David Wallace-Wells

00:024 3 2 1 David. So, first of all, thanks for doing this. Oh, my pleasure. Really excited. how much trouble are we in, legitimately? I mean, it's pretty bad already and it's going to get, I think, a lot, lot worse. So, bad right now, right here. It's raining. Seems nice out. The hills are fine. long ago were the fires? Right right around the corner. evacuated. It was October. Yeah. Yeah, it was rough. But, in all fairness, I've been evacuated three times over the past 20 years. Yeah, I know. The fires in California fires are kind of interesting in that, um, they both seem like it's like the future of the apocalypse. They're here, but also it's so familiar from like decades of wildfires. Um, but, you know, there's scientific estimates that say that they're going to get, by the end of the century, 64 times worse. What? Yeah, I think that number's a little high cuz

00:55that would mean more than half of California burning every year. But, um, I mean, it's going to get, yeah, it'll get, it'll get crazy. And there's no way to avoid any of this wildfire stuff? Well, I mean, you know, if we don't raise the temperature of the planet, then But, is is that the only thing that's causing wildfire? I mean, like, obviously, if the temperature raises, uh, there's more brown, dry leaves and grass and stuff like that. But, Yeah, you know, there's a there's a lot of preventative stuff you can do. I mean, not building in certain areas. Like, I mean, it used to be, you know, the Indians who lived here before the white people came, um, did a lot of controlled burning. They like lived among fires and, um, I think that's like a probably more responsible way to be. But, we've now built up the whole state so that there are all these homes that we don't

01:39want to burn. There are all these, you know, properties we don't want to burn. And when you, um, when you, like, restrict the ability of natural wildfires to burn, that means that, like, more tinder gets built over time and then, you know, at some point something lights the match and it all burns. So, I mean, you could, um, you could do more controlled fire. You could take more aggressive action in terms of, um, you know, like, spraying foam and that kind of thing. Um, you could have a lot more firefighters. But, I was just talking to a guy yesterday. I'm out here actually doing some reporting on wildfires and, um, who was saying that no Santa Ana powered wildfire has ever been stopped by firefighters. And he's like a environmental historian. Wow. Um, it's like you can hope that the winds redirect them, but like the action of firefighters is basically just spitting in the wind.

02:25So, the action is not to stop, but it's to kind of contain it. Yeah. As best they can. Yeah. And minimize property damage. Yeah, but, you know, it's hard cuz you you have a lot more it's a lot easier to do that when, um, you know, if the land was totally raw, you'd be like, "Oh, let's we'll just like try to direct the fire in this direction." But, if the land is like full of homes, you're like, "Well, we can't You know what I mean?" ever seen it live? Have you ever been in one? Yeah. One time, uh, we were filming Fear Factor and we were, uh, way up on on the 5, like, um, probably, I would say, maybe 75 miles from here. And for a full hour, driving about 50 miles an hour, there was fire on the right-hand side of the road for a full hour. I mean, like, Lord of the Rings, end of the world. Yeah. Like, you're waiting for Satan to come riding on a burning phoenix over

03:19the top of the hill. It was crazy. I'd never seen anything like it in my life. That was the worst one I've ever seen. But, I think that was just because of placement. I think that this past one was actually worse in terms of physical damage and size. It's just I didn't see it the way I saw this one. Well, I last year there were there were flames like hopping over the 405, right? I mean, um, and that's that's really like crazy to me because, you know, I'm a New Yorker. I've lived my whole life in New York and I just feel in my bones, I now know it's sort of not true, but like my inner emotional perspective on the world is that I live in a fortress. I don't live in nature. Right. Like, I walk down on concrete streets. I look up at steel buildings. Nature can't come for me. Right. But, when you see like fire straddling the 405, that's, you know, this is a major metropolis

04:05here. Um, and we're not safe. We're not we're certainly not totally safe. Um, and that's like for me, that's a major, like, a major revelation I've had is that wherever you live, no matter how defended against nature you are, climate change is teaching us that, you know, you still live within climate and when it gets up, it will you up. It will affect you in some way. Yeah, there was, uh, the both sides of the 405 were on fire last year. Last year or the year before last, one of those. But, it was insane. It was, it's it was hitting Bel Air. And people like, "Well, this is this we've never seen this before." I talked to a firefighter once. This was years ago and he told me, "With the right wind, it's a matter of time for a fire hits the top of LA and burns all the way to the ocean." And he goes, "And there's not going to be anything we could do about it. He goes, "If the

04:53right wind catches and a fire starts at the top of Los Angeles, it'll just go straight through LA." Look at this. What is that from, Jamie? That was the 405 fire, but Yeah, okay. Oh, that's it. That's the crazy video. So, this is Bel Air on the left-hand side. Yeah. And so, these are people driving down the 405 looking at, you know, the most insane sight for a place that has 30 million people or whatever LA has, to see the entire hillside on fire. And Bel Air to me, Bel Air is really interesting cuz it's, you know, most climate impacts, they hit the world's poorest first. And like the wildfires are they work in the reverse cuz it's like people living in the hills. Yeah. Um, those are the rich people. But, it just shows you like no matter how rich you are, no matter how comforted by that wealth you are, like, you know, you might get hit. Well, the best

05:44example was, uh, Point Dume. Yeah. And, uh, we were flying over it. My friend, uh, Bill, uh, has a helicopter license and so, we went, uh, around the peak of Point Dume. It's crazy because you know these are like $20 estates. Yeah. Massive bluff-side homes. They thought they were living in the peak of luxury overviewing the ocean and like, "Wow, we're on top of the world." And the fire just scorched it to the ground. Like, that's what it looks like now. Yeah, that's so crazy. Well, it's really crazy cuz you like the they couldn't even cuz people have always said, "Oh, well, they'll protect the rich folks." They didn't protect these ones. They they can't protect anybody when it gets this crazy. I think they lost more than 600 homes in Malibu alone. Yeah, I mean, and that's I mean, yeah. And then you think about Miami Beach going underwater and I mean, it's Well,

06:32Miami Beach is a weird one, right? Because the the ground is porous. Yeah. Yeah, so it's inevitable. I mean, I got to get out of there. That's basically a sandbar that like some developers in the '20s decided that was, "Oh, we can make this into a fake paradise." Oh, really? Yeah, I mean, there was yeah, it was, um, I mean, LA's kind of the same way. Like, nobody looking at LA in 1850 would have said like, "Here's a great place to build a city." Um, but we did it anyway. Like, America in its like imperial swagger was like, "No, we can create some paradise out of this completely inhospitable land." In both places. And then, you know, it's just a lesson that like, you know, it's just a matter of time. Well, the most cocky people are the people that have those houses on stilts on the water Yeah. in Malibu. How long is this going to work out for you? Like, this thing moves back and

07:15forth over time and it has forever. I mean, if you think about like the long, long sweep of human history, most human settlements didn't happen on the coast. Right. Um, like, people lived in maybe they lived on a river. Maybe you'd have like a little community on a river. But, the, you know, the last like 50 years, we 100 years, we've built up so especially in America, so much more on the coast and that's like, uh, you know, really inviting disaster. I mean, all of Houston, like, all of that is like that was flood plain that like nature was like, you know, it was swamp land. It was and now it's, you know, new suburban developments made out of concrete and that just means more and more flooding. Yeah, I've been to Houston right after floods. It's, uh, Houston is a crazy one. They we there was a hotel that we used to stay at whenever I used to do gigs in Houston.

07:57It's gone now cuz the the flood waters just filled up the hotel. So crazy. I actually really love that city. It's kind of like, um, there's great food. Oh, yeah. Houston's super underrated. too. Yeah. It gets lumped into this weird sort of San Antonio vibe. I don't know why, but, uh, I'm I'm I'm a big fan of Houston. I'm a big fan of Texas in general. They're fun people. Yeah. But, yeah, if it gets hotter, they're too. Cuz it's just like in the summertime in Houston, you know, when you're dealing with 100% humidity and it's 115° outside, you can't even explain to people what that feels like. I mean, you're getting cooked. There's there are places in the world that are going to be they're going to literally cook you by 2050. So, cities in India and the Middle East, you won't be able to go outside during the summer without at being a risk of dying by 2050. By

08:442050, like, what kind of temperature are we talking about? Well, it's a combination of heat and humidity. So, but, you know, usually the heat will be like up in the up around 130 combined with some bad humidity. Um, but you know, there were there already been we've already broken that threshold. Like, there have been temperature records set every year, but, um, last year broke 130 in Oman, I think. But, like, the the scarier parts are not some of these crazy desert places that have gotten really hot. It's the the cities. So, like, Calcutta has like 12 million people in it. And it may not be able to you may not be able to live there, um, in the summer in just 30 years. Mhm. And then you just think about where all these people are going and how much that's going to destabilize everything. You know, I've talked to people, uh, who are terrified about this and I've talked to people who are

09:25nonchalant. Um, where where do you sit? Are you are you terrified? Are you thinking that you're going to be physically in trouble yourself? Or do you think that with proper planning and just not being tied to one spot, you can move to another area? I mean, I have I have different feelings about it at different times of day cuz it's that big a story. It's like going to affect everything, I think. Um, you know, I think civilization's not going to collapse. I think like there'll be people around even living like kind of rewarding, prosperous lives, um, forever. And the question is like what shape those lives take and where they're where where they are. So, me personally, you know, I'm like a relatively well-off person who lives in America in, you know, New York, I think I'll be able to do okay. I think my children will be able to do okay. And when I imagine their future,

10:17I think it's a reflection of all of our kind of like cognitive biases and emotional reflexes that when I imagine like my daughter's future, I'm imagining world that seems a lot like the one that we live in today. But when I look at the science, um it paints a really, really bleak picture. So, you know, the question of like optimism and and alarm, I think it's really all a matter of perspective, right? So, we're at 1.1° C right now. I think there's basically no way that we avoid 2° of warming, which is like the UN calls um catastrophic warming, the island nations of the world call genocide. And that's when we would be making these cities in the Middle East unlivable. It would mean like some ice sheets would start a permanent collapse, which could all of them melted eventually bring 260 ft of sea level rise. Um and we're on track for 4° of warming. So, that would mean

11:06$600 trillion in damages in climate damages by the end of the century. That's twice as much wealth as exists in the world today. It would mean there'd be parts of the world, scientists say, where you could be hit by six simultaneous climate disasters at once. There'd be at least a few hundred climate refugees. The UN says the low end estimate is 200 million, the high end estimate is a billion, which is as many people as live in North and South America combined. you for a second? Six simultaneous natural disasters at once? Yeah. What does that mean? Like flooding, hurricane, um famine, uh you know, some public health issue, um you know, like malaria. Uh it's like every every category of modern life can be affected by this and um there aren't that many that could be hit by six, but like already right now in Australia, there is a crazy heatwave. It's like over 120 in lots of Australia.

