David Wallace-Wells on His Growing Optimism for the Planet’s Future

Hi, I'm Spencer. And I'm Andrew. And we're here at The Slowdown's New York headquarters. You're listening to Time Sensitive, a podcast where we profile curious and courageous people in business, the arts, and beyond who have found a distinct perspective on time. Welcome to episode 56 of Time Sensitive. This is our first episode of season five.

Andrew's in conversation with the journalist and New York Magazine editor-at-large, David Wallace-Wells. David is known for his reporting on the climate crisis, as well as over the past couple years, COVID-19, and as the author of the must-read book, The Uninhabitable Earth. What'd you both talk about? We covered a lot of ground. Climate data is everywhere, but few have the ability to synthesize that data and kind of make it relevant. He does this through metaphor and stories that are relatable.

and understandable he kind of makes everything really coherent he has this incredibly sharp mind and an empathic perspective he's very much heart and mind so as a storyteller i think what makes him incredibly unique is that he's able to turn data into something that's emotionally resonant

When he describes what he's learned and what he knows, he's always able to make it completely understandable in the now and not abstract. And with a long view. Incredibly long view. And his views have changed, which is some of the stuff that we've talked about as more information is coming. out. So it was really just a great conversation and it was really fun to have him in here. And now here's Andrew and David.

David, thanks so much for joining us today. Really good to be here. Thanks for having me. So I think many of us, certainly our listeners, are highly concerned, maybe even panicked. if you've heard this before, about the speed at which our planet is changing. And so I thought we'd just begin very simply with the state of the planet as you see it. Very simply. Very simply today. Well, so...

Depending on what data set you use, and this may get a little wonky, but I'll try to be as clear as possible. We're probably at about 1.2, maybe 1.3 degrees Celsius of warming, which is above the level that... we saw on the planet before the industrial revolution 1.2 or 1.3 and that doesn't sound like very much But it actually puts us entirely outside the window of temperatures that enclose the entire history of human civilization. So it is warmer now.

on the planet than it has ever been when humans were around to walk on it. Which means that everything that we've ever produced as a species, our culture, our politics, our music, our movies, our agriculture, the nation state, family structure, everything down to the most basic features of human life are the result of climate conditions that we've already left behind. We're already warmer than that today.

And probably we're going to get considerably warmer from there. All of the activism and advocacy has focused on this 1.5 degree Celsius of warming target. I think it's unlikely we hit that. I think something like two degrees, maybe a little cooler than that is our best case scenario. So we're looking like something like absolute best case. The world does absolutely everything it can to move quickly.

to respond to climate change and stop putting carbon into the atmosphere, we're going to end up with something like 50% worse warming than we have today. And what that means, you know, according to the science is quite... It means 150 million deaths from air pollution. It means storms and floods that used to hit once a century, hitting once every year. It means people in South Asia and the Middle East.

walking around in cities that are today home to 10 or 12 million people, where it would be in summer so hot that that would be a potentially lethal risk. It's one reason why the UN expects that about that level of warming, we could see hundreds of millions of climate refugees.

And that's in the not too distant future. And irreversible. Well, we can talk about irreversibility. You know, conventional thinking, which I think is a good baseline to start from, is that yes, it is irreversible. And that is because... Carbon hangs in the air for at least centuries and probably millennia. A climate scientist I spoke with recently told me that...

through natural processes, it would take a million years for the earth to return to its pre-industrial carbon state. If we just stopped emitting today, it would take a million years to get back to where we were. And among other things, that means that the damage we're doing is cumulative. Carbon that we burned in 19th century England is still warming the planet and will warm the planet for several hundred years, at least from now. In that sense, it is...

interchangeable with carbon that we are burning today and carbon that we're burning in the next decade. There's a way in which we're living in a sort of eternal present of climate change where...

What was done 200 years ago, what's being done today, and what will be done 50 years ago are all working together, essentially on the same timeline. And we are living as a species waiting for... that gas carbon dioxide just to dissipate in space and this whole story in which we are completely rebuilding remodeling the planet on which we live

is unfolding in that amount of time, in the amount of time that it takes the carbon that we're producing to dissipate in space, which makes the whole experiment seem quite fragile.

I think that's one really valuable lesson of climate change is that it is. We are here today, conquerors of this world, feeling like we own this place because of a long string of accidents. What we are doing today through burning carbon is making the conditions that gave rise to that experiment at the very least much more uncomfortable and harder for us and maybe even in certain parts of the world sort of unovercomable.

But to get back to the question that you asked at the outset, just to give one more sort of data point, when I think about how much the world is today different, so not at two degrees, but at 1.2, 1.3 degrees, the thing that I always come back to... relates to time and the distortion of time. And it's about the fact that the city of Houston was hit by 500-year storms in five years. And we know now.

as deep into climate change as we are. We know anyone who's engaged, anyone who has their eyes open, we know that the term 500-year storm is kind of meaningless. It gets thrown about all the time. But it's useful because it reminds us what we used to think of storms like these. We used to expect them, not...

Because of old wise tales, but because of science, we used to expect them to happen once every 500 years. And 500 years ago, there were no Europeans in North America. Hernando Cortes had just landed in Mexico. So we're talking about a storm that we would expect to hit once during that entire time, the arrival of Europeans in North America, the establishing of colonies, the fighting of a genocide against the native people, the building of a slave empire, the fighting of a revolution.

fighting of a civil war, industrialization, World War II, the American empire, the Cold War, the end of history. September 11th, the financial crisis, COVID-19, that entire history. We're talking about one storm we would expect during that entire time. And Houston has been hit by five of them in five years, which means that one city, and it's not at all exceptional.

has been basically hit with several millennia of natural disaster and extreme weather in the space of half a decade. Now, you know, Houston's still standing. And I think that's a valuable and important point too. Like there's the climate side of the story and there's the human side of the story and human adaptation and resilience and response will play a major role here, but it's still a level of.

everyday climate disaster that nobody alive 50 years ago would have recognized as anything like normal. And yet here we are today sort of normalizing it quite rapidly. The fire season. Oh my God. I mean, the fires really terrify me. In particular, because of the air pollution stuff that's coming out of it. But yeah, I mean, I wrote a piece about wildfire in California in the spring of 2019.

It was in the aftermath of their really awful 2018 year, which had been the worst year on record up to that point in modern history. I talked to Eric Garcetti, the mayor of L.A. who among other things told me that there was nothing that could be done to stop this. He was like, no amount of fire engines, no amount of funding for Cal Fire can stop this. The only thing that's going to stop it is like when the...

Earth's climate system, probably long after we're gone, returns to its natural weather state. This is what the mayor of Los Angeles said to me. You're basically like, this is a thing. It's not going anywhere. Yeah, and it's going to get worse. I mean, a lot of people in California think, okay, new normal. But actually everything with climate, it's not a new normal. It's the end of normal. Things are going to get worse. We will still live in that world. It's not.

apocalypse. It's not end times. But if you think it's hard to adjust to the things that are happening today, the future is really much harder. So, you know, Garcetti I think he's just turned 50. The year he was born, 60,000 acres burned in California. The year he was elected mayor in 2013, it was 600,000, so a tenfold increase. The year he was reelected, 2017, it was 1.2 million.

