David Wallace-Wells – Are we creating an ‘Uninhabitable Earth’?

In 2017, David Wallace-Wells wrote an article called The Uninhabitable Earth. It quickly became the most read piece ever published by New York Magazine. More than half of all of the emissions that have ever been produced in the entire history of humanity have come in the last 30 years. And that's...

Since Al Gore published his first book on warming, it's since the UN established its IPCC climate change body. So since the time that the global community really understood that this was a meaningful threat, since then, we've done more damage. than we did in all the millennia that came before. Today I talked to Mr. Wallace Wells about the challenges of climate change. He paints a bleak picture of the future if we don't act now, but at the same time he is an optimist.

Welcome to Planet A, a podcast on climate change. My name is Dan Jørgensen. I am Minister of Climate, Energy and Utilities in Denmark. In a series of conversations I ask some of the world's leading experts, policy makers and activists how to stem climate change. We the human species.

are confronting a planetary emergency. For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. The reason I believe we need to act now is because the facts are staring us in the face. The time to answer humankind's greatest... This challenge is now. So this gives us the best possible shot. to save the one planet we've got. There is no plan B because we do not have planet B. You're listening to Planet A, a podcast on climate change and what to do about it.

In 2017 David Wallace-Wells wrote an article called The Uninhabitable Earth in New York Magazine. Two years after the publication of the article, Mr. Wallace Wells wrote a book with the same title, Expanding on the Multitude of Interlinked Problems Created by Climate Change. According to Wallace Wells, climate change has the potential to fundamentally change life on Earth. If we don't act now, the globe is going to be, if not uninhabitable, then definitely a completely different place.

Today I talked to Mr. Wallace Wells about the challenges of climate change and why it is that he is not a fatalist, but actually an optimist.

So, David, thank you so much for joining me in this podcast. Hey, it's great to speak to you. Great to meet you in this way, at least. everything you've been doing in Denmark. So really, really grateful to be speaking with you now. Thank you so much. Thank you. I've read your book and I have to say, I think it should be on the required reading list for climate ministers on the planet. I hope that many

will read it because it is an inspiring also frightening read to be honest I'm used to reading the reports from the international science community obviously on climate change but you've sort of put it all together and showed us what this will mean if we don't more effectively tackle climate change. I'd like to ask you to elaborate a little bit on the critique that you put forward on the way that the media has described climate change.

you that it's been misleading for three reasons. Basically, when you look at the way it describes the speed, the scope and the severity. of climate change. Can you elaborate on that? But when I first was writing the manuscript of my book, I finished in late 2018, it seemed to me as a...

professional journalist who is regularly reading not just the scientific reports about the state of climate, but also coverage of the state of climate from my competitors in the US and all around the world. It seemed to me that We were failing to communicate just how dramatic, all encompassing and really all touching and all changing this story really was. So you hit the three points that the speed, the scope and the severity. When I was.

Growing up and really all through my early adulthood when I read about climate change when I heard about it watching An Inconvenient Truth, etc. I understood this as a story that began in the Industrial Revolution, and that was really, as a result, a few centuries old. On some level, I think that allowed me and a lot of people like me to think, OK, maybe we have a few centuries to get a handle on it. But that's really only the story when you're looking at, you know.

England in particular, and to a lesser extent, Northern Europe and America. The truth is, in terms of The volume of carbon emissions, more than half of all of the emissions that have ever been produced in the entire history of humanity have come in the last 30 years. And that's.

Since Al Gore published his first book on warming, it's since the UN established its IPCC climate change body. So since the time that the global community really understood that this was a meaningful threat, since then, we've done more damage. than we did in all the millennia that came before. And this is a story that is accelerating. You know, in the U.S., we're about to see President Joe Biden inaugurated in a couple of weeks. Between the time that he was inaugurated as vice president...

in 2009 and the time he's being inaugurated as president in 2021. In those 12 years, we've seen about a quarter of all of the carbon emissions that have ever been produced in the entire history of humanity. Since the Paris Accords were signed in 2015, in those five years, we have seen as much carbon produced as was produced from the speciation of homo sapiens all the way through world war ii so this is a story that is moving incredibly quickly and we now have a quite limited window as a result

for taking action and really getting a handle on the problem of climate change before it truly spirals, I wouldn't say out of control, but well beyond where we would like to be living 50 or 75 years from now.