11:57They're also dealing with like epic floods in other parts of the country. And that's kind of the problem actually with wildfires in California. It's not just that it's getting hotter, it's that it's also getting wetter. So, more rain means more growth means when it gets hot again, that growth gets baked and then becomes, you know, fire starter. Mhm. Um and that's the, you know, it's not just um it's not just the temperature. It's like higher temperatures mean crazier extremes in all directions. And um you know, I think why I think, sort of looking big picture, there's not a life on Earth that's going to be untouched by this force like over the decades ahead. But that's not to say that we'll all be destroyed by it, either. I think like we will find ways to live and adapt and mitigate. It's just a question of how much it's going to screw up our politics, how much it's

12:43going to change the way we think of history. You know, like I'm an end of I'm a '90s kid. I grew up end of history thinking the world was going to get better, the world was going to get richer, globalization was progress, etc. What does it mean if like climate change completely eliminates the possibility of economic growth, which probably won't be the case for the US, but there are huge parts of the world where that is going to be the case if we don't change course now. So, like at the end of the century, if we don't change course, the economists studying this say global GDP could be at least 20, possibly 30% smaller than it would be without climate change. 30% is twice as big an impact as the Great Depression. How did you get involved in this? How did you get involved in studying this? And what was your perception before you got involved and how did it shift? So,

13:24I'm I'm a journalist. I'm an editor mostly, actually, at New York magazine. Um and, you know, I'm interested in the near future. Like as a result, read a lot of scientific papers, read a lot of like obscure subreddits and that kind of thing. And um just in 2016, started seeing a lot more of that a lot more of the news from science was about climate and a lot more of that climate news was really scary. And when I looked around at the other places that like we think of as our competitors, you know, newspapers, TV shows, I just felt like the scarier end of the spectrum is just not at all being talked about. So, most scientists talk about this 2° threshold as like the threshold of catastrophe. And I think most laypeople think that that means that that's kind of a ceiling for warming. Like that'll be the worst it could get, but actually it's functionally the best case scenario. And

14:11we yeah, we hadn't had any storytelling, any discussion around what the world would look like north of 2°. And I just felt as a journalist, I was like, "Holy there's a huge story here." Like the way that this world could be completely transformed by these forces is not something that anybody is writing about in part cuz it's a long story, but scientists and science journalists were really um they were really focused on making sure that their messaging was hopeful and optimistic and they were reluctant to talk about their scariest findings. And so, I was terrified by the science. I looked at it and I was like, "Nobody's talking about this. It's scary. Got to like spread the word." And I wrote a big piece in 2017 that was very focused on worst case scenarios. So, I mentioned before, I think 2° is about our best case scenario. 4° is where we're on track for now. This piece was

14:58looking at 5, 6, 8° of warming. So, things were not likely to get this century, at least. And it was a huge phenomenon. It was read by a bunch of million people, the biggest story that New York magazine had ever published. And I just thought, "Man, I guess there are a lot of people like me out there who have intuitions about climate suffering and terror, but aren't seeing it in the way people are writing about the story." So, I decided, you know, there's there's more to say. And even beyond like telling the the bleak story, telling the really dark um talking about the really dark possibilities, I just thought there are all these categories of life that we haven't even thought about how they'll impact us. So, we we know about sea level rise, but that's like, as I mentioned before, that makes you think if you live off the coast, you'll be okay. But the whole planet is going to be touched

15:47by this. Some places are going to be hit harder than others. India is going to be hit by like 29% of all global climate impacts this century. Um but everyone's going to be affected in some way. And the way that changes our politics, the way it changes our pop culture, the way it changes our psychology, our mood, our relationship to history, how we think about the future, how we think about the past, what we expect from capitalism, what we blame capitalism for, what we expect from technology, what we think technology can do. Can technology save us? Can technology entertain us while the world is burning? These are all these kind of like humanities questions that I felt really really had not been talked about. And so, the book does like it's a tour through what the world would look like between 2 and 4°, but it's also, which is a kind of hellscape, but it is also, you know, about half of it

16:30is about we're going to live here. We're going to survive in what form? What will it mean? Um you know, myth at the mythological level, what will it mean at the personal level, what will it mean the way we think about our kids and their futures and all that stuff. And um you know, my my my big picture thinking about it is um yeah, it's really bleak. Um and I think there are some possible ways that we could avert some of these worst case scenarios. I mean, there is technology that can suck carbon out of the atmosphere already. It hasn't been tested at scale. It's really expensive. But if we really if we can over the, you know, the next decade or two, really like build a um like global plantations of these carbon capture machines, then not only can we like stop the problem from moving forward, we could actually reverse it a little bit. Um Yeah, I've seen those before. I've seen

17:24the designs for those where they had these enormous like uh apartment building-sized air filter things. Yeah. I mean, it's basically like only in theory. They're they're they do exist in in the real world, but only at a kind of like at in laboratories. They don't exist at anything like the scale they need to, but there's a guy at Harvard named David Keith who um has tested his machines. They're able to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere at a cost of $100 a ton, which would mean we could totally neutralize the entire um the entire carbon footprint of the global economy. We wouldn't have to change anything. We could suck out all the extra carbon we're putting into the atmosphere for a cost of $3 trillion a year, which is a lot of money, but their estimates for how much we're subsidizing the fossil fuel business that are as high as $5 trillion a year. So, if we just redirected those

18:10subsidies to this technology, in theory, we could literally solve the problem immediately. There are other complications. It's like, in order to store the carbon, you'd need an industry that's two or three times the size of our present oil and gas industry, which where that goes and next to whose homes and all that stuff. It's complicated. But we have the tools we need. It's just a matter of deciding to um put them into practice. And I think we're pretty like that, you know, recent history shows that um we're not doing that fast enough. So, one of the big, you know, points that I like I make in the book and I I it's stuck in my head so strongly is you know, we think of climate change as this thing that started in the Industrial Revolution like centuries ago. But half of all the carbon that we've put into the atmosphere in the history of humanity from the burning of fossil

19:00fuels has come in 30 years, the last 30 years. That's since Al Gore published his first book on warming. It's since the UN established their climate change panel. It's since the premiere of Seinfeld. So, like you and I have lived through the lion's share of all of the damage done to the climate in all of human history. Whoa. Yeah. And the next 30 years are going to be just as consequential. So, we brought the world from the basically a stable climate to the brink of total climate catastrophe in 30 years. One generation. We have about one generation to save it. To me, that's like it's makes me uncomfortable to use this language, but it's basically a theological story. Mhm. We have the entire fate of the planet in the hands of these two generations. What happens 50 years from now, 100 years from now, will entirely be up to the way we act now and what we do.

19:53And the time scale is so crazy because you have this really compressed we must act now to avert these worst-case scenarios time scale, but also the impacts will unfold if we don't do anything over millennia. So, like we could have, you know, if we really bring into being the total melt of all ice sheets, that means that eight centuries from now, 12 centuries from now, people will be dealing with the that we're up today. We will be engineering problems for them to be solving 800, 1,200, 1,500 years from now. And that damage will be done, if it is done, in the next 30 or 50 years. So, we are I mean, we are really writing this epic story about Earth, humanity, and our future on this planet in the time of a single lifetime, a single generation. And that is on the on the one hand, it's sort of like overwhelming, but it's also empowering. You know, like um all the climate

20:55impacts that I talk about, all the climate horrors that are really terrifying, if we make them happen, we will be making them happen. The main input in the system is how much carbon we put into the atmosphere. There are feedback loops that people are worried about. There are things about climate that we can't control, but at least at this point, the main driver of future warming is what we do. And so, we could if we get to a 4° hellscape with hundreds of millions or a billion climate refugees, that'll be because of what we're doing. It's not some system outside of our control, even though we're often kind of we find it kind of comforting to think that it's outside of our control cuz that means we don't have to change anything. Well, one of the problems with climate change is that human beings like to react to things that are immediate and right in front of them.

21:41And I think for us, it's very difficult to see the future, especially if it's inconvenient, especially if it does something to inconvenience or get in the way of our day-to-day routine. And that seems to be what what's happening here. And that seems to me Excuse me. That seems to me to be why people are so willing to dismiss it uh so flippantly because in front of them right now, it's not an issue. In front of them right now, this very second, this very day, I'm going to go to Starbucks, it's right there, it's open. Look, I'm outside, it's 65° out, global warming's not a problem. Yeah. No, I think that's I mean, totally true and I feel it in my own life. Like I I mean, I've been living I've been working in this material so long, I know it so deeply and yet when I look out the window, I'm like, you know, things are fine. Yeah. And I think that has a really powerful anchoring effect. Like

22:30we expect the world of the future to look like the world as it does today, but all the science says that's totally naive. Yeah. And we're going to have at least twice as much warming as we've had to this point. And I think we need to think about the future of the world in those terms. Like what it will be at 2°, at 3°, at 4°. But it's not just like the immediacy. I think we have so many biases that make like we want to be optimistic about the future. We have a status quo bias. We we don't want to change things. We think that'll be complicated and expensive. We have a hard time holding big ideas in our head, like that the entire planet is like subject to these forces. Um I mean, the the list goes on and on. In the book, I have a little riff where I say, you know, there's this new not so new now, 30, 40 year um discipline in economics, behavioral economics, which is about all of our

23:17cognitive biases, how we can't really see the world. And every single one makes it harder to see climate. There's this um he's actually an English professor named Timothy Morton who wrote who wrote a book about um climate and he calls it a hyperobject, which is like it's a it's a phenomenon that's so big that we can't actually hold it in our heads at once. We can only see it It's like if you imagine seeing a four-dimensional object in three-dimensional space. It's that kind of thing where you can only see it at an angle, only partially. Climate change is so all-encompassing that we can't comprehend it properly. Um but I think that's all all of those things are reasons that we need to be listening to the scientists and what they're projecting. Not to say that everything they're saying is going to come true will come true exactly as they predict it. Obviously, that's not how

24:07science works. It gets revised. Some things are alarmist. Some things are extreme. Some things just wrong. But, you know, I've been really working on this stuff for a couple years and the number of papers I've read that show that make me have a more optimistic idea about the future of climate, I could count on two hands. And the number of papers I've read that make me have a bleaker view of the future, it's in the thousands. And when you look at the totality of that, whether the six climate-driven natural disasters prediction is going to pan out exactly as those authors say, who knows. But when you see, you know, so many so many terrifying studies that you could fill, like I did, a 300-page book with them, you realize that like there's a huge margin for error and it would like we would still be really in bad shape, you know. Is there a I mean, I'm sure there have been some

24:57studies that made mistakes in terms of like past studies that projected that by now we'd all be dead. Um are those a Those seem to be a problem with this whole concept we have of wrapping our head around it. And if we find anything that we could point to that say, "Oh, Totally. back in the '80s, they said we'd all be dead by now and we're fine. We're going to be fine." Yeah. That kind of thing is That is an issue, correct? Totally. Yeah, there was there was a really famous book in the middle of the 20th century called The Population Bomb. So, this is a guy named Paul Ehrlich Ehrlich who he was like, you know, the world just cannot support this many people. Like if we get to 8 billion people, there just won't be enough food. There won't be, you know, the the planet can't sustain that. And he's often pointed to as this sort of like prophet of doomsday that and his

25:44prophecy totally didn't work out because we had this thing that's called the Green Revolution. Basically, we figured out a way is to make crops way, way, way more productive. And that's encouraging. Human civilization does that a lot. We figure our way out of foxholes all the time. Yeah. Um but that revolution was literally like one dude, Norman Borlaug, who figured out how to grow crops differently. And one guy, one set of innovations, and he completely transformed the whole fate of the planet. What did he do? He just basically did um like genetically modified crops before like the you know, before the name. It was like um Is he the golden rice guy? Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah. And and you know, the whole developing world benefited enormously. And you're still seeing that today. Like we see all these charts that, you know, so much less poverty, so much less infant mortality

26:36in in developing world. And that's great. That's like incredible progress. But a lot of that has was powered by the industrialization of those countries. So, that bill is going to come due going forward. Um and you know, I think like when you look at climate change, you know, if there was just one threat, like let's take agriculture since we're talking about agriculture. Estimates say that if we continue on the path we're on by the end of the century, grain yields would be half as productive as they are today. Just by the temperature effect. So, we'd have just as much land, just as much grain crops as we have now, but the food we'd get from it, we'd only get half as much as we get today. What's the cause of that? It's just the temperature effects Just the temperature alone makes Wow. I mean, there are other impacts too on food. Like insects, there's, you know, higher

27:27temperatures means more insects, which is bad for crops. Carbon has a complicated relationship to to crop growth. Like in some plants grow better better with more carbon, but actually they're like the weeds and the ones that we like to eat don't grow better with more carbon. Um and you know, by the end of the century, so we could have half as much grain and we could have 50% more people than we have right now. Um now, there's a way you could imagine, oh well, like maybe there'll be another Norman Borlaug. Maybe he'll figure out our way through that. But when you look across the spectrum, it's like agriculture, it's, you know, conflict. For every half degree of warming, you're going to get between 10 and 20% more war. So, if we get to the end of the century, we're going to have more than twice as much war as we have today. And this is projected because of battles

28:07over resources? Mainly that, famines, droughts, weather, you know, weather impacts. Basically, everything about unstable societies get stressed by temperature rise. The Syrian Civil War was, you know, wasn't singly caused by climate change, but it was That's one of the causes. There was a a drought um that produced it. And that conflict, it's not just at the level of nation-states or even civil war, it's also at the level of individuals. So, if you look at crime statistics, when temperatures go up, there's more murder, there's more rape. People get admitted to mental hospitals more when there's when it's warmer out. Um babies develop less well in the womb when it's hotter out. If there's for every day over 90° that a baby's in the womb, you can see those days in that baby's lifetime earnings. And we're living we're going to be living on a planet that's considerably warmer.