So a doubling. And then 2018, the year before I'd interviewed him, it was 1.89 million. So a 50% increase in a single year. Whatever that is, that's...

25-fold increase from the year he was born. And then last year, 2020, was considerably worse than that. It was over 4 million acres burned. And that meant that last year, 2020, there was more... air pollution in the Western US from the burning of forests than from all other industrial and human activity combined, which means like everything that we're doing in a place like California with all of its admirable green energy policies.

can just be wiped out by the fire seasons that are getting worse every year both in terms of carbon emissions trees are like coal they release carbon and also in terms of this particulate matter that's really really damaging and toxic to health in ways i think

we're really only beginning to understand. Because it takes time to study it. But, you know, looking globally, the WHO and the British medical journal Lancet say that 7 million people are dying from air pollution every year. I've seen more recent research by some quite... smart people who are not being irresponsible, who think that it's 8.7 million are dying just from the burning of fossil fuels.

8.7 million people every year. You think about, that's bigger than COVID was last year globally. It's happening every single year. And in terms of carbon emissions, this year, 2021, more carbon has been released from...

global wildfire than was released by the entire US economy last year. And the US is, of course, the world's second biggest emitter. So when you think about the really big picture of wildfire and the story of wildfire, carbon emissions are still a relatively small share of the global. emissions chart but they're getting up there and they're only going to grow and that's going to make all of our efforts to

halt warming a lot harder. Like a lot of things in this system, there are things we can control and then there are things that we can't really control. And unfortunately, wildfire is really, I mean, there's some things we can do, but it's in a lot of ways out of our control for the next 50 years. absolutely and now it's a season you know i keep i that just confounds me i mean the people the cal fire people they say it's a year they're not even talking about season

They're saying it's all year now. It's all year. I mean, that's a little misleading. You can breathe easy in the winter months in California. But this year, the bad fire started in the late spring, early summer. And they ended a little early this year, actually. We haven't seen a lot of stuff in December. A lot of the biggest fires in the last couple of years have been in early December. So, you know, it's bad. In your book, The Uninhabitable Earth, Life After Warming, you wrote...

There's one thought that's really stuck with me, which is that climate change is fast, much faster than it seems we have the capacity to recognize and acknowledge, but it's also long, almost longer than we can truly imagine.

And what I was curious about was how you came to understanding the speed, how you got your head around this idea of the speed at which it was changing. Well, the fact that sticks with me most and was probably the really eye-opening thing for me to begin with, still really hard for me to believe is about the speed at which we've put all this carbon into the atmosphere. So I was born in 1982. I'm 39 now.

I don't remember a time before we were talking about climate change. I talked about climate change in elementary school. I mean, it wasn't like a dominant narrative, but it was like we knew it was happening. We knew it was a problem. And until I really started working deeply in this, I simply didn't appreciate that half of all of the damage that we've done to the planet in the entire history of humanity has come in the last 25 years.

So that means in my lifetime, it's like 60 or 65% of the problem. We think of this as something that started in 18th century England. And to some degree, that's true. But the vast... bulk of carbon emissions have been produced since World War II, something like 90% of all in the history of humanity. And a really large share have come in the very recent past. So it's 50% in the last 25 years, which is...

Since Al Gore published his first book on warming, it's since the UN's established its IPCC climate change body. I often joke it's like since the premiere of Seinfeld. We've done more damage since then than we've managed in all the... centuries, all the millennia that came before. But even when you get a little closer to the present, you know, it's one quarter of all the damage that we've done to the climate through the burning of fossil fuels has come since Joe Biden was elected vice president.

running with Barack Obama on a ticket. Barack Obama accepting the Democratic nomination said, this is going to be the moment when people look back and say that was when the rising of the seas began to slow. That's what he said when he took the Democratic nomination. And we've done a quarter of all the damage that we've ever done in the entire history of humanity in that time. That's really a vertiginous speed. And because emissions are cumulative...

Because they just add up, they stockpile. What we've done in the recent past really changes what the near future has to look like if we want to get a handle on things. If we had started cutting carbon emissions in 1988 when James Hansen first testified before the U.S. Senate about climate change, not only will we only have had to cut emissions by a couple of percentage points a year to stay below 1.5 degrees, which is now our goal.

But we could have taken about 135 years to get all the way to net zero. We wouldn't have even had to complete that project by the year 2100. But we've added so much more carbon to the atmosphere since then that now in order to stay below 1.5 degrees, we have to... definitely, no matter what math you use, get to zero by 2050, which is only 30 years from now. And the models just say that gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees. It would also require a lot of what's called

negative emissions, carbon removal, which connects to something else we touched on earlier about irreversibility. And we can talk about that too, because carbon removal does allow for the reversibility of time here. But these timelines are just...

much, much shorter. And the descent from the emissions peak that we're at now has to be so much more rapid than it would have been if we had started earlier. I think a lot of people have this reflexive understanding of the challenge, which they think, okay.

We didn't wake up when James Hansen talked to us. We didn't wake up when Al Gore shouted at us. But we're waking up now. And they think what that means then is that we have to put in the policies that would have been recommended by James Hansen in 1988 or by Al Gore in 2007.

But putting aside whether Al Gore was even saying things that were sufficient in 2007, they're not sufficient now by any stretch. And every year of delay makes the future task much, much harder, which means the transformation that we're talking about. which will be beneficial in the long run if we undertake it, is just going to be much more disruptive and rapid than ideal.

So having a front seat for all of this, and you write about culture, you write about pandemics, you write about climate. You're not just a climate journalist. This is fairly recent, actually. From your sort of perspective on the human condition and how we behave and how we think, what do you think the next decade is actually going to look like? It looks a lot happier to me than it looked...

When I wrote the book and certainly when I wrote the article that first kicked me off into this story a few years ago, I think that the world is genuinely waking up. I think that that has happened over the last couple of years. I think it... There are a few different things that really kicked it into high gear, but the UN released this big report on, technically it was just outlining the difference between 1.5 degrees and 2 degrees, but it was basically...

a case for urgency and made in much more alarmist language than had ever been used before. That was picked up by Greta Thunberg, who had just started protesting actually before that had come out, but was not at all a famous person even in Sweden. And then by all of the people who are pushing a Green New Deal from Sunrise to AOC and globally by other climate strikers.

distinction rebellion. And we now have a kind of global climate movement in a way that, you know, frankly, I wouldn't have thought was possible when I was writing my book. I knew that we'd have to engineer a solution largely through politics, but I also looked back at the history of environmental activism and thought, there are not really many successes here. What are we hoping for? But actually, the politics have really changed over the last few years, not just with the activists.

base growing but public concern is really growing not just like progressive liberals but normie liberals and even normie conservatives are Worried. Want more to be done. And corporations see it as like a brand value now to care. Absolutely. And politicians. Yeah. Now the corporations and the politicians, I think, are complicated players here. They are often...