So that's the speed. It's happening much, much faster than I think any of us, maybe even the scientists studying it really, really appreciated until quite recently. In terms of scope, you know, I grew up, I'm a New Yorker, I've lived my whole life in this city, and I felt comforted by that when thinking about climate change because I thought I lived in the modern world, I lived in an urban setting, my environment was concrete and steel, and nature was... something that we had to deal with.

something occasionally we could go visit on vacation. And it represented a threat to parts of the world. I understood that. But I also thought that where I lived, and indeed where the majority of humanity lived in cities, it was not an imminent threat. And in fact, for a long time, we heard so much about, in particular, about the threat of sea level rise that I think anyone who lived really even just a few feet from the coast, any farther than that, you could think, okay, I'll just...

I'll be fine. Or if I just move somewhere, it'll all be fine. But the deeper I got into all of the academic research, especially in some newly expanding areas about the economic impacts where There are economists suggesting that global GDP could be as much as 30% smaller than it would be without climate change by the end of the century if we don't change course.

to the effect on conflict, which could double or more by the end of the century, to the effect on agricultural yields, which could fall in half, to effects on cognitive performance, to effects on... violence between individuals with rates of rape and murder going up to all the way, really every aspect of modern life that you could possibly imagine.

water quality, you know, heat strokes, you know, all of these things. Everywhere you look all around the planet, there are climate impacts that are going to affect you. And because we're all stitched together now in a... you know kind of a globalized network um even those of us who are personally sort of not all that vulnerable to like a killer heat wave or um agricultural you know collapse in you know the bread baskets of the world

our lives are still connected to those people who are and so we are vulnerable too and that's i think really important to keep in mind these are impacts that are not um uniform across the world um you know in general it's the wealthy countries of the world that will be spared unfortunately compared to um relatively speaking compared to the poor countries of the world but all of us are going to be impacted to some degree and that's because this is truly an all-encompassing system and that is

You know, it sounds naive to say, I think it... Looking back on it, I was naive to think that I lived outside of nature. Of course, we all live inside of nature. We all live inside the climate. And when climate changes, our lives change too. Now, I think we're an adaptable species. I think we'll be able to figure out ways to live in that new world. But what scale of challenges we'll be living with and how much suffering we'll have to be managing is very important.

excuse me very much an open question and depending largely on the actions we take right now so that's the scope it's everywhere it's touching all of our lives and then the severity you know i think this is changing a little bit too but um for a very long time even a quite close reader of climate journalism climate storytelling

probably very rarely came across frank discussions of what climate change north of about two degrees Celsius of warming would look like. And most scientists of the world called that level catastrophic. They said that we had to do everything. possible in our power to avoid it. And I think the lay reader, like me, thought that that meant that it was about a worst case scenario, that we may end up at two degrees, but probably we're going to avoid it. In truth,

It's about a best case scenario. We're at 1.25 or 1.3 degrees of warming today. Scientists believe there's probably some amount of additional warming that's sort of baked into the system, even if we could snap our fingers and shut off carbon entirely.

They argue a little bit about what that is, but it's probably at least a couple tenths of a degree, maybe half a degree. And given how hard it would be to get all the way to zero, I think practically speaking, we're talking about two degrees as really a kind of a best case outcome. And at that level. you know, even that level, the best case level, we're talking about

150 million additional people dying of air pollution. We're talking about people in cities in South Asia and the Middle East that are today home to 10 or 12 million people becoming so hot in summer. probably not walk around outside without risking heat stroke or death, at least on some days. We're talking about flooding events that used to hit once a century, hitting every single year. And again, that's a sort of a best case scenario.

as I hope we can sort of talk about. I think we're actually a lot closer to that best case scenario and it looks more achievable now than it seemed a few years ago. But we have to also be really serious and... clearheaded in acknowledging that even a best case outcome at this point, given how long we've delayed and how little we've done in the past, even a best case scenario from here is quite grim and requires quite a significant amount of

adaptation and management to what is really a truly new world that we will all be living in. Yes, and the last part is not even including the self-enhancing effects that might set in. the positive feedback mechanisms, the tipping points, all of that, which means that we might get to a stage where it's irreversible, where it doesn't matter what we really do because we have...

done so much damage that, for instance, when the ice melts in the poles, that will mean that it'll get even hotter and more ice will melt and so forth. That's just one of the...

self-enhancing effects that you also describe, if I'm not mistaken, in your book. Now, to a certain extent at least, the media focus has changed. The general knowledge and acknowledgement that This is a huge problem that we are in a hurry to solve it. That if we don't do something within the next 10 years, it's going to be extremely difficult to keep this under control.

Definitely in Europe, and I guess also to some extent in the US, a lot of progress has been made within the last couple of years. Yeah, I mean, it's truly astonishing. I finished the manuscript of my book in September of 2018, not that long ago. I had never heard of Greta Thunberg at that point. Nobody in the world, nobody outside of Sweden had heard of her. The climate strikes hadn't begun in earnest.