28:56That's going to have real dramatic effects on everything. Um air pollution, there's a big study that I write about in the book that's totally alarming and eye-opening. Just between 1.5° and 2° of warming, just through the effects of air pollution, would cause that 1/2° of warming would cause an additional 153 million which is 25 Holocausts. That's just air pollution, just between 1.5° and 2°. For me, is our best-case scenario. So, our best-case scenario is 25 Holocausts worth of death from air pollution. And that sounds terrifying. People when I say that to them, they're like, "Holy how could we possibly That's unconscionable." But already, 9 million people are dying every year from air pollution. And we don't pay attention to it. So, I think the likeliest outcome even as we enter into this like climate hellscape is that we find ways to turn away and not look at like the real pain

29:56of people especially in the developing world. But to to answer your earlier question, you know, like you can imagine agriculture getting figured out. But when you see just how many impacts there are, it's like it's everywhere. Everything will be changed and it just makes the challenge that much bigger and more complicated because how are you you know, how are you going to solve the conflict problem? How are you going to solve the the problem of having 30% less economic growth? You know, like I said that's an impact that's twice as big as the Great Depression and it would be permanent. Um $600 trillion in in climate damages twice as much wealth as exists in the world today. Um and that's just, you know, then you deal with the right you refugees, food. I mean it's it's it's so all-encompassing. And I think um that's another reason why we don't want to look at it closely because

30:43it's terrifying. Well, there there's also a matter of how it's being projected to the public, right? Like in in certain circles particularly right-wing circles, uh there there are people that are trying to paint this with rose-colored glasses, right? They're trying to maximize short-term profits and sort of dismiss the risks of climate change and dismiss the risks of or rather the impact of our what we've done in terms of raising the carbon in the atmosphere. There's some people that point to that like this this is nonsense science. This has been disproven. There's a few people like that, but it's overwhelming the overwhelming consensus of scientists who study this are terrified of it. Yeah, I would say there was some recent report that said it now passed the standard of physics that like climate science is now more reliable than physics. Um but That's hilarious.

31:39But you know, the um the to the deniers who say things like you know, the planet was hotter than this before. That's true. Yeah, dinosaurs lived here. Humans were not here. I mean if we're 4° warmer 4 the last time the planet was 4° warmer there were palm trees in the Arctic. Um What? Yeah. Really? We've already exited the entire window of temperature that enclosed all of human history. So, the planet is now warmer than it ever has been when humans were around to walk on it, which means to me it's an open question whether humans would have ever evolved in the first place. And this is all from the Industrial Revolution. From then on. Yeah. And yeah, and like And to that question it's like there are people who say there's some natural warming going on. I don't think that's true. I think most scientists would say it isn't, but I also think if what we're seeing is

32:29natural warming, that should terrify us even more because it would mean that it's outside of our control. And if we're really heading down the path that we're heading down and we have no control over it, that's even more scary. It should be a comfort that we're doing it because that means we can stop doing it. Right. Well, it should be a comfort that there's people smarter than the people that don't think that we're doing it. That there are people that can possibly consider some sort of way to mitigate this. Yeah. And what what are the what are the ways that are being proposed and how seriously are they being taken other than this the idea of building these machines to extract carbon from the atmosphere? I'm sure you're probably aware of um there's some of the programs that they've talked about suspending reflective particles in the atmosphere to to minimize the amount of solar

33:14radiation we receive. Yeah, so it's interesting this guy who I mentioned earlier who's like done the most the sort of most innovative carbon capture machine. I talked to him a few weeks ago and he was like, "No, no, no, but we shouldn't be using carbon capture. We should be doing solar geoengineering." which is what you're talking about. Um and that means probably suspending sulfur is like the most useful thing in the atmosphere. Oh great, we're going to smell like sulfur. Well, the sun the sky would get red. Oh Jesus. There are all of these aesthetic effects too which nobody talks about. So, like trees are going to just turn immediately brown. They're not going to turn color. There was a study a couple weeks ago that the oceans are going to change color. Um This is if we do that if we suspend these particles in the just from warming. Just from warming.

33:52The ocean's going to change color to what? Yeah, I think just from more green to more blue, but That'd be nice. Yeah. Um but yeah, so the the sulfur thing is I so we could, you know, we could suspend these basically an umbrella of sulfur around in the atmosphere, which would mean that it would some of the sunlight coming to the earth would be reflected back into the atmosphere and that would mean that the sun would absorb less sunlight. I mean the earth would absorb less sun sunlight which would make it a little bit cooler. Um the problem is that would have some crippling impacts on agriculture. And we basically don't know other side effects that it would have. And how would you take that stuff out? Well, you could just stop doing it. It has a shelf life of I don't know what it is 10 years. So, you could just stop doing it and that's a big concern actually

34:38because if we did that just to mask the amount of global warming that we were doing, then whatever program was responsible for it would be really vulnerable to terrorism, um to war because if we if we were if the planet were functionally warmed say 5°, but we were suspending enough sulfur that it was actually only 2° warmer, then if we just for instance like somebody bombs the facility that was doing it, the planet would be immediately tripped into a much much hotter state and that would be completely catastrophic even more catastrophic than a more slow approach to 5°. Cuz we would adjust to it. We over a century or several centuries we might in ways we'd be able to adjust to it, but if it was immediate immediate. Yeah. Why sulfur? I think it's just something about the particular characteristic of it. I don't know. Wouldn't it smell hard? I mean we'd literally be like

35:29hell. Like that's what you Yeah. you always hear about with horror movies, right? The devil smells like sulfur. Yeah. And I mean it's the it's what farts smell like. Yeah. And the reason that we the reason we're able to smell farts is because sulfur is also I mean somewhat related compounds hydrogen sulfide are um are really toxic and so That brings me to methane. That's another issue as well, right? Cows producing methane gas large-scale agriculture. Yeah, wait, let me just say one more thing about short um the solar geoengineering. So, the thing about that that's real this sounds horrifying this program. People are excited about it cuz it's really cheap. It's way cheaper than carbon capture. And um but so there's a positive for it, but it's also um we are basically already doing this. So, we have what's called small particulate pollution um that's or aerosol pollution

36:21stuff suspended in the in the atmosphere. That's why like Delhi is really hard to breathe in cuz we have a lot of particulate in the atmosphere. That is already suppressing global temperatures by as much as a half degree or maybe 1°. Which means and that's the reason that those 9 million people are dying every year from air pollution. So, if we solve that problem if we solve the air pollution problem save those 9 million lives we every year, we would immediately make the planet at least a half a degree warmer and possibly 1° warmer, which would put us at the threshold of catastrophe or above it. Um so, we're sort of already doing this program just not in a systematic way. We're doing it in a haphazard way. Um the methane that you mentioned there are basically two big issues with methane. The first is um cows. Um So, yeah, cows produce a ton of methane which is depending on how you count

37:07about 35 or maybe 85 times stronger greenhouse gas than carbon. Whoa. Yeah, it's really intense. Um but there are also these like small-scale studies that show if we feed cattle just a little bit of seaweed, their methane emissions could fall by 95 or 99%. So, we could if if that was scalable, which is not clear it is, but if it was, we could immediately eliminate the entire carbon footprint of beef which people talk about a lot now. That's incredible. Yeah, just it it's a reminder to me that like, you know, you get told oh you should eat less hamburgers or whatever, but obviously this is like a problem that's too big to be solved with like individual choices. We need some kind of global policy or national policy about it. But the scarier methane issue is um there's all this carbon stored in frozen permafrost in the northern latitudes. Um that permafrost is melting and when it

37:57melts that carbon will be released into the atmosphere. We don't know the proportion that it will be released as carbon dioxide versus methane. But there is in that permafrost twice as much carbon as now exists in the atmosphere. Which means if it were all released possibly in a relatively sudden way, it could make our carbon problem immediately three times worse. Um and it could be even the effect could even be more dramatic than that if it was released mostly as methane cuz methane is a stronger greenhouse gas. Most scientists think that that's not something that we need to freak out about in the short term, but it's there. It is melting and methane is being released at some rate. So, solution that I ever heard for that one was to bring back the woolly mammoth. Yeah. Yeah. They're trying to do that. Yeah. And the idea that the woolly mammoth is going to save us all by

38:47releasing them throughout Siberia. Yeah, it's crazy, right? I mean I think that we're going to have a whole a century of like that and like cows eating seaweed. That everything, you know, we'll have our global politics will be reoriented around climate change so that you'll start to see sanctions put against nations that are behaving badly. Um MBS, the guy who's, you know, the like kind of thug who's running Saudi Arabia now says he needs Saudi Arabia's economy to be totally off oil by 2050. And I think that's cuz he knows that, you know, the global community will not tolerate someone producing more oil Yeah. And um as recently as you know, as soon as a few decades from now, but the impacts are, you know, everywhere so that like um Yeah, like in California now, you can, you know, during wildfire season you can buy um masks to, you know, to shield yourself from the smoke which is really

39:39really damaging. Its effects on cognitive performance are really dramatic. Can lower cognitive performance by like 10 to 15%. Its effect on the development of kids is really dramatic. Um there was an incredible study a few years ago where if you looked at places where they instituted easy Do you have easy pass out here in California? No, we don't we don't have uh tolls. Oh, right. Isn't that amazing? Yeah. You guys just think What? Like one or two places? Yeah, but like depending on where you live, do you have to take that everyday? Dude, in New York they're everywhere. I know what you mean. Yeah, but okay. All right. So it used to be the case that cars had to like slow down and pay a toll. And because they were slowing down, they produced more exhaust. When they instituted easy pass, cars could just drive through and that meant they produced less exhaust. And the effect on

40:22the on premature birth and low birth weight in the areas where they instituted these new easy pass toll plazas, it reduced them by like 15% each. That's how dramatic just the exhaust effect is on development of babies. Um How much is an effect of electric cars? Yeah, that can I mean that that will Right now it hasn't had enough of an effect because there's not enough of them. Yeah. Um and but yeah, I mean the that problem on the on like at the technological level has been solved. We know how to replace cars with electric cars. We can make them even pretty affordable. Not quite as affordable as they need to be, but the new Teslas are like 35 grand, I think. If you get it down to 15 grand, that'll be you know, that'll be a huge solution. But then there are a lot of other problems that are more difficult like air travel. Yeah. We don't have electric planes around the corner. You can't fly

41:12planes Is there anything like that on the horizon? Is it There are some people who are who are trying to develop it, but it seems like probably it's at least like a decade away. And you know, one cross-country flight in the US is the equivalent one seat on one cross cross-country flight is the equivalent of eight months of driving. Every time you fly from New York to London and back, you melt nine three square meters of ice. Every single seat on every flight from New York to London melts three square meters of ice. Um of Arctic ice. What? Yeah. That's insane. That's real? Yeah. I think it's every every Every time you fly across the country, it's like eight months of driving? Yeah. Whoa. So globally, air travel is only 2% of the carbon footprint, so it's relatively small. But for people in especially rich people in rich countries, it's a much bigger part of the footprint.