making promises I think they're not really prepared to meet, essentially offering lip service to the cause. But on the one hand, I think we have to treat that as progress anyway. They weren't even acknowledging. the necessity of this urgency a few years ago at the same time concretely they are doing more the commitment to evs almost every car manufacturer i mean we are seeing a lot of shifts in the last year absolutely and a lot of that has to do with

The economics of it, you know, renewables are now cheaper in 90% of the world than new dirty energy. And in fact, in a lot of parts of the world, it's cheaper to build new renewable capacity than even continuing to run old dirty energy capacity. And, you know, I think that one thing that tells you is that while for a long time this was conceived as an economic problem, like how can we ask our citizens to accept this burden?

to pay more for electricity, for power, for their lifestyles generally. It now seems pretty clear that the economics actually are arguing for a faster transition. And the forces that are standing in the way are entrenched interests, incumbency, status quo. People don't want change, even separate from whether the change is going to make their lives good. They just don't like change. So it looks like a little bit of a different battle.

And I think in the long term, that battle is going to be won. But it's going to take longer than the scientists say we really have to... give us a decent chance of stabilizing warming below a level that they call catastrophic. I think the medium-term future is that we move quite fast, that there is a lot of renewable build-out. There is even...

going to start to be some fossil fuel retirement. We're seeing that with coal plants already. There are a lot of people who are just like buying up coal plants to shut them down, which is I mean, to think about, that's just like crazy to think someone would do that, but it's already happening. I think that may start to happen. Happens in every other industry. Yeah, true. You know, require things to shut them down. No, that's true. And hopefully that'll start to happen in oil and gas as well.

It's also going to be important to manage that so that, you know, we don't have these major disruptions like we're even seeing this winter where energy prices are skyrocketing and there's backlash and disruption in China and across Europe. And so I think... What we're likely to see is a really fast period of change that is insufficiently fast to really deal with the crisis, but which is also really disruptive and disturbing to a lot of people because their lives are being changed. I think...

So that's basically exciting, but also a little bit treacherous. And I don't know exactly how it's going to play out. You know, I don't think there's going to be like major global backlash that prevents climate action for 30 years, but I think that they're going to be...

sort of micro resistances here and there. Oh, definitely. And from unlikely places. I mean, I want to get into a bit of that later about the politics of it. But regarding you as a journalist, you work with storytelling to essentially change behaviors.

on some level. Not that you definitely have an agenda, but specifically in this book and the article that preceded it, I'm sure you were trying to make people aware on some level and change behavior. So I'm curious now in this moment, how you see your... your role as a storyteller in combating the climate crisis. What's your position here? What's the assignment? Well, you know, it's interesting. I often...

feel awkwardly cast in the role of advocate. I don't think that there's any denying that part of why I wrote the book and part of why I wrote the article was to make people think differently about what we were facing. presumably to inspire some more political engagement and movement. But at a sort of like core who I am reptilian level, I really still do think of myself as a journalist who is...

observing the story as it's unfolding. And I think probably my role in the present moment is to try to be as clear-eyed about that as possible rather than succumbing to advocacy. I think denial is sort of dead, but unlike the climate delay side of things, there's a lot of disinformation and bad faith argumentation, but there's also some willful blindness on the climate left.

Not wanting to see, for instance, the energy problems that are unfolding right now as a problem and just say, we can snap our fingers and solve this immediately. I think that's kind of naive and sometimes not wanting to. think about or plan for using certain tools that all of the climate models now say are necessary if we take seriously our collective goals. So that may sound a little abstract, but, you know, we've touched on negative emissions a couple of times.

And just to be clear about what that is, it's basically any process that takes carbon out of the atmosphere. And over time at scale, you could, in theory, especially if we get to net zero emissions, doing this. in a large scale way for a period of time, you could actually not just stop the amount of warming and halt the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, but actually undo that damage over time.

Basically, all of the climate models that allow us to stay below 1.5 or 2 degrees even have some amount of these negative emissions built into them. We do not have a planet that is capable of... producing that scale of negative emissions through natural approaches like tree planting and reforestation which was a narrative that sort of took hold i'm gonna pull this down so yeah you're not so hot

Oh, thanks. Think clearly. We're being warmed by the greenhouse effect. Natural solutions have a role to play, but to really combat the emissions that we're putting out there. and even dealing with the very hardest to abate emissions. So assuming that we totally decarbonize our cars and our

electricity and a lot of other stuff. And just like the really hardest, they call the hard to decarbonize or hard to abate sectors would require huge amounts of lands. Some estimates are as high as half of the world's arable land, which we need to grow food. I just think it's not all that. plausible that we do that through these natural solutions, which means we're probably going to have to be

doing it through tech, through industrial processes. We have that technology today. It's not some dream. It works. It's expensive, but we have it and it works. But there has been for a long time a real resistance on the climate left to taking it seriously. because it is the preferred solution of the fossil fuel business because they think, well, if we just say we're going to suck carbon out of the air down the line, then we can keep burning it today. And that's obviously...

an unacceptable bargain. And I understand why many people who are fighting for climate don't want to think about negative emissions tech as a result. But ultimately, if you're... top goal is keep warming to 1.5 degrees. You need this tech. And we need to think seriously about it, invest in it, plan on it, start building it out now. Because those models I talked about that allowed us to stay below 1.5 degrees, they require us to...

cut our emissions in half this decade. They require us to get to net zero by 2050. That would be an unbelievably rapid transformation of our energy systems. But even beyond that, they would require so much negative emissions that we would need to be building a plant to do this every day until 2050. And we have all over the world today, one of them.

On some level, I guess I think of my role as being ultimately like a, just a, I don't want to flatter myself too much, but just like a, someone who's looking with clear, fresh eyes at the whole picture. I don't think that's flattering yourself. I think that's the reality. Like, someone's got to bring some coherence and clarity to the situation.

And that needs data, and it needs emotionality and story attached to that data. I think that's why your book hit people, why your articles hit people. And throughout the pandemic, you were also reporting on COVID-19. We're still in it. I was curious if you had an opinion on why we understand the urgency of a response to something like a pandemic and the vaccine in a way that we just can't get our heads around the climate crisis.

I think people are really scared, were really scared for their own safety and the safety of those around them. And I think that that was in large part because of how immediate and urgent it seemed. We have a lot of things that actually kill more people than COVID. I mentioned air pollution before. I mean, the difference between air pollution mortality and COVID mortality is large. Cancer is killing more Americans than COVID is.

I think heart disease as well. And I don't want, I don't say that to downplay the pandemic at all, but the new threats really terrify us. And you can see that, I mean, September 11th is another example. old threats, we just kind of normalize. And I think that that's an unfortunate predictor of where we're likely to head with climate, where things probably will get quite a bit worse, but we'll just sort of learn that that's where we are and that it's acceptable for...

that many droughts and those intense heat waves to be hitting, you know, these poor people in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. I think that's another interesting and important dynamic that pandemic hit the wealthy countries of the world first because it was... transmitted essentially by the system of globalization. Even within the US, it was like it was New York City that was hit first.