In the U.S., we hadn't elected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Congress. We weren't talking about a Green New Deal. All of the climate pledges that have been made over the last few years. you know, all across the EU and extending more recently and I think more consequentially to China, Japan, South Korea.

These were not on the horizon. And the corporate commitments, which I'm skeptical of, I think, as many people on the left might be, but the corporate commitments we've seen over the last few years from Microsoft to BlackRock, these were also... not being considered in any significant way. And I think we have to say already, just, you know, whatever it is, a year and a half, two years since then, two and a half years since then, we're living in a...

practically speaking, different world in the sense that, you know, you look at opinion polls, people really worry. And, you know, from personal experience, Climate simply wasn't the priority that it is today as recently as a few years ago in almost any government across the world. And now, some of what we're seeing, I think, is posturing and rhetoric, paper promises that we have to really be...

sure are honored, at least to the extent that they can be. And yet the fact that we're even seeing those gestures, I think is a really consequential development. It means that, you know, in... parliaments and in boardrooms and in community meetings and town halls. Climate has become part of the way that almost everyone thinking about the well-being and future of the world. is focusing their attention. Now there's a huge project beyond that conceptual leap that we've taken.

We have to actually rebuild the world's energy infrastructure and not just our energy infrastructure, but a lot of other aspects of modern life, too. And that is an enormous, enormous challenge. But the first obstacle, that conceptual obstacle. I think we have largely overcome. I think it's fair to say now.

that we're no longer really living in an age of climate denial as we were for a long time. We're not really doing battle with that force anymore. We're now engaged in a much more realistic contestation of how fast do we move, who do we prioritize to the extent that we're dealing with trade-offs. who benefits and who bears the burden. These are really tough challenges that we don't, I think, have an adequate intellectual or political.

framework to really answer yet, but it's a sign of incredible progress that we're starting to ask those questions at least.

Yes, I totally agree. I think also connected to this, we need to be better at creating narratives. This is also something that you deal with in your book. the storytelling around climate change because if we don't do this We will never get the wide range support that we need from all parts of society. This is not just about getting some of the most polluting companies to stop producing the way they do now and become more energy efficient and more green. It's about transforming.

whole societies so how do we overcome that that on one hand we need to be honest and get people to grasp the severity of this but at the same time tell a positive story of how we can actually make the green transformation that we need And there I see a huge challenge because I know that you want not to be fatalistic and we should have an optimistic view. And I totally agree to that. But I also have to admit that when...

When I and others read your book, it's not exactly a book that puts a smile on your face. Well, the facts are grim. I agree that the state of the science and I think what is to be expected, even if we move very quickly. It's not a happy future. It's not a future that our grandparents would have recognized as a comfortable one.

But as I said a few minutes ago, you know, we are an adaptable and resilient species. And so I think there's some amount of additional warming that we can respond to and still produce. human life that is sort of flourishing and rewarding. But it requires two big things. The first is stopping our carbon pollution, getting our emissions to zero so that global warming stops.

And the second thing is engineering a future in which we protect ourselves from the impacts and develop new ways of generating prosperity and well-being and justice in the world.

I think on some level that should be an exciting project. We live today in a world of gross inequities, of shameful levels of global poverty although global poverty has been falling over the last few decades quite amazingly the difference between you know the way some people live in sub-saharan africa or South Asia compared to the way that people live in Northern Europe or the US.

unconscionable. And even the inequities within societies like yours and mine are similarly unconscionable. We have an opportunity to sort of rethink root and branch what our society is designed for. And I think on some level especially to those who've been frustrated or dissatisfied with a lot of the um you know recent economic cultural and political history um around the world we have a chance to really do something new now i'm not um you know i'm not a

I'm not a left-wing radical. I'm not looking for a revolution, but I am a person of the left. And I think that our societies have not been as attentive to those in need. And especially at the geopolitical level, we haven't been as focused on the needs of those who have the least. And a true response to climate change gives us the opportunity to rethink some of those principles and restructure some of our...

some of our goals and the way that we live in order to benefit more and more people around the world. And I think ultimately, one of the reasons that we've seen so much change at the level of, you know, at the sort of Davos level, at the level of environmental ministries and prime ministerships and corporate boardrooms is because over the last few years, there has been a really significant

change in perspective among the world's economists, even those people who were not people of the left, even who are quite conservative in their view of the state of the world and what produces maximal. prosperity in sort of, you know, five, 10 years ago, many of them would have told you that taking action on climate was too costly and that it was a really significant burden that was not worth undertaking. And now very, very few economists or sort of

economics adjacent policy people would tell you the same. Almost all of them would tell you that we'll be better off at almost every level of society in almost every corner of the globe if we decarbonize more quickly. rather than less quickly. There is still going to be a kind of significant upfront cost but that will pay us back quite quickly and much more equitably and uniformly than almost any public investment in the economy.

uh is really capable of and i think you know the clearest way of thinking about this is through air pollution which is not exactly climate change, but it's basically produced by the same thing that is produced by climate change. And so they're tied up together in a really profound way. In just the US, which is a country that has remarkably clean air.