42:05around all the time. Yeah. But yeah, you know, the average American, I think the stat is the average American every year emits enough carbon to melt 10,000 tons of ice. Jesus Christ. That's just the average American. And if you're a person like me who flies like every other weekend, it's way worse. Way worse. Yeah. Oh. So Holy You put it in that perspective, it's How much ice is there? I mean there's a lot of ice. Yeah. But it's going to melt. Well, That's how you get you know, the out the outside projections, the high end projections for sea level rise are 260 ft. Now, um the the plus side is it's way better to get hotter than it is to get colder, right? Like ice ages kill everything. Well, the you know, the each of the so there have been five mass extinctions in planetary history in Earth's history before. One of them was killed was caused by an asteroid, but the other

43:04four were were produced by global warming related to greenhouse gas um and one What about the ice age? Well, the ice age doesn't count. It didn't didn't kill as many. No. Really? The the biggest mass extinction, the end Permian extinction, which was 252 million years ago, 90 to 95% of all life on Earth died. When was that? 252 million years ago. God So each of these mass extinctions basically is like a complete slate wiping of the evolutionary record. It's like we're starting over from scratch. So we want to think that the the asteroid that hit the Yucatan did the most damage in terms of the fossil record. Is that not true? Is the one that was the the global warming, was that more? Well, there so there there five and four of them were from global warming. And the worst the worst one was just from from greenhouse gas warming. But yeah, the the one that killed the

43:55dinosaurs was also really bad. It was something like 70% of all life on it. But it's less than the one where there was a temperature rise. Yeah. Wow. There was a volcano This is a little bit sketchy science, but there was a volcano explosion um something like 30,000 years ago or something. I don't remember the exact dates, but that volcanoes can cool global temperature for the same reason we're talking about with the suspended particles cuz it basically clouds the atmosphere with um and it dropped global temperatures. I think it was 2°. And the human population at the time then shrunk to 7,000. So there was this incredible bottleneck. a bunch of times. That's less people than live on Nantucket. And it just it just makes you see like everything about the way that we live on this planet is dependent on climate conditions. Like we'll figure a way to like have a civilization, but it will be

44:45transformed. It will be very different if the world is 4° warmer. And you know, everything about the way that we take for everything we take for granted today is like a permanent feature of the modern world, I think we're going to learn is much more precarious, much more unstable. Um And yeah, like I said earlier, you know, climates were stable for all of human history. That's how we were able to evolve. It's how we were able to invent agriculture. The part of the world where we did invent agriculture, the Middle East, it's now getting almost too hot to grow crops. It's also going to be too hot to go to Mecca for a pilgrimage in just a couple decades. Whether like we're entirely outside of that um window of temperatures, which means we're functionally now living on an entirely different planet than humans ever lived on before. And it's going to keep changing. So by the time we get to

45:352 3 4°, we'll be living in in a climate that's you know, two or three or four times as much different as the one that we're in now from the one before the Industrial Revolution. And yeah, it's like those impacts could be totally overwhelming and catastrophic. Now, the Al Gore film is something that scared a lot of people, but was also very widely dismissed by a lot of other people as well. How accurate was that movie? I think it it proved to be too sanguine. It like it didn't deal with a lot of extreme weather. It thought that stuff was far away. And I think this is one of the one of the big shortcomings of most writing about climate, most kind of communication about climate for 25 years is that we were told it was slow. We were told it was going to be coming maybe at the scale of centuries. Something we'd have to worry about for our grandchildren. But when you realize that half of all

46:34the damage we've done has been done in the last 30 years and you see already the extreme weather. We had a global heat wave last summer, totally unprecedented. People died in Canada, they died in Russia, they died in the Middle East. The same season 3 million people were evacuated in China from a typhoon. Unprecedented rains in Japan. We had multiple hurricanes in the Caribbean all at once. There was an island in Hawaii, East Island, small island, not one that most people have gone to, but got literally wiped off the map by a hurricane. They were thinking about inventing a new category of hurricane, category six. All of these impacts were are coming much faster than scientists projected even a decade or two ago. And so I think the first inconvenient truth is a little too complacent. But Al Gore is also, you know, I know him a little bit. I've talked to

47:24him a few times. He's temperamentally he's a technocrat. He's an optimist. He thinks market forces can solve all this stuff. And I don't even totally disagree with him. I think the market forces are really powerful. We've had a huge green energy revolution in the US that's you know, and has spillover effects elsewhere in the world. So solar power is now cheaper than anybody expected it would be decade or two ago. Although it's also the case that we haven't replaced any of our dirty energy with it. We've just added to our capacity. So the ratio of renewable energy to dirty energy is now the same as it was 40 years ago. So we made no progress. Um Why is that? Because we just if we're like rather than saying, oh, let's retire this coal plant and replace it with a you know, a wind farm, we think, oh, we'll have the coal plant and the wind farm. We'll have more energy. Mm. You

48:11know, we just grow the pie of energy. And this is unnecessary? It's not because there's just a massive demand? Is it just because they don't want to end that industry? Yeah, I mean there is a demand. People like energy. Trump was talking about clean coal and everybody was like, what the are you talking about? Clean coal? I mean I think on some level American policy is a red herring. The US is 15% of global emissions. Um and we're falling. The future climate of the world will be determined by China, by India, by sub-Saharan Africa. Those are carbon footprints that are growing. China's now almost twice as big a carbon footprint as the US. And they're building all this infrastructure outside of China that doesn't even count um in Asia and Africa. You know the Belt and Road, do you know this project? So They're basically taking the model that the US had with like the Suez Canal and

49:00the Panama Canal. And they're building the infrastructure of the developing world. So recently they they loaned um Kenya a huge amount of money to build a new rail line which was being built with Chinese workers. They built the rail line. Um then they Kenya couldn't pay back the debt. So China um is threatening to take over the entire port of Mombasa as debt repayment. And this is like going on all around the world. Highways across Africa, across Asia are being built by Chinese workers as an in an effort to build a new imperial infrastructure for themselves. And is the thought that they're doing this in terms of setting up the debt in a way that's unpayable so that they could take over? I That's one motive. I think that the Kenya example, but they'd be happy if the debt got repaid. I think it's they're they're stitching together an alternative to the western infrastructure of trade and

49:59transit. They're basically stitching together an entire second system of how the world will work, how the economy will work, and it will be conducted through their own infrastructure and through their own ports and through their own airports. And that's being done by their own standards. So, China is now pouring more concrete um every 3 years than the entire than the US poured in the entire 20th century. Jesus Christ. And if concrete were a country, it would be the world's third biggest carbon emitter. So, the the the path of development of these other countries, China, India, and sub-Saharan Africa, are really what's going to be writing the story of the future. America has a kind of I think like a moral obligation to lead because historically we had the biggest carbon footprint, but at the moment we're relatively small part of the problem, and within the US

50:49market forces are doing a lot of are making a lot of progress for us. Um So, the real issue is how do we figure out a new geopolitics that forces countries like China to act better? And one answer may be, as weird as it is to say, that um you know, Xi Jinping is basically a dictator. If he wants to impose um new standards, if he wants to invest aggressively in green energy, he doesn't have any of the political obstacles that we have in the US. And so, there's this sort of weird sympathy among American climate people for that um authoritarianism. And he has, especially since Trump has been elected, been a lot more aggressive about talking about climate because he sees if America's not going to be leading, this is an opportunity for China to be like the real face of climate. And that means they've paid if, you know, they've invested a ton in in um solar and wind. They've

51:45done a lot with air pollution. So, Beijing used to be really awful in 2013. Then more than a million Chinese people died of air pollution, and now that's much better. Um What have they done? Just imposing stricter standards on um on pollution. So, emissions, uh coal plants, things like that. of stuff, yeah. Yeah. And um But, you know, we think about we think about carbon and the whole problem I think a little too much um in terms of energy. Energy is just 30% of the global carbon footprint, and it's the easiest one to solve because wind and solar is actually really cheap now. In most parts of the world it's cheaper than dirty energy. What's the majority of the footprint? Well, it's all nothing's a majority. But, so there's um energy, there's infrastructure, there's transportation, um and agriculture is like a huge under-appreciated part of it. It's something like, I don't know, 30% of of

52:34the global footprint. Um And is it because of tractors or what what is it because of? Everything. Everything. Everything that you need to do to run a farm. really everything you need to do to live in the world has some kind of carbon footprint. But, you know, if we were able to like feed all our cattle seaweed, that would have like a big that would have a big impact. Um But, all kinds of crops have um have carbon footprints. And they but they would still have to do something to get the seaweed and have the seaweed travel, the seaweed deliver it to these farms. Well, you could also do you know, you could imagine lab-grown meat having a much smaller carbon footprint. Um I mean, it it should if it like proceeds as we expect it will. Um And like I said before, like when you look at each particular threat, there's like you can see reasons for optimism. You can see like, "Oh, we'll figure it

53:20out in this way. We'll figure it out in that way." But, the UN says we need to halve all of our global emissions by 2030 to have a chance of averting 2° of warming, which they call catastrophic warming. And the projects that we need to put into place in those 11 years are just much bigger than I think we're capable of pulling off. They say the UN says what is necessary is a global mobilization at the level of World War II against climate starting this year, 2019. And there's just no chance that we're going to do that anytime soon. I mean, maybe 10 years from now we'll get there. That may even be optimistic. Um but the the total decarbonization that's required is we need to totally zero out on carbon by 2050, they say. Um and I just think, you know, a lot of these sectors are much trickier. We could maybe zero out on energy. Zero out on carbon when it comes to energy in 15

54:23years if we wanted to, but again, that's just 30% of the total problem. Um which is why I think there's the negative emission stuff, the carbon capture is so important because it will allow us to move more slowly than the UN says we need to and still, if it works out, you know, keep the planet relatively stable, relatively livable. Um but, that's, you know, those technologies have been called magical magical thinking by like the journal of nature, which is like the biggest scientific journal, um writing about this stuff. So, it's sort of a leap of faith to think that they could solve that problem. Do you think that we're dealing with like shifts in degrees of perception that it it's things like your book, things like Al Gore's movie, things like, you know, anytime there's a new story that's written in the New York Times or in any any periodical, we need

55:15more of this. It needs to be hammered home to people. It's It needs to be something that's a global discussion that accelerates. Totally. And I think that that's happening. You know, I think um there was this big report that that the UN did in October that spurred a lot of conversation about it. And I think that in a grotesque way, the best teacher is just extreme weather. You know, when you see every year these California wildfires, every year they're burning, and that is really dramatic. People I talk to in Europe are focused on the California fires even though they have wildfires over there. There's something about the California fires that they're really worried about. When you see these global heat waves, when you see unprecedented hurricane seasons, we just had a typhoon in the Pacific in February, first time in recorded history. Um you know, when every day on the news