We got it bad. We got it really bad. For a long period there, we were the epicenter of the global pandemic. And it wasn't precisely true within China because it happened to start in Wuhan. But when you think about all the places around the world that really suffered, it's a lot of the global capitals. And while there was some disparity in how...

poor people, disenfranchised people within particular countries got sicker and died. When you look at the global picture, most of the death is concentrated in the wealthy countries of the world. And in part, that's also because...

we're all older and the age skew of COVID is really extreme. So when you think about, you know, I don't know the exact figure for all of sub-Saharan Africa, but I've just been looking at the South Africa numbers because of thinking about Omicron, you know, the average, the median age in South Africa is 28.

There are just not that many old people in the developing world, which means that the rich countries of the world died at much higher rates than the poor countries of the world. It's like Phnom Penh has very few old people. Yeah. And for different reasons, but. Yeah. And.

With climate, we're like, oh, it's going to be the poor people who suffer most. And that means that people like you and me don't pay all that much attention to it. And with COVID, it was... people like us who were getting sickest and suffering most and dying. And I think that was a lot scarier. And we did have this incredible, incredible response, which I think most...

Americans, maybe even most people around the world still don't appreciate just how dramatic the global intervention last spring was. I mean, this is like more than a billion school kids were out of school. um, for a period of a couple months there. Like that is insane.

The lockdowns that we lived through weren't complete. There were still some people going to work and risking their lives and both in genuinely essential jobs and then other jobs where they just didn't have the power to demand protection. Even so, the kinds of lockdowns that we had, the partial lockdowns that we had were unprecedented in human history. And as were the government responses in terms of making it...

mostly okay for most people. In America, the average unemployed person who lost their job because of the pandemic actually had more money coming to them during 2020 than they had from their previous job. That is, again, a kind of a... a response beyond the imagining of

I mean, if you had said to someone in November of 2019, there's going to be this huge disease outbreak, I really don't think that many people would have said, OK, well, we're going to shut down. Everybody's going to just stay at home and the governments are just going to pay for them to live for six months.

That would have seemed unthinkable. And yet, within a few months of learning about the disease, that's where we were. Not to mention the technological speed of getting the vaccine going. It's unreal. Yeah, and I mean...

I think most people still don't really appreciate just how fast that happened. I wrote a particular piece about this last December that was called, we had the vaccines the whole time. And literally the Moderna vaccine was designed within two days of the genome being released in January of 2020. It was fully designed before the first American case had been identified. It had been put into production before the first American died.

Now, we have to do clinical trials. We don't want to just inject random stuff into people's arms. But we knew that the drugs were safe. We knew the vaccines were safe from early clinical data that came out in May. Even the incredibly rapid, unprecedented in human history, insane speed of development and rollout that we've seen with the vaccines actually could have been considerably shorter.

If we had done that, if we had taken that May data and ran with it and started rolling out the vaccines in, say, August or something, we could have prevented a huge amount of the winter surge deaths that we saw. So it's possible that even that delay... cost 100,000 or maybe even more American lives. But yeah, there's all of these responses that were unthinkable before the pandemic, and we put them together really rapidly. But I think actually most Americans don't...

think that that was, they don't see it that way. They think of us as, which is also true, having bungled through it, like failure of leadership from the presidency, which was abject failure, down through local government and even down to the level of individual citizens, where we see all these videos of people getting into fights about masks and now about vaccines.

You know, both things are true. And I think that's a lesson for thinking about climate, which is this is not a hero swoops in, saves the day and everything's fine narrative or. It's an apocalypse. We're all going to die narrative. Like we're going to live in the middle. We're going to fight about the process. We're going to muddle through and we might end up.

closer on the optimistic end of the spectrum or closer on the more pessimistic end of the spectrum. But we're in a spectrum there. It's not a binary thing. And because people are complicated and politics is really hard, no victory is going to be. And that's really where we are with COVID. And I mentioned to you before we started recording, I think really important is COVID actually offered us this huge opportunity.

There's some estimates that the U.S. spent $10 trillion on pandemic relief. And a lot of that money was just throwing it out the door, like asking for people to take it. And we could have done a much better job, not just in the US, but all around the world, in directing that money towards greening our economy, towards decarbonizing our economy. Some quite smart, reliable, responsible people who work on this did.

pretty sophisticated modeling to find that if we had spent 10% of what we spent on COVID over the next five years, so it's in total 50% of what we spent on COVID, that would have been sufficient to totally decarbonize the global economy.

And yet we didn't. And that's another big picture thing I think is worth everybody keeping in mind. Well, you always seem to do this. You know, you always seem to take this incredibly long view while you deal with the present moment. I mean, the piece you just put out on Omicron, which what, you wrote Sunday? Yeah. I mean, you must have written it over the weekend and it's happening, you know? And when I was reading it, I was thinking like, you know, there's so much noise.

And you have a platform and people are listening. So what are you thinking about when you're sitting down to write? in terms of a responsible contribution to the conversation, how do you clear out the noise in a way? How do you make sure that you're not adding to the noise? And most of your work, if not all of it, results in this long view. while at the same time this very tangible present fact. You sort of exist in these extremes in your work. You know, it's funny. That's...

That's a very generous way of putting it. I think it is also to some degree an accurate description of my mind, which is at core, I'm just like a marveling stoner who's just like, wow. look at this saga that's unfolding and is always pulling myself back to the really big picture. But when I'm actually thinking about writing a piece, honestly, it's like, you know, that old, like, is it?

xkcd cartoon i don't remember it's like somebody's wrong on the internet like that is really like my i'm like no no wait like everybody's saying that you know it's good news that omicron is less severe But if it's only 30% less severe and six times more transmissible, that adds up to a lot more deaths like nobody's talking about. Let me shout this out there. And I am often motivated by that impulse. I'm observing a particular.

Often elite, privileged, but quite powerful, influential discourse and feeling like there's some part of it that's being misleading. or, um, inaccurate or where the moral emphasis is wrong. So like, for instance, the last couple of months, I just keep astonishing myself by looking at like a lot of people just looking at the COVID data on the New York times website and just being like, wow.

Still 1,000 people dying every day. And that made September and October of this year, aside from last year's winter surge, the deadliest two-month period in the entire pandemic in the US. And nobody I know and not really anybody I even see like, you know, speaking to journalists or writing on Twitter or whatever is putting that fact front and center in this period.

with vaccinations where they are, with liberal Americans in places like New York feeling relatively well protected, which they are, there is still an awful lot of people dying. Yeah, but it's not as cinematic. I mean, we're not looking at imagery of freezer trucks outside the Javits Center. Well, you know, I'm trying to be cautious in how I'm thinking about Omicron, but I do think that that...

sort of hospitals getting overwhelmed narrative could happen again. And I think we're very much not prepared for it in part because we've all sort of mentally... Turn the page there. Now, I'm not saying that is going to happen. I think there's a huge amount that we still don't know. But this week, it's like, you know, holiday parties. There was a holiday party at a friend's company the other day. 80 people were there. 20 people got COVID.