It's been estimated by experts on air pollution that the entire project of decarbonizing the American economy would entirely pay for itself simply through the public health benefits of cleaning our air further. And then you look at a country like India. where it's estimated that 9% of their GDP is lost every single year to air pollution. I saw a study that was published yesterday, 350,000 miscarriages and stillbirths every single year just in India.

because of air pollution. And around the world, we're talking about 9 million, roughly, deaths every year from air pollution. And those costs are concentrated locally. And this is a real key because it used to be said when people lamented that lack of climate action, that one big challenge was that.

the benefits of decarbonization were distributed globally. So if you decarbonize Denmark, Denmark wouldn't benefit all that much. Even if you decarbonize the US or China, the world's two biggest emitters. the global impact would be relatively trivial if everyone else on the planet wasn't working in unison.

Skeptics and critics said, well, this means that this is a really big collective action problem. And we have to make sure that the whole world is moving in unison to ensure that everybody is going to participate in this project decarbonization. But actually, the benefits of air pollution work in the opposite way. They are local. If you decarbonize not just your country, if you decarbonize your town or your community, the benefits are visible immediately.

and locally and that means that the incentives to move more quickly are much clearer at every level of government and every level of society and i think that that logic is becoming clearer and clearer again not just at the level of climate activists marching in the street not just at the level of the IPCC, but even in the corner suites at BlackRock and even at the major central banks, the European Central Bank, the Fed in the US.

These are all institutions that see the logic very, very clearly and are pushing us, I think, in the right direction. Now, there's a big question if it's fast enough. And I think, you know, to your point about... How can we tell a story? I think that honestly, the only honest story we can tell is that we're not moving fast enough. And it'll be very, very hard for us to move fast enough to really avoid what would...

appear to us today as quite catastrophic impacts. But, you know, and that's one perspective to have. We're not moving nearly fast enough according to the science and according to our own standards. from today and from generations in the past but another perspective is to say we're moving much much faster than we were a few years ago and the you know the sort of path we're on as a result we've really bent that trajectory downwards such that

What we're likely to see, while still quite grim, is not nearly as terrifying as what scientists were saying we were likely to see as recently as a few years ago. And that progress is most exciting because... not just of what it means for now, but what it means for the future in the sense that if what five years ago, 10 years ago seemed like an impossibly optimistic path is now the path we're on.

Maybe that means what today seems an impossibly optimistic path will be the path that we're on five or 10 years from now. And maybe even some of the scenarios that seem to me to be. literally impossible to imagine today, say staying close to 1.5 degrees. Maybe we'll take action over the next five years or 10 years that allows that to...

once again, seem achievable. I think it's very much a long shot. And I think we have to be realistic about the world that we'll be living in. But the progress over the last few years has been so rapid, I think we can't foreclose the possibility.

that future progress will change our perspective in the same direction. I hope you're right. And I also think that there are reasons for optimism. If we look at what... the world has been able to do on development of technology in other areas information technology for instance but also if you look at the different wars that has been fought over the last 100 years, that has sparked innovation into new technologies, which has been done on a...

Obviously, not very idealistic background, but nonetheless, it's happened. Imagine if we could use some of that force of innovation, willingness to allocate funds. willingness to collaborate between sectors into this endeavor, then we really see some potential. And looking at what's happened in my own country, you know, 10 years ago, most people still thought that

We weren't really that rational spending as much resources as we have done on developing offshore wind. Now today, offshore wind competes with coal. and nuclear power almost all over the world. So that's just one well-known technology. We have many other technologies, which brings me to ask you a question about the development of technology, because...

You have argued that, I think you have a, what is the term you use? The church of technology. We need to be careful, if I understand you correctly, not... to just lean back and wait for technology to solve the problem for us. And I totally agree with you on that. But on the other hand, if we don't... Focus on the development of technology. If we don't allocate the resources to technology development, to making the scale of the technology we have bigger, all of these things.

then I doubt we'll get where we need to go. Yeah, I think both of those points are very well taken. I would say if we're going to... really take a hold of this problem and stabilize the planet's climate at something like a livable temperature. It will be because of the technology that we have today and develop over the next few decades.