56:03there's some um there's some you know, dramatic extreme weather. And when they come one after the other, I think that's a really powerful teaching tool. So, you know, there's this term that's now outdated, but 500-year storm you hear a lot about. 500-year storm means, you know, a hurricane that would hit a particular area once every five centuries, right? That means five centuries ago there were no white people in America. So, that means we're talking about a storm that would have come once as colonists came to America, as they, you know, committed genocide against the Native Americans, as they built their own empire, as they built an empire of slaves and cotton, as they fought a civil war, as they fought World War one one storm of that kind in that time. Hurricane Harvey was the third 500-year storm to hit Houston in 3 years. We are living in such unprecedented climate

57:07that it's impossible to look at the news and not learn that. Despite all of our inclinations, all of our reflexes to look away, I think it is seeping in. I think people are beginning to be more alarmed about it. And I think alarm is really useful. There are people in the climate community who think, you know, it's it's dangerous to scare people. It turns them off. But, I'm somebody who's awakened to this out of fear. And when I look at the history of environmental activism, when I look at activism generally, like we don't try to get people to stop smoking cigarettes by like messaging through optimism. We try to get them to stop because we tell them how bad it's going to be for them. Drunk driving, nuclear proliferation, same thing. Rachel Carson, you know, wrote um Silent Spring about pesticides. It was called hyperbolic alarmist. It led to the creation of the EPA. And, you know,

57:53when you think about that UN directive that we should be mobilizing at the scale of World War II to combat climate, we didn't fight World War II out of hope. We fought World War II out of panic. And I think that that should be part of how we think about this story. Obviously, I think you know, when I look around the world, when I talk to anyone, when I talk to my family, when I watch TV, when I watch whatever, read stuff, it just seems obvious to me that there are many more people who are still too complacent about this issue, even if they're concerned about it a little bit, even if they're aware of it. Um they don't think of it as like the overarching, all-encompassing story of our time that requires an existential response. And even saying those words make me uncomfortable because I like it's hard it's hard for me to believe that the the threat is that big. But,

58:43that is what the science says. Um and like I said before, some of that science is not going to get borne out, but when you look at the full scope of it and just how just how large just how bleak the impacts will be, you realize like we really need to wake up to just how dangerous a world we're heading into and do everything we can to avoid it um in addition to probably planning to adapt. Now, you live in New York. Were you living in New York when Tribeca flooded a few years ago? Yeah. What was that like? Well, I mean, I think in a situation like that, um most people emerge from a particular disaster and think, "My god, since this is so awful, it must be an anomaly." And, you know, I think New York was really horrified as a city by Sandy, but Right. But, Right. there's going to be Sandy's, I don't remember the exact stat, like once every 5 years by the end of the

59:40category storm was Sandy? I think it made landfall as a category 3. So, it's not even a 5. Yeah. So, if a 5 hit Is it possible for a 5 to hit New York? Or is it too far north? No, it's possible. Totally possible. I was talking to a a really prominent climate scientist a few months ago who is like one of the He was one of the lead authors on the the UN report. Um, lives in New York, does a lot of consulting with the city. And I said, "So, we're going to build a seawall to protect New York from flooding?" And he was like, "Oh, absolutely. You know, Manhattan real estate's way too expensive to let flood. So, we'll definitely build a seawall. But an infrastructure project like that takes at least 30 years to build. And if we started right now, we wouldn't be able to finish in time to save Howard Beach and parts of Brooklyn and Queens. If we started right now, he said.

60:30He said the city knows this. And you'll see in the next few years, they'll stop doing repairs on infrastructure. They'll stop attending to the subway lines in those neighborhoods. And even a few years after that, they'll start saying explicitly to the people who live there, "You might be able to continue living in these homes for a couple decades, but you're not going to be able to live them leave them to your kids." Whoa. This is in New York City. It's like the richest country in the the richest city in the world. And yeah, huge parts of um huge parts of southern Brooklyn and Queens are going to be underwater. So, for the people that live there right now, what parts are you talking about? Um well, the one that the one that he mentioned most explicitly was Howard Beach, but um which is it's kind of an interest It's like a a mob neighborhood. And you know, it's still Yeah. Really?

61:15Well, yeah. Yeah? So, cuz that was like the Gotti neighborhood, right? Yeah, that's where they buried all the dead dead bodies. Wow. Um know that was still a mob neighborhood. Well, you know, to the extent that there is a mob. Yeah. Um and yeah, I mean, that's true everywhere on the coast, everywhere. It's not just New York. New York's not exceptional. Right. You know, there are projections that like $30 billion of New Jersey real estate could be underwater by 2030. 2030. Why is that not as alarming? I was born in New Jersey, too. It's not as alarming. And then, you know, Miami Beach is you know, Miami Beach is done for. Yeah, Miami Beach is almost inevitable, correct? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, they could they could build a seawall. But that's not going to help because of the the ground, right? the and and it's it's just so expensive. So, you really have to

62:06um you really have to pick your poison. And then, when you look around the world, you know, it's like Bangladesh. That country's going to be almost entirely underwater. That's hundreds of millions of people. If we wanted to build a seawall, they can't afford that. Who's going to afford Who's going to pay for that? And this is all because of the raising sea level, because of the melting ice, because of the temperature, and all this is happening. Yeah. And I think, you know, we think of sea level as really a thing that happens on the coastline, which it is primarily. But it also increases flooding on rivers because the water's all connected. Of course. So, flooding in the UK is expected to grow 50-fold by the end of the century. What? Well, the London 50-fold? London is already like underwater a couple times a year. I mean, not the whole city, but What is this, Jamie? This is Bangladesh.

62:53I just went to Bangladesh underwater. This is like a video that pops up showing Oh my god, these people are Yeah. 18 million residents live here. That's a swamp. Yeah. That looks crazy. Like Like if you're a real estate projector and you're flying over that like Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We can't build here. Yeah, Jakarta will be totally underwater Look Look at those apartment buildings. Like you could see the water level. Look back up a little bit. This is just a running little thing. Oh. But if you see Look at like doesn't that look like a water level on the the apartment buildings on the right-hand side near where your cursor is? Like Like that's going to go up to where that orange level is. Christ. I mean, over millennia, we're they're going to rise hundreds of feet. Oh god. I mean, it's going to take a long time, so you can adjust to that a little bit. But um But that's always

63:39been the case, right? The the I mean, they're still find they find these artifacts and things in the middle of the ocean areas where people used to be able to live and now they can't live anymore. Yeah. I think that'll be We have to move. People have to move. So, what's a good spot? Alberta? Anywhere Anywhere north anywhere north off the coast. Yeah, that's the spot now. I mean, I think I would like People ask me that all the time, and I say, you know, honestly, the place that I would move to is somewhere in Scandinavia. Really? Because um you know, I talked about the impact of economic growth before, but there are going to be parts of the world that benefit economically from this. Anywhere in the north. So, Canada, Russia, and Scandinavia will benefit because But why Don't go to Scandinavia. Go to Canada. It's right there. Well, but Scandinavia seems kind of like

64:25pretty to me. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, I like Scandinavia. It's nice, but Canada's like our neighbor. So, they're our friends. also Yeah, they have wildfires there, too. Canada? And and in the Arctic Circle in Finland last year. Yeah. Mountain lions. But so, you know, these these guys the economists who study this stuff say that um there is actually an optimal temperature for human productivity. It's 13° C, which is the historical median temperature of the US. It's also the historical median temperature of Germany. 13° C? Was that 60° or something like that? Yeah, I think it's like in the high 50s. What we got, Jamie? I Googled it. Google didn't give it to you? I didn't have anything. Hold on. All right, whenever I'm in Canada, I'm always like, "I don't know what you're saying." Yeah, they're like, "Holy it's 22° 55.4. Um and so, for every degree north of that,

65:17you lose about a percentage point of GDP. So, the US is now at about 13.5 uh degrees C as our median temperature. That means that we're losing about a half percentage point of GDP every year from it. But there are parts of the US that were cooler than 13 and are now brought up to this optimal level. Silicon Valley is like exactly at 13° right now. Um which is, you know, notable cuz they're like super productive. Yeah. Yeah. Um and that's going to be So, that'll be true for Scandinavia generally. And it may be part of the explanation why there's been so much um economic productivity in Scandinavia over the last generation is that they have already started doing better with temperature. Crops are going to be more bountiful in Russia. Like Russia will have better agriculture um because of global warming. Which is why they they make such a you know, they're they're such a um complicated

66:06figure in the geopolitical story about climate. So, they are a petrostate. They have almost all of their economic activity has to do with burning oil. But they're also poised to benefit from warming. So, they're doubly motivated to produce more global warming. Whoa. And they have such a the rest of the world perspective that they're not going to stop. Whereas Canada probably they're like likely to even though they'd benefit from more warming, they'll probably get on board with any program to avert warming. But that is a um that's a dilemma that faces every nation. You know, like Justin Trudeau gets you know, talks a lot of about Donald Trump and his climate policy, but he Justin Trudeau is also approving new pipelines. Angela Merkel does the same, but she is retiring um nuclear so quickly in Germany that they're having to use dirty energy. Um and even though they've had this

66:52incredible green energy revolution there, their emissions are going up. Um and every country in the world is it's a collective action problem. Every country in the world is incentivized to behave badly and let the rest of the world clean up the mess. So, I was talking to this guy yesterday about wildfires, and he was like, "You know, California is doing so great, you know, with all of the emission standards. They're basically, you know, holding themselves to the Paris Accords, even though the country as a whole isn't. But that impact isn't local. It's global. So, it's dissipated. The temperature impact on California wildfires will be determined by, like I said earlier, basically what China does. So, in terms of you know, what any individual area what any any individual nation is doing, the motivations are really really complicated there. And in California in particular,

67:40this is a bit of a tangent, but um you know, you the state has done incredible stuff with emission standards, fuel efficiency, green energy. And yet, all of those gains now are wiped out every year by the fires. Because fires are trees. Trees are burning. Trees are basically coal in the sense that they are stored carbon. When they burn, they release carbon into the atmosphere. So, every time there are wildfires like there were last year in California, it literally wipes out all of the progress that the state made in all of its green initiatives that year. Um Yeah. And you know, about in in in Brazil, the um the president of Brazil wants to like basically deforest the Amazon. The Amazon is responsible for something like 30% of the world's oxygen. Um and is a huge So, all plants obviously absorb carbon and produce oxygen. Um So, plant life is really good for fighting climate change.