Well, you know, on some level, there is wisdom in an approach to this that says, if I'm vaccinated, especially if I've gotten a booster, an infection is much less meaningful than it used to be. That is true at the individual level. And to some degree, you can say that it's true at the population level, although I've been so astonished that we are here now in the late fall, early winter, and we've got 60% of Americans.

vaccinated, something like 80, maybe even higher percent of seniors vaccinated. Those numbers are a little unreliable. The CDC has been really bad about it. And yet the ratio of cases to hospitalizations and the ratio of cases to deaths is the same that it was. before vaccines last winter. So this is maybe a little technical just to even state the problem. And I actually don't understand what explains it precisely. But given the same number of cases,

We would expect to see today, and we are seeing today, the same number of deaths and the same number of hospitalizations, in fact, more hospitalizations than we saw before mass vaccination last winter. Which means that... You know, vaccines are doing their job. They're protecting individual people. But first of all, there are enough unvaccinated people that the disease can still kill. And I think Delta was considerably more severe than we were told, which means that overall...

The effect of vaccines and the effect of Delta basically canceled each other out. They fought to a draw. So last winter peak, we saw 250,000 cases a day, basically. In the Delta surge, we saw between 100 and 150,000, so a little more than half. Last winter, we saw between 2,000 and 3,000 people dying a day. This time we're seeing between 1,000 and 2,000. The ratios are exactly the same, which means that if you're thinking about what you owe the society at large...

Any case actually has the same mathematical relationship to death that it did at a national level, that it did before vaccines. You yourself may feel protected, but because of these complicated dynamics of spread. because of the severity of Delta, because of how many unvaccinated people there are, you getting sick and possibly infecting other people actually represents the same kind of social risk and social...

imposition that it would have represented a year ago. I don't think anybody is thinking in those terms at all. Kind of bring this poetic terms to it. I think it was on the long form podcast, but there was something I heard a while ago. I mean, this is going back a couple of years when you were doing press for that book where someone was asking about your inspiration to write the book on this interview. And you said, well, actually Twitter.

and the sort of stacking of data, but then somehow you're taking that and you're figuring out a way to make it poetic or understandable. So I want to hear a bit about that.

that from you process basically and how you're thinking about these things because like what we just talked about like the only way to get an understanding there globally or in a populist way is to use somehow poetry to make that work yeah well I think that is more or less what I do, but it's a little bit of like a black box to answer just because when I see those numbers, I'm marveling at them in addition to just tabulating them.

And, you know, I just, I wrote this long piece about air pollution that a couple of weeks ago came on the LRB and the headline was 10 million a year. And I've actually been working on this piece for a long time in part because.

I didn't entirely know what to make of the fact, given my background on climate, that the mortality toll of air pollution is considerably bigger than the mortality toll of climate. It was a mind-bending experience to go through. But basically, I just spent a couple of years going around being like... Fuck, 10 million people a year, 10 million people a year. And that number meant something to me emotionally in a way that.

A lot of people deride statistics, but I just saw the stats and found them. I mean, you said the word poetic. I just think human, majestic. Full of wonder. Yeah. And really felt like there weren't all that many people who had the same disposition or perspective writing in these areas. So I felt that really keenly with climate where like.

It used to be for so long, people would talk about climate journalism and be like, well, we can't talk about the stats. We got to find someone. We got to find a family that got displaced because their house flooded in rural Louisiana or whatever. Frankly, I find those stories kind of boring. Like they all feel very paint by numbers and especially like in the newspaper format, which is how they often appeared. And I was just like, we're not talking about transformation of a scale where like.

there are going to be some tragedies. We're talking about, I mean, 10 million people a year. That's a Holocaust every year. Nobody's talking about it in those terms. And even that's hard to understand. But when you go to Birkenau or something and you see the piles of shoes, how we make meaning through symbol and through story.

is what makes understanding and i think that that's the thing it's like 10 million you're struggling with that and then you go okay so how do i make other people think 10 million yeah what makes that work you know because there's such a

a sort of delta of understanding. Totally. And it's funny because... I often, in talking about those stats, use the Holocaust comparison. And I often get people being like, how dare you? And I'm like, my grandparents were Holocaust refugees. I don't want to say that that gives me exclusive access, but I think I could use that as a comparison point without offending people.

My grandfather's entire family was incinerated in the Holocaust. You carry the generational trauma and ancestral trauma. My mother is very much dealing with it still today. I do think that finding the right comparison point there is really... useful and powerful. One of the things that has been really interesting to watch unfold with COVID is, you know, conservatives who were reluctant to embrace

restrictive measures early on were very eager to make comparisons and were like, it's the flu. And they were wrong. Like the infection fatality rate is higher than the flu and the infection fatality rate, which is the... proportion of people who get sick who ultimately die that's misleading because when it's a new disease it spreads much more quickly many more people get it so it's not a total picture but there was no real

effort on the other side to contextualize the numbers usefully. Make facts touch humanity somehow. Yeah. And, you know, there's been a lot of commentary since that we didn't see enough dead bodies. You mentioned the morgue trailers or whatever. And I think that was one of the few, we didn't even see those people, but that was one of the few illustrations of mortality that.

made visible like yeah yeah i mean speaking of the holocaust it's partly how it was kept a secret for so long was those images didn't travel for quite a while but it's also it's interesting in the sense that we basically don't believe that we are capable of that kind of moral monstrosity anymore and whatever we say about donald trump and however awful his regime was we don't think he's gonna

I mean, I didn't think he was going to be killing millions of people. Our civilization has just moved past that. And yet, there are all these things that we blithely accept, which are really, really horrifying, immoral.

grotesque, cruel, and climate change is probably exhibit A. We literally, with our daily lives, are poisoning the future of the planet. We are wealthy today because We and those who came before us poisoned the planet and poisoned the future and the entire structure of global power and wealth. is the result of the scarcity of this energy resource hoarded by the countries that we now call the global north and used and producing pollution that is ultimately toxic.

to the lives of people living in what we now know as the global south. That's not- That's just fact. That's just fact. There was no history of economic growth before the discovery of fossil fuels. Now, the history of economic growth is more complicated than the simple input. of fossil fuels, but it played a huge role. And that energy source has basically not been used by the global South, which today is already...

poorer than it would be without climate change. By some measures, as much as 25%. They've lost 25% of their growth over the last couple of decades because of climate change. And the gap is only going to widen. I don't even think we think about that. Yeah, there's this whole narrative that's like, what happened to Africa in the 60s? And there's a kind of a right-wing narrative that's basically like they got independence and they couldn't govern themselves. So it's this problem of governance.