But I think the lay person thinking about these questions thinks if the technology exists, even at like a conceptual laboratory scale level, then the problem is solved. And they just overlook the politics and the cultural complications of rolling it out. Now, just to take one example, I think there are... I think there are complications, conceptual, moral, with the project of technological negative emissions. But I also think that there are...

presumably going to be some part of our response to this crisis. And just to be clear, this is basically machines that take carbon out of the atmosphere and do a variety of things with it, maybe bury it, maybe use it as carbon neutral fuel, but essentially they suck carbon. out of the atmosphere. And as I say, I think I don't want to count on this technology as a total solution by any stretch.

But it is the case that even direct air capture, which is the sort of more sci-fi version that you're talking about, which is just taking it out of ambient air. It's been demonstrated that this could be done at about $100 a ton of carbon. And that's more expensive than avoiding putting the carbon up there in the first place. But it means that buying a sort of equivalent carbon offset to your... cross-country flight from New York to LA would cost about $10.

And I think most people would be quite comfortable paying that they might not even notice the difference. So to a certain degree, these technologies, quote unquote, exist, we have machines that do them. And although they're more expensive than we'd like them to be, they're not so dramatically more expensive, that imagining their rollout would totally disrupt our energy economy. On the other hand...

To build out these machines at a scale that would meaningfully impact the trajectory of our emissions requires an enormous allocation of land, an incredible commitment of public resources. Mining, construction, you know, according to the IPCC reports, you know, which have some amount of negative emissions built into their projections, even if we...

undertake an absolutely breakneck World War II scale mobilization against climate and decarbonize as basically as rapidly as is humanly possible. They think that in order to give us give ourselves a decent chance to hit the target. of the idealistic targets of the Paris Accords staying close to 1.5 degrees would require a build out of this negative emissions technology such that globally we'd have negative emissions.

industry that was at least twice as big and maybe four times as big as today's oil and gas business. And they'd say that we need to build that out by 2030. So we need to build out an industry twice as big as today's oil and gas business in the next decade, just as a sort of like on the margin, cleaning up the last bit of emissions that we can't manage through decarbonization quickly enough to really make a difference.

And then if you're thinking about deploying this technology at a scale beyond that, at a scale that would really sort of equally counteract all of our emissions, you're talking about building out an industry that is covering the globe that is truly remaking the surface of the planet and reshaping the way that almost all of us live on it because it will be in our backyards, it'll be buried in our forests. It is an incredibly dramatic, daunting political

and pragmatic project to roll out that kind of technology. And the same is honestly true of, say, solar and wind. Now, solar and wind are a bit better. Can I just stop you there, David? Because I just want to say a few words about that point. You're pointing to why that would be an almost impossible endeavor, but you didn't even mention the fact that how do we create a business model for it to work? That's the difference between solar and solar. Yeah, exactly, because how do you make money?

You can only do that if you have a business model in which you have a pricing on carbon. So you get the polluters, so to speak, to pay for the capture. Now, if you do that, then it might be a part of the model. But obviously, to do it in the extent that you talk about, that's probably impossible. But don't you see it maybe as...

a very feasible and important part of the solution where, for instance, you say, okay, well, we know for a fact that there will still be plastic in the world in 2050. Some of it you'll reuse. We'll have much more recycling than today, but what about the plastic that's in a napkin or in a diaper, for instance? That's difficult to reuse, so there will still be plastic burned.

If we take that, the carbon out of the chimneys from the initiation plants that burn that plastic and put it into the ground, that's an important part of the solution. Also, if you combine this with types of... sustainable biomass, then that's a way of getting negative emissions. Big picture, I think anything that will help

we have to use. And I think the negative emissions are inevitably going to be a part of our response. And presumably, especially if you can... if it doesn't hurt your brain to extend your time span out centuries from now, presumably we're going to be doing some amount of this, maybe even quite a lot of it in ways that we can't yet even really comprehend.

But I also think it helps to keep in mind, you know, on the church of technology point, that it's not just a matter of inventing the technology and then it's like we snapped our fingers and the problem is solved. No, we have to also roll this out to a quite dramatic degree. People ask me all this.

time you know do we have is there kind of a magical technology that could solve this problem for us and i say well we have a lot of magic technologies negative emissions are one but honestly solar power and wind power are also magical technologies and yet producing them at scale and at a speed that allows us to displace the infrastructure that's producing dirty energy today is incredibly daunting. And that is even though right now.