68:41When you say he wants to deforest the the Amazon, like what scale? What is he What is he talking about doing? So, the scientists who studied his proposal say that um his plans would be the equivalent of adding over a 10-year period, adding a second China to the world's global footprint. Jesus Christ. Yeah. And this is just to pump up Brazil's economy? Yeah. Well, he has a kind of a Trumpy like I'm going to the environmentalists perspective, too. So, he's just like a little bit like, you know, whatever, flipping the bird to people who care about it. Oh my god. And that just makes you think that like it seems crazy now, but it really won't be crazy, I think, a generation from now for another country to threaten at least sanctions and maybe military action to deal with that. You know, after World War II, we built a whole liberal international order around the principle of human rights. That

69:35would have been unthinkable in the '20s, and yet it led to a series of military interventions over the next century half century because people were behaving badly towards their own citizens. If we could do that, it doesn't seem all that crazy to me that say 30 years from now, an empowered imperial China looking at someone like Bolsonaro in Brazil would just be like, "No, you can't do that. I'm just going to We're just going to go in and like take you out." Yeah. Um and this is what I mean when I say it's a kind of all-encompassing, all-impacting threat. Our politics will be shaped by it. Our geopolitics will be shaped by it. Our, you know, everything will be shaped by it. We could have climate wars like in the not-too-distant future. Jesus Christ. How is this being received? The book? Yeah. Are people people resisting it? Is there any anybody that wants to debate

70:23you on this? So, I You know, I wrote this article a couple years ago that produced I mean, it was a huge sort of viral phenomenon, but it it produced also some scientific criticism, and um you know, we published a fully annotated version where every single line we showed where every single line came from, but there were still scientists who were arguing about whether the messaging was precisely calibrated, whether it was too bleak, too dark. Um the book has had none of that. I mean, it's first of all, it's been the best seller first week it was on the Times best seller list, number six. It's best seller in England. It's been in and out of the Amazon top 10. Um and all of the reviews have been really kind. Um I think this goes to what you were saying before. I think like the conversation is changing. People are actually really interested in um talking seriously about just how big

71:13a deal this is in a way that they might not have been just a year ago. Uh where is the resistance though? Is there any resistance to it right now? To the book? Well, not just the book, but just the concept in general. 73% of Americans believe climate change is real. 70% of Americans are concerned about it. Those numbers are up 15% since 2015. Who are the 27 that don't? I mean, I think it's, you know, it's um Hard right-wingers. Yeah. Yeah. But you know, those numbers are we live in a we live in a culture now where like most people's worldview passes through a prism of partisan politics. So, like you know, there's amazing studies that show that in the in the early '90s, there was no partisan divide between on the on the question of whether O.J. Simpson was guilty. When you control for race, Republicans and Democrats had the same idea about O.J. Simpson's guilt. That is

72:01totally unthinkable today. And there's now a huge partisan split on whether 12 Years a Slave deserves an Oscar. Partisanship has like totally taken over our minds such that the fact that we have 73% of Americans who believe global warming is real and happening, to me that's a really high number, actually. Right. Right. Um because one of the two part I don't think that the Republican Party is really any more a denier party. I think they're just a party of skeptics and self-interest. They want to like look out for business interests, which actually the calculus there is changing, which I could talk about in a second. Um but people don't want to believe that horrifying things are real because who would? It's terrifying. Um but 73% of the country, that's a lot. I mean, that's, you know, that's more support than there is for just about anything. Um so, I'm like basically

72:52and the speed at which that those numbers have grown is really dramatic. I said 15 points since 2015, eight points just since March has moved up. That's incredible. Um and I do think that the economic logic is really powerful here. So, it used to be the case that there was economic conventional wisdom that action on climate was going to be really expensive cuz it would require massive upfront investment, and it would mean also foregoing economic growth. But all of the new research the last couple years reverses that logic totally. So, there was a big report 2018 that said that we could add $26 trillion to the global economy through rapid decarbonization by just 2030. Um we could avoid all of these horrible $600 trillion impacts that we're talking about if we decarbonized rapidly. And there are also obviously business opportunities there. There are whole

73:42solar empires to build. There are whole new electric grid to build. Um so, the economic conventional wisdom is now that fast action on climate is better for the economy than slow action on climate. That hasn't yet totally taken over the perspective of our policy makers globally, but I think it will soon. And when it does, I think that we'll see like a real sea change in in their um perspective because I think for a long time, even people who cared about climate thought, "Well, I want to do something, but if I have to like cost some people some jobs and cost like a percentage point of economic growth, that's not worth it. Let me just kick the can down the road. This is a slow-moving phenomenon. We'll invent our way out of it. We'll grow our way out of it." But all of the new research says like let's get started right now. And we'll see how that plays out. I mean, if

74:34we really have to halve global emissions by 2030, it means really really aggressive action, which I don't think is possible. But I do think that we'll see much more aggressive action in the decade ahead than we've had in the decades in the past. So, you think that once there's a financial incentive for people to either some sort of an industry that reduces carbon or something on those lines, industries that are working to mitigate global warming, that once there's a financial sort of benefit for these people to to innovate and to to move forward with this, that that's when we're going to see real change? Yeah, well, also that I mean, direct investment of particular companies, but also, you know, government leaders who look around and say, "If the economic picture is going to be better 10 years from now if we make massive investments in green energy than it would be and and even like

75:24pass laws, you know, regulating say fuel efficiency or even banning internal combustion engines, which I think will happen within a couple decades, um if that's going to be if the economic picture taking that path is much rosier than the economic picture of inaction, I think they'll go down the path of action." Right. Um and, you know, again, the question is how aggressively, how quickly, um and in what form, but I do think that, you know, I do think the incentives will be different 5 years from now than they looked 5 years ago, and that'll be that'll be huge. So, that that you think would be a great motivator for people to shift their perceptions and particularly right-wing folks maybe amongst the 27% that are in denial. Yeah. Well, I mean, if you look around the world, denial is not really a problem anywhere but the US. There's a little bit of it in the UK, but it's a

76:14totally American phenomenon. And when you understand that the US is only 15% of all global emissions, Is that just typical American arrogance? Like what do what do you what do you think is the the root of that? Uh I think it's it's basically bad behavior by the oil companies. I mean, they've like put out really aggressive um disinformation and denial. Did you ever see the movie Merchants of Doubt? Yeah. Yeah. Perfect example of that, right? Yeah, totally. Um yeah, I and I know the the people who wrote the book, too, who are really really great. Um and, you know, it's especially horrifying because in the '60s and '70s, the the oil companies were like doing some of the most ambitious research on climate. So, they're, you know, then they ended up suppressing that going forward, but they knew about how the planet was going to change before any of the rest of us. Really? Um

77:04But there was no alternatives back then, and there was no real emission standards. So, so like this that's when catalytic converters started being enacted, right? Well, you know, somewhere around then? if we had started decarbonization in 2000, which just coincidentally was the year that Al Gore won the popular vote for president, um we would have had to globally cut emissions by about 3% per year to get below 2°. We're now at a spot where we have to cut them by about 10% per year. And if we wait another decade, we're going to have to cut them by 30% per year, which is like an unthinkable rate. So, we wouldn't have had to take such aggressive action if we had started early. We would have had to just be doing moderate kind of on the margins um changes. But we're now in a situation where the problem is way too big for that. And there are people who want to

77:51talk about the solutions that could have been useful 20 years ago now. Talking about the carbon tax is like one quite popular thing to talk about. Um the UN says that in order to be effective, the carbon a global carbon tax would need to be perhaps as high as $5,500 a ton. And there's nowhere else in the world There's nowhere in the world where there's a tax that's even 1/100 as high as that right now. Um and the places in the world where they do have carbon taxes, everybody's emissions are still going up. So, there there was a time when like the kind of like you don't have to change anything, we'll just like fiddle on the margins here could have worked if we had taken if we had really been focused on it. But we're sort of past that point now, unfortunately. Um but it's interesting, you know, that the talking about the oil companies, um I think they you know, I think they're

78:35responsible for denial, but I also think that denial is not all that important in American politics. Um because when you look around the world, you see many countries which with very different politics, even quite universally focused on climate issues, who are not behaving any better when it comes to carbon than we are. And so, you think, "Well, what is the sickness here? Is it the Republican Party and their climate denial? Or is it the fact that all of us just want, you know, more, better, cheaper stuff? And we have a really hard time conceiving of different paths that don't push us for towards more consumption and, you know, more um more of the modern amenities that we sort of assume will keep accumulating over time. I mean, people say financial capitalism is the problem. I have some sympathy for that view, but I also look around the world, I see social

79:22democracies who are behaving really poorly when it comes to carbon. I see socialist countries who are behaving really poorly when it comes to carbon. Um, it seems on some level like it's even deeper than the systems that we have to organize and manage um our cultural priorities. And there are now, you know, getting back to the villainy of the oil companies, um there are now all these lawsuits that are being brought against them for basically on the model of the of the cigarette companies like that for climate damages. And um that may be they may be victorious. They may put some of these companies out of business. Um I think it's not that likely, but it's possible. There are also other lawsuits that are happening that are really interesting. There's one in the Netherlands that some people held um the Dutch government they basically Dutch government was not honoring the

80:08Paris Accords and citizens sued to hold them to that and were won the case. So the Dutch government is now obligated legally to do better on climate than they were doing on their own. And in the US there's this amazing court case called Juliana versus the United States, which is a lawsuit being brought by kids using this kind of ingenious um use of the equal protection clause. They're arguing that their generation has been exposed to climate damages that their the previous generation, their parents generation were protected from. And so they're saying this climate policy is a violation of the equal protection clause. You're not protecting us in the same way that you protected our parents. That's at the district court in Oregon, which is just one level below the the Supreme Court. I think it'll win in the district court. It almost certainly won't win at the Supreme Court, but if

80:55it did win in the Supreme Court it would immediately obligate the US to a totally maximalist climate policy because it's literally impossible to protect the next generation from climate damages as fully as the previous generation was, but they'd be obligated to do everything they could, which would mean sort of suddenly something like the um the the World War II scale mobilization that the UN calls for, which would be really kind of dramatic and incredible. And I think that's one path forward is through uh litigation because so many places in the world it's not just politics are inert like American politics are inert. It's just there's a lot of slow moving bureaucracy and um slow moving public opinion. And in the same way that a lot of civil rights victories were fought and won in the courts. I think we might be able to make some progress in in the courts on

81:43climate, too. We'll see. If you had a magic wand like if they made you the king of the world Mhm. and they said you you can decide what we do. What would you what would the first step be? The first step is just ending fossil fuel subsidies. I mean there's no reason why these companies should be receiving public money. And why are they Just incumbency advantages. They're well connected companies. A lot of them um are really big and powerful and any government in the world is not going to want a major industry to like completely collapse. Um but you know, if we're really subsidizing them $5 billion a year that's a ton of money that could be poured into green like to R&D of new technology. It could be poured into carbon capture like we talked about before. That's just an unbelievable resource and it would accelerate the decline of coal in particular and uh and other oil other fossil fuel um

82:35businesses, which would be great. Is there any discussion about that? In individual countries, yeah, but um it's slow moving. Um you know, there's stuff about um I mean people are taking action in all different ways at all different levels, which I think is basically necessary. So there are cities in Europe where cars are now being banned. Um cars? Yeah. In a city? Yeah. They just people biking around? You've been living in LA too long. You can do that. In Amsterdam you can do that. Um It just seems ridiculous. Yeah. Well, I mean I think um maybe maybe it'll just be you can only have an electric car. Um you know, maybe 10 years from now like it'll be illegal in the US to build uh like a you know, a gas guzzling car. I got an electric car recently and it's amazing the blowback from my friends. What do they say? Well, first of all, it's always homophobic or or uh or feminine. They're

83:29always going after you about your estrogen levels and your manhood. It's like it's weird. It's kind of like a space I mean Teslas are kind of like they're kind of like spaceships though. They feel I mean that there's a Have you been in one? Yeah. You driven one? I haven't driven one. I've been driven in one. Yeah. I've I drove in one years ago and I wasn't that impressed. I want to say like maybe five or six years ago, but now I have one of the new ones that's crazy fast. It doesn't even make sense. Regular cars are stupid. Yeah. They're stupid. And you spend all that money on gas. Why would you want to do that? Yeah, but I mean they're stupid. Like they don't work as good. Like that thing is way better than any car I've ever driven. Yeah. And it's only going to get better. They're they don't even make sense how fast they are and they drive themselves.