I'm not here to say that there aren't problems of corruption in African government. There are, definitely. But also, we were essentially dumping toxic waste into their world, not dealing with the pollution.

here in the same way and watching their Their famines become more common, their droughts become more common, and assuming that it was just natural, that it was some feature of their culture, their civilization, which doomed them to that kind of suffering, and not because it was essentially a story that we had written.

or in part written by producing fossil fuels in part because we don't want to acknowledge that we have a, we have any kind of moral responsibility to the, and that's where we all flip past like the pleas on TV when we see like starving kids, but also because. It makes us feel shitty about the comfortable lives that we have. Yeah. If it really did come on the back of billions of people living elsewhere in the world.

I mean, you wrote this New York Magazine article that spawned the book in 2017. And I was thinking back to that time, especially here in New York where we both live. And, you know, you definitely faced some heat. On the other side of it. And you wrote a book in the context of how polarized and hyperbolic everything was. I mean, we mentioned Trump.

you wrote this with a canvas and an arena that was so crazy hyperbolic at the time but somehow you managed to like a keto that you were like well let me maybe use fear as a weapon for good because they're using fear as a weapon for maybe not so good. That's at least how it felt in a way. It was like, finally.

You know what I mean? So I was thinking, were you thinking actively about that? Were you like, how do I take this moment and this zeitgeist and this feeling applied to the climate crisis? I think I was responding. At a subconscious level more than a conscious level. I mean, I definitely was scared. You know, when people ask me like how I got turned on to climate and climate alarm in particular, I often say.

In the months after my father died, I started seeing a lot. I was keeping an eye on, you know, the future news from. You lost your father in 2016. Yeah. I was seeing some more scary news about climate. Trump got elected. And then like a couple weeks after that, there was this string of days in the Arctic where the Arctic was like 40 degrees warmer than it was normally. And I had a panic attack. And, you know.

I thought to myself, this story that we're living in is really scary. And I felt that I had not been told that story honestly. I had to discover it because I was like reading some relatively obscure academic papers. Now that's not to say...

That nobody had raised the alarm about climate change before. Of course they had. And we didn't listen. And I was one of the people who was not listening. But one of the reasons that that... message hadn't gotten through in the way that I think it really has over the last couple of years is that there were a series of conventions around climate communication and climate storytelling that were really restricting the canvas.

essentially to more optimistic possibilities and not really wanting to talk about the scarier end of the spectrum. Just on a storytelling level, I was like, there are things that are possible. that I as a well-informed person didn't know were possible. And I think that that's a communications crime. If science says something is possible and it's scary, I want to know about it. I don't want to have it shielded from me. Secondly,

I was someone who became kind of a climate person because of that fear. So I didn't trust anyone who told me that fear was a counterproductive messaging tool. I knew also it wasn't for everybody.

I know there are other ways to tell the story. I still feel that way. But I knew that at least in this case study of one, me, I had had an awakening out of fear. I assumed that there were other people like me. And maybe if they, maybe they numbered in the thousands, maybe they numbered in the millions, but.

They were out there. And I looked back at this history of environmental activism, but activism in general. And I just saw all of these instances where fear had worked. And I thought, if it's true that this is scary. If I know that I was activated by fear, and I know from analogies in the historical, in the recent past, that fear can work, what possible argument could there be against using it? So my...

first impulse was really like, I got a story that isn't being told and is a really big deal. But thinking through the strategic implications of that, I thought, you know, whatever reluctance people had towards fear-based messaging, whatever skepticism they had was really blinkered. And I didn't know that I would be...

surfing a wave of alarmism when I started out. I think a lot of that is coincidental, but a lot of it just is like probably a lot of people were picking up on what I was picking up on. So when Greta goes outside of Swedish parliament with her sign all by herself. you know, a lonely, literally friendless teenager, no platform at all, and starts talking about how big the gap is between what scientists say is happening and what...

politicians and journalists are saying is happening. She had an enormous response. I mean, she started doing that in August of 2018. By January, she was like the star at Davos from total obscurity. not even surrounded by friends to, you know, effectively like the cover of time magazine or whatever, you know, like in four months time. Yeah. That just tells you how much.

audience appetite there was for this very direct. Yet you cut all this flack from climate journalists. Yeah. Specifically, Air Coldhouse. And Chris Mooney, who were not totally gracious in welcoming you to the Climate Journalist Club. Yeah. Why do you think that is? You know, I don't mean to just call out those two people, but you have mentioned them in things before.

Good journalists. Great journalists. Why was there this sort of like, I mean, was it classic schoolyard stuff? Like, who do you think you are? We've been here for a minute. Like, what was it? I think it's... complicated to understand the psychology of that pushback. I think of it in terms of two different, they're sort of two different.

schools of criticism and this is just to be clear really talking about the this article I wrote in 2017 which was explicitly about worst case scenarios and was really really scary yeah the book is also quite scary but the article that preceded the book yeah yeah the book that came out of the article was with an amazing image by the way just like note what an image you illustrated that with yeah we'll put in the podcast

The book is quite scary. It looks at a range of scenarios that are more likely not worst case. And to some degree, I guess that's a response to that criticism. But I think of the initial criticism as being of two different kinds. One was that I was being inaccurate. with the science. And the other was that it was irresponsible to talk about worst case scenarios at all.

I think that a lot of people raised the first objection really meaning the second. But we did, I think, a pretty good job of quite quickly annotating the story I'd published, showing where everything came from. And there's still some things, you know, as with science.

all of these papers, they're not going to be precisely accurate. I mean, your book I'm holding here has 77 pages of notes to paperback. Yeah. So, you know, I think it's always important to keep in mind with this stuff that's like, it's not, we're not talking about a study. We're talking about a literature. And many of those studies are going to be revised. Some of them are going to be revised to be, actually, we were too worried about that. That's going to happen.

The recent history shows there's much more like we were not worried enough about it, but like there's going to be some stuff that gets debunked. That's how science works. But when you take in totality the full literature on what this high-end emissions scenario that the UN said was possible would mean, it was really terrifying. I was sketching that out in an unapologetic, fear-mongering way. And it was not the way that any of these people did business. And the reasons for that are...

As I say, complicated. I think there was some like new kid on the block stuff to it. And if I was writing that same piece now, I'm sure I'd get more. I mean, the culture has changed. We're more receptive to alarmism, but also just my position has changed. So this is before Greta got up and yelled at everyone. Yeah.

And before anybody knew who I was. So I think that the reception would be different now. But I think there also was this quite baked in conventional wisdom about climate communication messaging, which is that... scaring people doesn't work and you need to inspire them instead. You need to be clear about the stakes, but you also need to be clear about the opportunities and that those things need to be balanced.

And that anytime you're talking about really high-end scenarios, you're essentially out of balance and out of whack because we can expect that humans will do something. Those curves will bend and we're not going to end up in what looked at the time to be worst case scenarios. That's a big assumption. Now, at the time, I thought it was a big assumption. I thought it was bullshit because I thought I look at these trajectories and they're all.

we're not doing anything to bend the curve. Emissions are going up. Maybe we won't get all the way to this one particular scenario that That article was based a lot on technical, but it's called RCP 8.5. Maybe we're not going to get all the way there, but can we count on not getting there when we've done so little to this point? That seems like a big bet. And given the stakes, let's just be clear about what the stakes really are.