Wind and solar, as you mentioned, are cost competitive with dirty energy everywhere in the world. And it's even in a lot of parts of the world cheaper to build new... renewable capacity than it is to continue running fossil fuel infrastructure now that's not true everywhere but presumably it will become that way soon enough and yet even though there are those incredibly those incentives are screaming to be

to be followed, even though those price differences are there screaming at us to follow them. it's still difficult to displace the fossil fuel infrastructure we have. And the growth that we've seen in renewable energy over the last decade in total is really quite small. It's not a much bigger chunk of the global energy production.

um than it was a decade or so ago even though in certain countries particularly in northern europe um there's been quite quite a lot of progress made um it's not the case that you know it's just not the case that globally um

we are anywhere near where we need to be in terms of having renewables displace dirty energy. What we're talking about now are fundamental changes in the way that we organize our societies, basically. I've always been a person that's argued that... We shouldn't focus too much on what the individual does. It's very, very good if you recycle more and all of that and if you eat a little bit less meat and more vegetables and all of that. But really, it's the big collective action.

As societies that will help us. And that is still my opinion. But I've changed it a little bit though. Because now I think we need to argue that yes. The big steps forward will be big collective actions, decisions made by governments and collaborations of governments, international organizations. But because this is such a difficult task and because...

This will have to affect all parts of our society. We all as individuals also need to change our behavior, the way we eat, the way we consume. Do you agree with that? I think that my own feeling is that both things are necessary in the sense that if we imagine a relatively happy outcome, it does involve not just large scale.

policy change but also change at the individual level and i think that individual choices help move us along to the bigger changes but i also think that there's a risk in feeling as an individual that you've done your part because you are making slightly more responsible choices in your everyday life. So to give an example, in the US, you know, Tesla,

sells a quite attractive electric car. It's a little bit more expensive than the sort of equivalent gas burning cars, but probably within a few years, it'll be cost competitive. But we still live in a society in the U.S. where most of the electricity on our grid is dirty energy. So we might feel we've done our part for the environment by buying an electric car. But if we're charging it at a charging station.

which draws its electricity from a coal fire plant. You know, we've made a little bit of difference because electricity is more efficient than gas, but we're not making nearly the difference, even to the extent that we are... trying to make a difference on our individual carbon footprint. We're not even making as much of a difference as we could because our choices are shaped by what's called the choice architecture introduced by public policy. I can't go out and build my own electric grid.

you know i can't build a public transportation infrastructure that allows me to avoid driving by car if i live in a place that doesn't have that i can't do that only government can do that um and then even beyond that um you know The mass of individual carbon footprints changed somewhat simply doesn't add up to the scale of change that we ultimately need. We really do need not just national, not just regional.

global transformation of the way that particularly the way that we use energy but also the way that we do a lot of other things the way that we raise our food the way that we run our industry the way that we manufacture our clothing the way that we um you know the way that we get around public transportation and the sort of infrastructure that we use. All of those things need to be

transformed, and almost all of them can only be transformed at the scale that they need to be through large scale investment in public policy. And so, you know, I don't want to tell anybody, any individual, and I myself wouldn't feel comfortable. forsaking choices that were more climate responsible simply because it didn't make a difference. But I think we also have to keep in mind that the main difference we can make in our individual choices is by nudging our societies.

further along to the kinds of commitments and changes that are necessary to sort of secure the future that I think we all would hope we can find down the road. I think if you look at my own country as an example, if you compare us to most other... countries, we've actually had climate change pretty high on the agenda compared to many other places in the world, but even in Denmark.

What happened after our last election, where all of a sudden climate change was on top of the political agenda, has been amazing. Political parties that were arguing that we were too ambitious and we should be more realistic. And that was their way of saying we were doing too much, that it was too expensive. They are now on board. They support our 70% reduction target in 2030, which is an incredibly difficult target to achieve.

So we have a broad majority from the left to the right in the Danish parliament, and that has happened because of the public pressure. People all of a sudden also took this into consideration when they cast their votes at an election. So we need that to happen.

in more and more countries and i think it will even when i talk to colleagues from some of my colleagues ministers from eastern europe some of the countries that have huge challenges with coal, for instance, still being a major part of their energy infrastructure. Even in those countries, they say, well, this is also high on the agenda now. You cannot hope to win an election without having a strategy for green transformation. But this is, of course, then in Europe.

What happens then in the developing world, emerging economies, where people, first and foremost, which I understand, think about getting some food on their plate? Maybe they would also actually like an air conditioner and a fridge. the rest of the world. Maybe they would even like to fly on a holiday once a year as their income grows. How do you see the perspective for that part of the...