84:11Yeah. Like you hit this little thing go do do and it just steers. It takes over. Yeah. Like it drives and it's it stays within the speed limit and you can just kind of half-ass out. Just keep your hand on the steering wheel and it uh it brakes when there's cars in front of you and slow it's very strange. It'll even change lanes for you. Amazing. It's It's weird. It's weird. It's It's very difficult to let go and to give in like that, but the the strange thing that I felt was the the blowback from my friends. Like and they're joking around. Obviously most of my friends are comedians, but it's uh it's hilarious. Even people have heckled me about it. Well, I feel like like I just at the aesthetic level I understand that mocking of like the Prius, but I feel like the Tesla is actually a little more macho, you know. Well, the Prius is a piece of It's like a a cheese wedge with wheels.

85:03Yeah. But I mean it's like, you know, yeah, we live in a sick culture where like being like healthy and responsible is like I just Exactly. We like cigarettes and whiskey. Like you you mock someone eating a salad. Yeah. It's very weird. It is very weird, but um I was Is that an American problem? Like other parts of the world they don't they're not as attached to their trucks and gross. We're gross. But but there's um something particularly strange about being on that side of it cuz I I was um I want I don't want to say I was pessimistic about electric cars, but when Elon did the podcast, I told him I'd buy one of his cars cuz he was he was telling me how the great they are. I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll buy one of your cars. But I really did not expect to like it as much as I do. Yeah. And then once I got it, I was like, okay, now I get it. Yeah. But then I was thinking about my

85:51own resistance to it because I like cars. I have, you know, muscle cars. I have a couple I have an older Porsche. I love them. They're fun. I like those kind of cars, but they're stupid. They really are dumb. That's a dumb way to get around. The the Tesla's a way better way to get around. And you know, he's got one that's coming out in 2020 that's going to have a 660 mile range which is insane. I mean you drive all the way to San Francisco and back with one charge. No, I mean he's incredible. I think you know, I like there there are reasons why he gets the that he gets, but I also think like Tesla and Solar City are incredibly important. And I'm actually I don't understand why there aren't more people in Silicon Valley who are focused on climate in this way. Like obviously they want like these are people who see themselves as gods who want to be world historical figures.

86:42They're they're literally Who who do you think is doing that? Well, like like Jeff Bezos Jeff Bezos. You think he thinks himself as a god? Yeah. Really? Yeah. Really? You don't? No, I read those text messages he sent to that chick. I don't I don't think a god would say that. A god would say you should be lucky to get this dick. All the space exploration stuff though. It's like, you know, all that like people are obsessed with that and the life extinction extension um But but don't you think that that's just a side effect of having $150 billion? But you could do so much good with that. Yes. So Bezos is pouring a billion dollars a year into his into his space exploration project, which is like I mean I'm excited by space, too. I think it would be cool to go up there, but there's some pressing problems here, which we could really benefit, you know, that money

87:25could really benefit and I agree, but long-term I think the philosophy is that we're going to have to get off this planet. And if the human race is going to succeed because of not just the threat of global warming, but of asteroid attacks and many other factors. It's an asteroid thing, I think. I mean for me Supernovas. There's there's a lot of factors. Mar for on the particular question of climate um there's just no way that the Earth is going to get as inhospitable as Mars is. So the idea of building a colony there as a hedge against global warming is just crazy. We could It is ridiculous, but on a good on the positive note, if we could fix that hole Yeah. like imagine what we could do here. Yeah, paradise. Yeah. Well, the idea is terraforming, right? That they're going to go there with some kind of massive machine that's going to create oxygen in the environment and yeah. Well, it's a

88:13good place to practice cuz no one lives there. So you could do all kinds of goofy and go, well, good news and bad news. The good news is we figured out a way to terraform. The bad news is we already up Mars. So we're going to try another spot. We're going to go to you know, we're going to move on to some other planet. Uranus. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, Venus used to be actually quite Earth-like and they went through a really rapid global warming um that made it now it's like a total hell hole. And that's like the sort of worst case um worst case for Earth is the Venus scenario. Well, ultimately the sun's going to burn out, right? Like if But that's many millions of years from now. Sure, but if we really do look into the future, something something has to be done, you know? I mean this is uh the on the grandest of grand scales, the the concept of uh some sort of interstellar arcs.

88:56I believe that. I'm and I'm I'm with it. I just think the time scale of the threat that we're that we need to avert by space exploration, that's a time scale of millennia. We have a lot of new technology develop over the next thousand years that'll allow us to do it better and more efficiently. But climate change the time scale is like the next 30 years. So we need to focus on it now to give ourselves the opportunity to do the other Why do you think it's sexier to go to space? Is that what it is? Like rockets and I mean, I think for these dudes yeah. It's a big metal dick shooting off in the atmosphere. That's what we're doing. We're trying to space. I actually made that argument about Mars that it's like they're shaped like dicks. It's like There's something to that. Yeah. Well, also this generation of people really grew up in the in the age of like the the space race. Yeah. I mean it's

89:46in the aftermath of landing on the moon and I think there is like Peter Thiel talks about this. There's this kind of unfulfilled sense of future that we all like anybody who grew up in the post-war years in the '60s, '70s they were like you know, whatever his famous line were promised flying cars and all we got was 140 characters or whatever. I think it that applies to the space exploration stuff is like well, the government is no longer doing the really ambitious Right. But we can do it privately. On the other hand, there is a government in the world that is doing that and China. Mhm. just landed on the far side of of the moon. They're doing really aggressive space exploration. And I haven't been there in 20 years, but the people I know who live there say there is so much faith in the future there. Um they just believe in a very inherent deep down way that like the future will

90:33be better and sci-fi-y in an exciting way. And that's so far and from the way that Americans think about the future. Is that part of the benefit of having a dictator run things? I think it's just like they're on a huge upswing. Right. And it's also like there's no debate about how things get done. Yeah. Yeah, totally. I mean, that's what I was saying before. It's like it gives you some hope for climate if like Xi Jinping is just like okay, immediately no more coal. Mhm. They'll all stop Right. But he's also throwing 2 million Muslims in concentration camps. Right. Yeah. Um this Bezos thing, I mean, I'm not criticizing you because I think it's a very common thought, but why is it that we look at these super rich billion billionaire characters that are on the top of the heap, why do we think of them as like having these tremendous egos and looking like gods? Isn't it sort of just

91:20that's just how you're always going to look at someone who lives in a hundred million dollar house and It's possible. I think when you look at I mean, not to get too like armchair psychologizing about Bezos, but when you look at the physical transformation that he's put himself through, when you think about like the life extension, what has he done physically? Well, he's just like I mean, if you if you look at photos of him when he's like a young man, he's you know, just kind of like dweeby. Right. he's like um an action hero. Is he really? Yeah. I mean, maybe not like you, but he's like he's yeah, he's pretty Is Bezos jacked? Am I missing something? Let me show you. He definitely looks different. Well, pull up pull up some images of Jeff Bezos jacked. I didn't know. But he's he's got a trainer. I mean No, I'm not blaming him, but that's only one part of it. I would say

92:08bigger than that is you know, the I just how thin-skinned the world's Okay, let me see. Zoom in. Well, I guess I guess he's got some arms. There he is. Oh, wow. That's a big difference. Yeah, but he's also got a vest on. I guess his arms do look pretty big. Yeah. I mean, I'm I'm not a in most ways I'm not a Bezos hater. I think Amazon has been actually really pretty great. I'm a fan. I like listening to the guy talk and I loved his letter to the National Enquirer. There he is right there. Yeah, so he looks fit. Yeah. In front of the King Kong Rampage movie. Is that him? Yeah. Yeah, he looks pretty good. Um okay. I guess physical transformation, but that's yeah, probably But life extension like uploading your brain to the computer there's so many Does he end of that Uh he is actually I think not as into it as some other people, but That is so sci-fi. You know, I

93:01I interviewed Kurzweil a while back when I was doing the sci-fi show and I went to this 2045 conference that they had in Manhattan and it was um these guys are they're talking about something that they think will be invented and they're acting as if it's been invented. Inevitable. Yeah. Yeah, totally. I mean, Eric Schmidt has said about climate change that the solution is already here in the sense that AI will just solve it. And it's like that well, no. That's nonsense. That's a weird thing that we do though, right? We we always looked to like oh, someone's going to handle this. Yeah, well the the the brain upload stuff is interesting to me with regard to climate just because it's like a a portal through which we can escape environmental degradation. So if the world is on fire and full of suffering maybe we can just upload our minds to some machines and not not live in the

93:53real world anymore. And when I think about even my relationship to my phone, like tech addiction generally, we're sort of being taught to think of the world on our screens as more real than the world that's around us. And that sounds in a lot of ways like decline-ist and all whatever, but I also think it may be a kind of coping mechanism for a world that we're about to head into where there is that much more suffering. And when I when I see for instance like the whole wellness movement, I think their intuitions there are about like the toxicity of the world and how we have to avoid it. I think the way that it'll reshape our own sense of self and relationship to the world and idea of our place in nature and history, all of these things are really um up in the air um and will be affected by climate change I think in you know, in ways that we don't yet appreciate or understand.

94:45So the to wave the wand Yeah. what would be step number one? Step number one is ending fossil fuel subsidies. Ends fossil fuel subsidies. Step number two. Um step number two just massive R&D investment massive investment in R&D and new infrastructure. Which would be great for the economy, right? Totally. So all these things taking a positive or taking a negative and looking at positive aspects of mitigating the problem. Yeah. And yeah, new energy sources I mean, there you know, you they're really there are already new business empires that were are from the climate change era. There are new solar empires. There are new wind empires. But that can happen globally. That needs to happen globally. Um and you know, that's you know, then we have to we have to deal with agriculture. Which may be about seaweed. It may be about lab-grown meat. I don't know, but um you know, it's it's like

95:41the big picture it's all carbon. It's all just how much carbon we put into the atmosphere. So I think it will come to be the case that in the decades ahead everything about the way that we interact with the world will be um described and understood in terms of carbon so that for instance you walk down the aisle in the supermarket, you see organic food you see non-GMO food, you'll also see like carbon-free food. I think that'll be a big part of the way that we consume everything that things will be advertised that way. Promoted that way. But globally, we just need to really focus on reducing carbon. Is it like and wherever it is, which is almost everywhere, we need to figure out new ways to do whatever it is we're doing that's that's causing that problem. We need to make it trendy in LA. That's what we do. Have some organic, gluten-free, carbon-free food. I feel like that's

96:33already kind of happening. be. Yeah. That would as long as that kicks in and people realize there's some street cred to be in carbon-free. Yeah. I mean, I think in different parts of the world people will relate differently to it. So like yeah, in China they're scheduled to have this huge boom in beef consumption and dairy consumption because it's expected that as that country gets richer the people will adopt a more western diet. Mhm. But it's also possible that they won't. That like the new Chinese middle class will be still really interested in you know, tofu less interested in beef. Less interested in milk. They are they you know, um and it might be it might be easier to have them follow that path than it will be to make the American average American eat less beef. But um you know, it's it's everywhere. It's like every every everywhere you look there's some there's some some little

97:35problem to solve. Um but then when you pull back, it really is just carbon. It's like absolutely everything if you if you think about everything you do in terms of the carbon impact it has then you know, the solutions suggest themselves and I do think that in the coming decades if even if you and I don't start to think in those terms, our policy makers will that like everything will be or entering into a new trade agreement with Japan. What's the carbon budget here? Like what kind how's their carbon behavior? Oh, we're like you know, this um we're providing some public subsidies for this factory over here. What's their like emission situation like? Can we ask them to bring along some carbon capture plants so that they reduce their footprint. You know, every at every level, the level of the individual like talking about buying a Tesla or buying a you know, buying a Range Rover or