I now actually feel a little differently about that. I think that it's very unlikely that we get to that emissions level. I think in part that's because of the changes that we talked about where renewables have gotten much cheaper.

Politics have changed. Corporate politics have changed. All that is really different. But I also think some of it was honestly a... problem of scientific communication at the outset, which is to say that that scenario, and this is, I'm sure your listeners will be so bored hearing me talk about this detail, but that scenario assumed...

Something like a five-fold increase in the use of coal over the course of the 21st century. Which shifted. And maybe that was defensible as a worst-case scenario when the scenarios were first being... cooked up in 2007 to 2012 or whatever, because at the time China had gone through this huge coal boom and you could say, well, everybody in the developing world is going to do the same. It was defensible, I think, as a high end scenario, but then it was messaged.

as business as usual. That was the language that was used. This is our business as usual trajectory. And this is what will happen if we don't implement any... policy at all. And I think that that was at the time in ways that I didn't understand misleading in the sense that it required the world to really turn away from any climate action at all.

While I was not confident that rapid action was going to take place, I would have told you if you asked me in 2017, you imagine the course of the 21st century, do you think something's going to be done? I would say, yes, something is going to be done. And doing anything means that RCP 8.5 is really unlikely. Now, that's not to say that some scary things are not quite likely. Some scary things are not baked in.

As we talked about at the beginning, they absolutely are. But I do think that there may have been also something that those journalists and other scientists understood about the basic plausibility of that scenario that I didn't, that allowed them or led them to be more critical of me.

than I would have been to someone else doing the same thing at the same time. And it is one of the things I think about a lot is like, if the last major UN report on this had not... used rcp 8.5 as its high-end scenario but had used rcp 6.0 which is like a slightly lesser one where would that have led me now those scenarios are really scary so i think i would have written

quite similar piece and really would have written a quite similar book. But it's also possible that that very initial pushback might have been lighter because people would have considered that a more likely future. Right. And I mean, you engaged with other scientists, you know, Michael Mann, the author of the hockey stick graph, who was critical, but you then sort of use that to collaborate and to have understanding further. I mean, was there anyone in particular that.

that really had a major supportive effect on you at the time? Oh, I think many. So you felt more supportive than criticized at that moment? Yeah. The scientist, scientist who I'm probably closest to, you know, who was... I think very helpful to me then and very supportive then is a guy named Michael Oppenheimer, who's at Princeton, but been involved in the IPCC. And we did a bunch of...

events and the podcast radio stuff together. And he was not exactly where I was, but he said, the science says these things are possible. We should be talking about them. And maybe we should also be talking about them in terms of probabilities. We don't really have the... math to do that but it's worth airing them and i think that's really true if the world scientists are saying this is plausible enough to model then we need to be worrying about it

More recently, I've spent a lot of time talking to Marshall Burke and Saul Shang and Drew Shindell. I'm now quite plugged into that world. And in general, the picture is brighter. Most people believe progress is being made, but we waited too long and we're moving too slowly to avoid levels of warming that we...

We're quite comfortable and confident defining not that long ago as unacceptable. And we're now heading for them almost inevitably. You were in a conversation about a year ago with Ezra Klein and Leah Stokes. And at the end of it, you were asked to recommend a book, and you brought up The Lorax. Yeah. And I was curious why that book is relevant to you. What is it about The Lorax that's relevant in this moment?

The reason that I brought it up is that I've been thinking a lot about the way that our relationship to nature is being changed by climate change. So what I mean by that is... For a long time, really since the Industrial Revolution, Westerners have regarded the quote-unquote natural world, which is a conceptual idea that only came about during the Industrial Revolution.

as a retreat, an escape, a source of solace and comfort, but also of perspective and grounding, a reminder that we are guests on this planet. as well as stewards we're of nature we are of nature not above nature and even as someone who's spent my whole life living in york city i have a lot of those same values like i do feel That the natural world is awesome in the original meaning of the word and perspective giving. And essentially, in that sense, a model.

for how we should live here on this planet. And in the climate context, it has also been an incredible friend to us in the sense that all of those trees... All they're doing all day long is eating up carbon and putting out oxygen for us to breathe. So they're literally taking our pollution and feeding us clean air. And we have only as much warming as we have now.

because they've been such efficient allies in the fight against climate. About half of all of the emissions that we've ever put up into the air have made their way into the atmosphere. The rest of them have been absorbed by trees and oceans. And that means that in the present moment, we may not just be turning to nature as a source of perspective, but also as a backup plan.

All of the science says we really can't be counting on that for much longer, at least at the levels that we've seen to this point. So because we've done so much damage to the atmosphere in general through warming and through direct emissions and pollution.

Almost all scenarios suggest that this carbon uptake mechanism is going to become less efficient going forward. And in some cases, especially through wildfire, many places that have... done an enormous amount of work saving us from ourselves, like the Amazon, are not only going to become less efficient in taking carbon out of the atmosphere, they're going to start being sources of carbon, which means that they're going to go from being

our friend that is so good to us that it shames us to be a better person. They're going to go from that to being our enemy. They're going to be a source of ongoing, in some cases, uncontrollable. emissions that are going to make our future worse and our climate situation darker. And that is a really profound shift. I don't know how long it will take us to process it.

I don't know how complete it will be. We may choose not to process it. We may choose to continue thinking of the natural world as this majestic, untouched, better than us system. Within a few decades, it's quite possible that many of these largest forest and rainforest systems are going to be working against us rather than working for us. You know, in the book, I talk about it and I call it like, sometimes I think war machine is like the best.

We've been arming the system for a really long time and it's about to go to town. And I don't really know what that, where that leaves us, but it means that a lot of the conceptual. models that we've inherited from past generations about nature and our relationship to it are going to have to be at the very least remodeled. Beginning with enlightenment. Yeah. I mean, what's a terrarium?

Yeah. You know, I mean, you got to think about these things in terms of when that really shifted. Did enlightenment create the climate crisis in many ways? It is the case that we didn't even really think of the natural world as the natural world until we started despoiling it. The category is like... the parts that we haven't touched yet. Although, as we know, we now think of a lot of things as natural that are not at all natural, like we bulldozed Indians out of all of the national parks.

There's a lot of engineering going on there too. In a place like the Amazon, there are civilizations there in the past. It's not like perfectly, perfectly untouched. On the other hand, nothing is. But we want to believe in the, not just like the kind of...

moral virtue of untouched nature, but also it as an asset. And we may soon be getting to a place where like, yes, trees are good but like if we're planting them at an industrial scale and managing them like a factory farm is that nature no we know that now yeah so you had a child while you're writing this book which

To me is amazing. Having a few myself, I can understand the sort of cognitive shift of a before and after becoming a parent and having lost a parent just before that, which opens you up. I imagine. I haven't. But my wife did at a similar time that you went through it. And I know that there's a kind of being that I don't understand quite yet because I haven't experienced that. But being this...

present with life cycle, someone passing, someone coming, and you're writing this book. How do you think about raising a family during an ecological crisis? And how do you think about... your child's future and the planet you you brought them into i think there are a couple of different ways of thinking about it and i can't say that i have a perfectly

coherent or even defensible perspective on it. I think if I were to sum it up in general, it's something as crude and reflexive as you got to live your life. Now I do think reflecting on it more takes me in a bunch of different directions. I guess the first thing I would say is... I don't think that global warming is likely to proceed at a level that makes life miserable for my children or indeed most people on the planet.