Those parts of the world were also, by the way, the population will increase with billions of people from now.

until 2050. Well, let me first actually talk about the first point you made, which is about how the change in your country, you've seen change in your country. I think it's, and this gets back to a question you asked earlier about narratives. I think it's really critical.

the way that we have learned to talk about the positive benefits of decarbonization, even in relatively short term ways. And I was talking about air pollution before, but it's also a jobs program. It's also, you know, an urban renewal program. For too long, I think climate advocates offered what was essentially a moral case for climate action and allowed climate skeptics.

to own the cost benefit analysis. And I think the more that climate advocates can be clear that no, yes, this will require investment, but we also invest in education. We also invest in healthcare. We also invest in the military and investments in the climate space will benefit us too. I think the clearer the case will be to voters all around the world. And honestly, I think that is true in the developing world, too. I think we're seeing...

I often talk about the case, you know, the government of Indonesia, this is a country that has halved its poverty rate and doubled its per capita income over the last 20 years. But they've done that by... burning a lot of fossil fuel, like a lot of countries in the developing world. They say that they can cut their emissions in half by 2030, which puts them ahead of their commitments under the Paris Accords, and still grow at a faster rate than they've grown over the last two decades.

We'll see if that comes true. But I think it illustrates the way in which this conceptual problem is a lot less thorny and difficult than it was a few years ago. And that gets back to, again, the basic economics of renewable energy changing so rapidly. In a certain sense, it may even be easier for countries especially low on the development trajectory to make this jump because they don't have to deal with the...

What's the word I'm looking for? They don't have to deal with the fact of existing fossil fuel infrastructure whose investments will... disappear if we retire those plants. In countries that are just trying to provide power, adequate power for middle-class life, global middle-class life to their citizens and are deciding, are we going to do that with a... coal plant with a, you know, a gas plant, solar plantation, nuclear plant, you know, making those choices now, the decision is actually

just on an economic basis, quite clear. And it's more difficult if you're looking at a country like Poland, say, or even to a certain extent, the US or China, which has invested significantly in power plants that if we retire them early enough to meet our climate goals will mean a lot of stranded assets both in terms of financial assets but also like the actual

buildings that have not produced the money that they were counted on to produce. And, you know, it's for a long time, it seemed, you know, to ask, say, India, or Bangladesh, or much of sub-Saharan Africa. to sort of make the leap to a renewable future and forego the easy, cheap power of fossil fuels would mean consigning them.

to a longer period of true poverty and forcing many millions of people in those countries to live under unfortunately abject conditions for a much longer period of time. I actually don't think that that... is the dilemma anymore and that these countries can sort of leapfrog from quite um

crude energy systems to renewable energy systems in much the same way that they sort of skipped landline telephones and went right to mobile technology. It's not exactly... an analogous situation, but I think that there is a way in which the challenge is easier for those who are not dealing with the existing problem of

fossil fuel infrastructure and how to retire it it's a great point there's one thing that complicates it a little bit though which is that all of the arguments that you are making which i agree with But they rest on the assumption that it's a free market and you do whatever is most rational. Well, first of all, it's not a free market because there's lots of subsidies in coal and gas and nuclear.

Second, when you've had for decades, even generations, political systems where money and politics, everything is connected, that's built on this infrastructure. then it can become very difficult politically to move away from that. That then, of course, puts a responsibility on the international community. Because all of the international organizations that you mentioned earlier, they play a big role here. The U.S. as a country play a huge role here.

If we make it a condition in the international collaborations, our development aid, where we spend our climate action funding, that they actually engage in this and stop, for instance, the subsidies for fossil. then maybe we have a way of getting around this. Because if investments are made today or tomorrow, next year or the year after, in new coal power plants, for instance, it's investments that are so big that they will have to then run for...

50 years, maybe. And this is why I guess I, and I'm sure you'll agree, think that we are really in a hurry making this a key priority also in international negotiations. And I think we're beginning to see that, that climate has become a bigger part of geopolitics generally. and a bigger part of international trade negotiations. I would like to see it become a still bigger part.

I absolutely agree about the challenges that we're facing. This is, I think, as much as it is, I think it's been talked about for a long time as an economic challenge, but I think that you're absolutely right that the sort of... political economy aspects of it are just as profound or more profound. That is, who are the powerful actors within a society? How close are they to the decision makers? um i also think it's worth keeping in mind that you know the majority of um of the

of the world's biggest fossil fuel companies are state owned. And that, you know, the way that that complicates this calculation is also, I think, you know, quite profound in a way where we're sort of... the world has taken the debate in the US and read it on a global stage that this is about how the free, you know, it's like the US always wants to talk about.

free market or government interference. But in a lot of cases, those things are already in bed together, in many cases, quite directly. And that presents a somewhat different challenge going forward. And on some level, I think, as you say, the reorientation of international financial institutions is a quite profound and important part of this story. I think that we're still not...

where I would like to be in terms of many of these groups. And yet, you know, when you have the World Bank coming out talking about, you know, Fossil fuels are subsidized $5.3 trillion a year. You have the IMF talking about similar problems. You have the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the Fed talking about lending in a way that promotes, you know.

promotes climate action. And indeed, the way that China is approaching, you know, it's sort of somewhat shrinking belt and road initiative, but also more generally handling its carbon footprint around the world, I think is in certain ways quite... I mean, you know, just recently, China basically told Australia that it was no longer going to be importing Australian coal. Now, to get back to the dynamic we were talking about before about like developed countries, developing countries.