98:28whatever. Um I think we'll start to think in in the term in terms of carbon and that'll be a sign of just how total climate change will have how totally climate change will have conquered the world so that there won't be an aspect of modern life that will be not just untouched, but in a certain way kind of ungoverned by it. Yeah. What about is there a way to educate people in in a way that's not preachy that sort of moves the needle in that direction? I think conversations like this are important. I think your book's very important and I think you know, interviews that I'm sure you're doing right now on all these different shows are important and everything kind of like ups the needle or or or ups the perception of it a little bit, but is there anything else that can be done that can educate people in a way that's it's not preachy or it's not it does

99:17it's not aggressive in a way that annoys people? Yeah. It's a horrible thing to say. I I feel totally the same way. We're like we need sugar in the medicine. You know I mean like the song from Mary Poppins. Yeah. I mean I think in general like climate messaging climate communication has really suffered for a long time because it was so preachy. And because it was so holier-than-thou. And because the people that get involved in it part of the reason why they get involved in it is for virtue signaling. Totally. And I've been asked like on you know as I've been promoting promoting the book by a lot of people like what have you done to in your life to change you know? And it's like well I'm flying a little bit less the flying really makes me feel guilty but otherwise I basically haven't changed anything because I do think that politics and policy are the most

99:58important impact you can have and I'm like spreading the word. Whether I eat a like a couple fewer hamburgers a year just doesn't really matter that much. But the idea that you would ask a newcomer to the movement to demonstrate their commitment by making themselves the most optimally committed that they possibly could be that's just going to alienate so many people. And this is obviously a issue where we need more people engaged in a more direct profound way. So I think for me it's like anyone who wants to care about climate who wants to vote about climate like come on like um And I think that you know Hollywood can be really important here. Um I mean it since I've been out here I've been I've I've had a couple meetings about shows and stuff and I do think that we've had really corny storytelling about climate change. Um and that there are actually opportunities for like

100:49really incredible new kinds of storytelling. I mean in the book I wrote about this story that happened a couple years ago where um you know anthrax that was had killed a reindeer in Russia in the early 20th century. The reindeer was frozen in permafrost for the entire 20th century. Permafrost melted the reindeer thawed the anthrax was released and killed at least one boy and a number of other reindeer in Russia. Wow. And that is true so in the ice in the Arctic ice arc you know we know of rock is like a record of geological history ice is also a record of geological history. So there like the bubonic plague is trapped in ice. The the Spanish flu in the from 1918 that killed hundreds of millions of people is trapped in ice. There are diseases trapped in the Arctic ice from before humans were around. Which means that humans immune system have no experience with them.

101:46There's so many horror movies that you can make about this subject. Um Holy I didn't even think of that. I didn't know that the Spanish flu is trapped in ice. Yeah. I mean and there've been instances where like in lab conditions anyway they've revived bacteria that are millions of years old. Um one Russian doctor literally injected a bacteria that he had revived from like 35,000 years ago it'd been frozen for 35,000 years. He brought it back to life and injected it into himself. Why would he do that? Just to see what would happen. That's a Marvel comic book. That's how like you become like the the Red Skull or some Yeah. Well that's what I mean about this this story is so big it's like the world that we live in in the next couple of decades will be completely transformed. Like we will be reading about diseases coming out of the Arctic ice. We will be

102:34reading about tropical diseases arriving in Copenhagen because now mosquitoes are there because the temperature allows them to live there in a way that they never lived before. We will be reading about climate conflict. We'll be reading about you know um I mean all this It's it's it's everywhere. It you know air pollution increases the rates of autism and ADHD. It changes um the development of babies in utero. It's like it's all-encompassing. Wow. The disease in the ice thing is really freaking me out. I never even considered that. Yeah. But that is something to think about along with the methane and carbon that's going to be emitted into the atmosphere as it melts. Well let me tell you this story. So um there we now so there was there are this the species of antelope called a saiga antelope. They um they're mostly in Siberia. They're kind of dwarf antelopes and

103:26they've been around for millions of years and uh all of a sudden in 2016 or 2015 they literally all died. It's called a mega death. The entire species died. They're extinct? They're now extinct. Jesus. Um and that happened because a bacteria that had been living inside their guts was changed by temperature conditions. It was an unusually hot unusually humid summer and this bacteria that had been living inside them presumably for millions of years comfortably as a kind of peaceful cooperator became a killer and killed the entire species. Now we have inside us countless bacteria and viruses. Scientists believe millions in every human. So our guts are full of bacteria that do our digestion for us. They monitor our moods. They're they're you know there are some scientists who think it's really um misleading to even think of the human as a unitary animal rather than a kind of

104:30composite creature. Yeah. And most of those bacteria and viruses are not going to be dramatically transformed by a degree or two degrees of warming. But there's so many of them. The chances that one could it's hard to dismiss that. And whether that would mean we'd all immediately go extinct probably not. But what if that means suddenly schizophrenia increases by 15% because schizophrenia is related to um a bacterial infection called toxoplasma I think it's bacteria toxoplasma gondii. Well that's that cat parasite. Yeah exactly. Schizophrenia is related to that? Yeah. Really? Yeah it like triples your chances of getting schizophrenia. Wow. Yeah. Um and our bodies are so complex such intricate ecosystems like you say that if one little thing gets disturbed it could have really catastrophic impacts on us. And that's true of the planet as a whole. I think that's that's

105:23one of the big lessons of my book is that this is such a delicate system. It's been stable for all of human history and now it's not stable. What that means for how we live we don't know yet but the changes will be significant will be profound. But it's also true of the individual. You know our bodies will be living differently in a world that's two degrees warmer than they are today. We can't really predict what those impacts will be but they could be quite dramatic and they could be things that we can't even imagine today because there are you know by some counts millions of bacteria inside us that we haven't even identified yet. Jesus Christ you're freaking me out David. God damn it. It's a crazy world out there. Well not just crazy but it it seems like when when you're talking about things like this when you're talking about climate change affecting our actual gut

106:09parasites or our gut biome and that this literally could change the way human beings behave. I mean these are all things that I've never heard discussed and it it just it's really terrifying. Really is. You know I mean and part of the problem is people hear and they're like oh relax everything's fine. This is this constant thing that we do where if it's not affecting us currently right now in the moment there's not a fire in front of us we don't worry about it. It's a weird compartmentalization thing that human beings do. Yeah. And um it's you know we you think that evolution would have trained us differently. You think that evolution would have trained us over time to have at least some long-term capacity. And I guess we do have some long-term planning capacity but it's um we choose to think in really short-term ways just about all the time. Now you've

107:01already freaked me out. How's your book going to freak me out more? Um I mean it's every page. Every page is more of this? Yeah. Jesus man. How do you sleep at night? Are you okay? I mean I sleep through compartmentalization and denial too. I'm not I'm not you know as I mentioned earlier like that I think there's it's been a problem for environmentalism for a long time this kind of holier-than-thou thing. That's not who I am. I'm not an environmentalist. Until a couple years ago when I started really worrying about this stuff I had the same disinclination to take it seriously than than most people do. You know I thought climate change was real. I thought it was something that we need to worry about and deal with. But I thought it was like a small problem that could be dealt with without much change to my life. And I still basically feel that way. I mean

107:44I you know I like going on vacations in nature but I'm not someone who's like spends months hiking the trail or whatever. I've never even had a pet. I don't love animals you know. But my the more I looked at the science the more I just realized this isn't about affecting some part of nature over there. It's about affecting all of human life every aspect of human life as it's lived on this planet and that really terrified me. But even knowing that even staring at it straight in the face I mean I still get up in the morning and you know whatever do the same Go to the gym watch basketball go to my day job and I don't think that we should be ashamed of that. Um I think all of us have are going to have different reactions to this story different perspectives on the crisis and that's good that's human. Um but spreading the word generally making people a little more alarmed is

108:39going to make people take some more action and that's what we need. Um but you know the psychological like I said before the psychological biases are so strong that like when I imagine my daughter's life I'm not imagining a hellscape. I'm imagining the life the world that I grew up in. Right. And again that's not like that's how everybody that's how everybody relates relates to the world. And it's just a a reminder of how important it is to look really directly at the science because the world as it exists today is not a good guide to the world that we will be living in in a decade or two. There's no way that the climate system as it exists today will be stabilized forever. It will get hotter. All of these things will get worse. Every tick upward of temperature will make will create more climate suffering somewhere in the world. And if we get to really dramatic levels of warming

109:32that suffering will be basically everywhere. We can't continue orienting our perspective on the future on the world as it is today. We have to take seriously this range of temperature temperatures 2° to 4° that we're on track for the century as a way of generating sufficient activity in response and adapting as we need to. If we keep looking out the window and thinking the world as it is now will continue, we're not going to do anything. And that's what we've done over the last 30 years which has been catastrophic. I think that message is really important and I think that also the message of that we need to change and evolve as a civilization but as a human being you need to still enjoy your life and that, you know, it just it's it's a it's not a oh my god, I need to drop everything I'm doing that leaves any sort of a carbon footprint. It's we need to address it as

110:26a civilization. Yeah, and I mean, you know, the if the average American had the carbon footprint of the average European America's carbon emissions would fall by like 35%. Now, I don't think of like difference? What do they do differently? They drive less. They um That's weird cuz they make the best cars. Yeah. But it's like it's less territory. Yeah. Um I mean, there aren't many people in in Europe who like commute an hour and a half to work every day and that's like not so uncommon in America. Um their diet is better carbon-wise and they have more you know, they have some more aggressive um green energy stuff going on. How is their diet better carbon-wise? They just they waste less food basically. So like a third of all American food, I think it's a third, is wasted. Mhm. That's just wasted carbon. Yeah. Um and you know, I think I think the number of

111:16of electricity is like 70% of American electricity is wasted because how bad the grid is. Like it just is so bad at delivering from one source to another. This is one reason why Solar City is so important because the battery can be a much more efficient um transporter of electricity. Well, there's no excuse for California. I mean, other than this this winter, it's sunny every day. Yeah. But so if 70% of American electricity is wasted, it's like we're just throwing all that carbon away. 70%? Yeah, that's giant. Yeah. Um and if we were less wasteful, we'd have, you know, less of a problem on our hands. But we still like order twice as much food as we want and then throw it out. I mean, I do that. Yeah. Yeah. Um so you can understand why someone would say to you like what are you doing? But it's that sentiment behind it that's kind of gross, right? It's like they're looking for you to be

112:05a hypocrite. They're trying to catch you. Well, when I look at hypocrisy, what I see is like, you know, you want the world to be a better place than you yourself are doing. Yes. It's like that to me there's a way of it's like we think of hypocrisy as like a negative quality. I think it's kind of a positive it can be a positive quality. You believe we should be behaving in one way collectively. Yeah. Yeah. You just need to adjust like you're saying not just what everybody needs to do what you what you you need to do as well. You're being conscious of this need to change. And like, you know, if someone believes in say like better health care we don't ask them to donate all of their money to hospitals. That's what taxation is for. Like policy directs our cultural energy towards targets that we want to reach. So again, as a civilization we need to adjust. And as a

112:54an individual we need to be aware so that we promote and support this idea of a civilization shifting. Yeah. Yeah. Listen, man. Thank you. Thanks for scaring the out of me. Thanks for coming down here. Tell people the name of your book one more time, please. The Uninhabitable Earth. The subtitle is Life After Warming. It's on my Instagram and we'll put a link to it on Amazon, on Twitter and thank you, David. Great to meet you. Appreciate it, man. It's great to meet you, too. Good luck with your book, man. I really I think it's going to make a big impact. Thank you. Woo, that's scary.