I think that there is going to be an enormous challenge of responding to this crisis. It will introduce a lot of pain and suffering, but that alongside that, we will... adapt, but we will also normalize and we will come to accept conditions that are much more brutal climate wise than the ones we live in today without feeling like the world has ended.

That's true globally, I think. I think there are going to be regions like the Sahel that grow, that are truly uninhabitable. But I think for the most part, people are going to continue living their lives. with more difficulty in them. And I do think that the air pollution point is really illustrative there. You know, like the WHO says between 2030 and 2050, climate change could get so bad that 250,000...

People are going to die every year from its various effects. That sounds really bad, which it is. But 10 million people are dying right now from air pollution. And... I'm not trying to say that nobody noticed. The people who are dying are noticing. The people who are getting dementia. It's staggering now. It's so large. Our capacity for normalization is so large. And it is especially large.

in wealthy parts of the world by privileged people like you and me. So when I think about raising my daughters, the lesson that I want to impart to them to the extent that I can impart any lessons is... That the life of people living elsewhere who have less, who are suffering more, is equivalent to your life. You cannot just look away from 500,000 people on the brink of starvation in Madagascar and just be like,

Oh, that's some backward corner of the world. That's just what life is like there. You can't just look away at a billion Indians facing really intense climate impacts in the decades ahead or... all of those people living in sub-Saharan Africa whose agricultural yields are already falling, who are already struggling in various ways. These are all humans whose lives are meaningful and whose suffering is in part

a reflection of your prosperity. Those things are connected. There are other things at play, but those things are connected. It is a factor. And to just try to... inculcate a moral imagination that is global as opposed to extremely local or tribal or national. And that's hard. I can't say that I see the world that way. All the time. But to understand the basic value and dignity of.

people living elsewhere is I think a really, really, really important lesson. I think it's the lesson that we need to learn as a globe so that if we have a hundred million or 200 million climate refugees, we don't just think. stop clogging up our country, you brown people. We think, let's help you. And I think it's important on the individual level too. What the world looks like.

30 years from now, 50 years from now, 80 years from now. I also think it's really, I want to sound like too optimistic about any of this, but I also think it's really important to keep in mind, like it's really hard to project the future. We can't.

really see it. We tell ourselves we can, we model it in this way and that, but what's the world going to be like in 2080? I think I have a pretty good sense of what the global temperature is going to look like. I think that means I have a pretty good sense of what some climate impacts are going to be like.

Does New York City have a seawall? I don't know. Hopefully. Well, there are some arguments against it too, but I think probably we'd be better off with it. Yes. You know, is today's coastline of Bangladesh totally uninhabited? I don't know. But a disruption like that, while tragic and horrifying, if you imagine it playing out is also a...

positive adaptation. So when we talk about 100 million, 200 million people, maybe the UN says as many as a billion climate refugees by 2050, which is as many people as living today in North and South America combined. On some level, that seems horrifying. And given the geopolitics of the present, it is really scary. On the other hand, it would mean people relocating from places that are bad to live in to places that are better to live in. That's what that...

movement would mean. We don't look at, you know, Jews fleeing pogroms in Russia and going to Western Europe and the US and thinking that was a horror. I mean, it was that. But it's also like, well, those people found some better lives. And that's probably going to be a part of the story with climate too. So, you know, what worries me most is...

our capacity for normalization, our capacity to dehumanize people who are living elsewhere, especially when they're suffering. But what gives you hope is like all of that's variable. All of that's. to be engineered and to be determined. And the climate conditions are going to make things hard. They're not just going to make things hard in terms of hurricanes and droughts. They're also going to make it hard because...

They're going to teach us that the world is full of scarcity and difficulty. And when we have that idea, we tend not to be very kind to one another. And that's, I think, really likely to be bad news on climate. But while I do have a pretty bleak baseline, I also think that we're doing quite a lot to...

bring ourselves into the range of that baseline. I think that we may end up quite close to what I think of as a best case scenario, or what I used to think of as a best case scenario. And above all, that'll be... An amazing accomplishment. We dug ourselves into a horrible hole and we didn't manage to get all the way out, but we didn't drown in the water at the bottom of that hole either.

So, you know, we'll see. I guess we'll have to just continue reading what you write to know what the hell's going on. Yeah, and like check back in 50 years. Who knows? It's hard. This thing in particular, this fact in particular is really, really hard. set effects. The future is going to be grimmer than we were willing to accept up until even a few years ago and grimmer than our parents and grandparents would have recognized as even possible.

But it's also going to be, I think, better, more comfortable, more stable. And as a result, ultimately, relatively speaking, more prosperous and more just, then... most people looking at it would have thought was likely a couple of years ago. Now, how you process those two really divergent facts is kind of up to you and your emotional temperament.

You can sort of probably hear it coming through the way I'm talking now. It's like, for all the stuff I've written about, for all the stuff I talk about and think about, I actually am temperamentally an optimistic person. You just had to wait around. to hear that.

So if you're still here, good for you. Yeah, totally. I mean, I do think that the biographical facts are really important here. I was born in 1982. I grew up in New York City in the 1990s. This was the end of history. That was my adolescence. I did think these- promises were not perfect, but like over the course of my lifetime, I was going to see the world get more prosperous, more just, and more equal and more free. I thought those were like,

Over a five-year period, in particular countries, you couldn't count on those things coming true. But over a 50-year period, looking at the globe as a whole, for sure, I thought those things were true. And climate has made that... view of the future a lot more complicated for me and a lot more, um, tentative. And I'm certainly much more skeptical of those promises than I was as a teenager or 20 something, but I'm still inclined to think that like,

This is our story. We've written it poorly to this point, but we are in control. And if, in fact, the scale of the damage that's possible is a sign of our power over the system. Because if we do that damage, it will be because of choices we make. Making different choices is really hard. The politics is hard. The engineering is hard. The infrastructure is hard. All of that stuff is really, really hard. But on some level, you have to think like...

Thank God we're still in control. Thank God we can write the story we want to write. And if we don't, we have only ourselves to blame. David, thank you so much for joining us today. And this has been amazing. Thanks for talking to me. Great to be here.

Thank you for listening. You can find more episodes of Time Sensitive on our website, timesensitive.fm, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can listen to our other podcast at a distance by heading to atadistancepodcast.com. You can follow us on Instagram at slowdown.tv. And if you like our program, please be sure to subscribe and leave comments. Our theme music was composed by Billy Martin. This episode was produced by Emily Jang, Tiffany Jiao, Mike Lala, and Johnny Simon. Thank you.