You know, China is not exactly a developing country, but they're, you know, they're sort of middle, middle high income country on a per capita basis. It sort of scrambles the narrative that people. in the US and places like Denmark like to talk about, about the power dynamics here. In this case, this is a quite wealthy country finding out that it can no longer provide dirty energy to a middle-income country.

And that's quite a significant development. Australia is not going to, they just, they're just opening these coal mines, but they're not going to have anywhere to sell them. And that is, you know, that is quite significant. I think it's almost as significant. I shouldn't say that, but it is, it is. It is alongside the commitments that Xi Jinping has recently made to get getting China to a near term emissions peak and to net zero by 2060. I think we're seeing a lot of action there that is quite.

encouraging it. I think we all take any of these commitments, any of these pledges. We have to be somewhat skeptical of them. It's not entirely clear, even to people who know the Chinese energy sector very well, whether these goals can be met. But the fact that we are seeing this kind of rhetorical leadership, again, I think is a really meaningful sign.

that things have changed. And at the very least, we're going to be debating how thoroughly, how completely, how seriously these imperatives are met rather than

whether countries are making plans at all, which is where we were just a few years ago. On that positive note, David, are you making a two-point...

Zero version of your book with the newest developments? Well, I'm not writing a book at the moment, but I am working on a piece that is on some of these themes about my own evolving... optimism although from a very bleak baseline my own evolving optimism and um and really also thinking a little bit about um how much more adaptation planning we probably should be doing because you know the the range of possible outcomes is shrinking. I think it's almost certain that we're going to

not get below two degrees, but I think it's probably a safe bet that we're going to stay below three and maybe even 2.5. And that means that we have a pretty good sense, actually, of the world that we're going to be living in at the end of the century. And that world is full of climate impacts.

which if we don't take adequate planning protective measures now, will be quite devastating. But if we do take those measures and start to think about climate adaptation alongside the project of mitigation, we can make a world that is, at least relatively speaking, you know, one that is full of prosperity and justice and flourishing in ways that you and I and everyone alive today would be proud of. Well, I can definitely say from the Danish perspective that...

We've set ourselves challenges that on paper has looked almost impossible. And I think probably experts have said in many... countries when looking at Denmark this is going to be too expensive this is going to lower their living standard this is going to hurt their ability to compete but But actually, I'm proud to say that the opposite has happened. We've managed to make a green transformation that has...

not cost jobs, it's created jobs. It hasn't led to more inequality in our country. We've done it in a way where this will not make us a country that's worse off. It's actually going to make us a country that's better off. Can I say one last thing about that? Yeah, of course. What you're talking about is success on even metrics like...

GDP and living standards that are probably imprecise and imperfect in measuring human flourishing more generally. And I think as part of this conceptual transformation, one next step will be developing a slightly more... humane and accommodating sense of what

prosperity really amounts to. And especially if we can incorporate some other considerations into our basic metrics of wellbeing, I think we'll see even more clearly than you see in Denmark, that many of these measures can be very productive. and appreciated by just about every member of society. Well, that's a great point. So I'm not going to let you go yet then because...

No, but honestly, this is one of my main points. I actually also wrote a book about this a couple of years ago, which is to say that, why is it that... Some countries are so fortunate that when you measure happiness in the population, that we are high on that list. Usually Denmark is number one, two or three. But if you look at the US per capita, it's a richer country.

Why aren't people more happy then? Well, the conclusion probably, if you look into the science, is that we have a society with more equality.

with more trust, with better work-life balance for people. All of those things that are a little bit difficult to measure on economic parameters, but that are important to happiness. And I think we're not... good enough at now putting a value to sustainable development, but I'm certain you've mentioned some of the areas where you can measure, for instance, air quality, but I'm 100% certain that also access to

clean nature, being a part of a healthy green society is something that will benefit a population as a whole. I agree and hope we can start using those metrics a little more promiscuously in the future. Yes, yes. David, thank you so much. It was really great to meet you and to speak with you. And I hope it's not the last time. I hope we get to cross paths again soon. I hope so too. Thank you so much. Bye. Bye bye. You've listened to Planet A, a podcast on climate change and what to do about.

Thank you.