The fires have been raging in Southern California for days, and it s not getting any better. This week, we talk to fire historian David Weinstein about the devastating fires that have ravaged the area over the past week, and what we can do to prepare for them in the future. We also talk about the effects of climate change, and whether or not we should be worried about them. And, of course, we have a special guest on the show this week, our friend and former co-host of Fear Factor, Alex Blumberg. He talks about what it s like to grow up in a metropolis, and how he s lived through some of the worst fires he s ever seen. This episode is brought to you by CBS Radio and the National Transportation Safety Board, and edited by Annie-Rose Strasser. Thanks to our sponsor, Caff Monster Energy Drink, and to David Weinstein for coming on the pod to talk about all things fire and the fires in California. Music by Jeff Kaale and the Vigilante Crew, and special thanks to Kevin McLeod for producing and engineering the sound design for the music used in this episode. Art: Mackenzie Moore Music: Hayden Coplen Editor: Will Witwer, Jeff Perla Additional mixing and mastering by Matthew Boll and Matt Newell Editing by Mike McLendon Special thanks to John Rocha, Ben Kuchta Thank you for your support and support, and our sponsorships, and for all the support we ve received so far this year, and all the hard work we ve gone into this podcast this year and throughout the past year and into 2019 and into 2020 and beyond! thank you so far in 2019 and 2020, and in 2020, thank you for the years we hope you ll be back in 2020 and 2020! Thank you so much for all your support in 2019, and we're looking forward to 2020, 2020, 2019, 2020 2020, we'll see you in the next year and beyond, and thank you, bye bye, bye Bye Bye Bye bye bye bye Bye bye, Bye Bye Love, bye, Love, Bye bye Bye, Bye, bye bye, MRS. - ETC, MURCHEVERYONE! - THE FOREVER, KAVY AND YELLO, MALAYA AND KELLY, MOSCOLLA, SONGS
00:01:32.000And I think that's, like, a probably more responsible way to be.
00:01:35.000But we've now built up the whole state so that...
00:01:38.000There are all these homes that we don't want to burn.
00:01:39.000There are all these properties we don't want to burn.
00:01:42.000And when you restrict the ability of natural wildfires to burn, that means that more tinder gets built over time and then at some point something lights the match and it all burns.
00:01:56.000You could do more controlled fire, you could take more aggressive action in terms of spraying foam and that kind of thing.
00:02:04.000You could have a lot more firefighters.
00:02:06.000But I was just talking to a guy yesterday, I'm out here actually doing some reporting on wildfires, who was saying that no Santa Ana powered wildfire has ever been stopped by firefighters.
00:02:17.000And he's like an environmental historian.
00:02:20.000It's like you can hope that the winds redirect them, but the action of firefighters is basically just spitting in the wind.
00:02:25.000So the action is not to stop, it's to kind of contain it.
00:03:20.000I've never seen anything like it in my life.
00:03:22.000That was the worst one I've ever seen.
00:03:25.000But I think that was just because of placement.
00:03:27.000I think that this past one was actually worse in terms of physical damage and size.
00:03:32.000It's just I didn't see it the way I saw this one.
00:03:36.000Well, last year there were flames like hopping over the 405, right?
00:03:41.000And 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...
00:03:53.000I live in a fortress, I don't live in nature.
00:03:55.000Like, I walk down on concrete streets, I look up at steel buildings, nature can't come for me.
00:03:59.000But when you see, like, fire straddling the 405, that's, you know, this is a major metropolis here.
00:04:10.000And 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 fucked up, it will fuck you up.
00:05:07.000So this is Bel Air on the left-hand side.
00:05:10.000And 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.
00:05:23.000And to me, Bel Air is really interesting because most climate impacts, they hit the world's poorest first.
00:05:29.000And the wildfires, they work in the reverse because it's like people living in the hills.
00:07:23.000Like, people lived in—maybe they lived on a river.
00:07:25.000Maybe you'd have, like, a little community on a river.
00:07:27.000But, you know, the last, like, 50 years or 100 years, we've built up, especially in America, so much more on the coast, and that's, like— You know, really inviting disaster.
00:07:37.000I mean, all of Houston, like, all of that is like, that was floodplain that, like, nature was like, you know, it was swampland, it was, and now it's, you know, new suburban developments made out of concrete, and that just means more and more flooding.
00:07:47.000Yeah, I've been to Houston right after floods.
00:08:18.000But yeah, if it gets hotter, they're fucked too.
00:08:21.000In the summertime in Houston, when you're dealing with 100% humidity and it's 115 degrees outside, you can't even explain to people what that feels like.
00:08:32.000There are places in the world that are 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 being at risk of dying by 2050. By 2050, what kind of temperature are we talking about?
00:08:46.000Well, it's a combination of heat and humidity, but usually the heat will be up around 130 combined with some bad humidity.
00:08:54.000But we've already broken that threshold.
00:08:57.000There have been temperature records set every year, but last year it broke 130 in Oman, I think.
00:09:02.000But, like, the scarier parts are not some of these crazy desert places that have gotten really hot.
00:10:17.000I think it's a reflection of all of our cognitive biases and emotional reflexes that when I imagine my daughter's future, I'm imagining a world that seems a lot like the one that we live in today.
00:10:27.000But when I look at the science, it paints a really, really bleak picture.
00:10:31.000So the question of optimism and alarm, I think it's really all a matter of perspective, right?
00:10:37.000So we're at 1.1 degrees Celsius right now.
00:10:41.000I think there's basically no way that we avoid two degrees of warming, which is like the UN calls catastrophic warming.
00:10:48.000The island nations of the world call genocide.
00:10:51.000And that's when we would be making these cities in the Middle East unlivable.
00:10:55.000It would mean like some ice sheets would start a permanent collapse, which could, if all of them melted, eventually bring 260 feet of sea level rise.
00:11:03.000And we're on track for four degrees of warming.
00:12:22.000And, you know, that's 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.
00:12:34.000But that's not to say that we'll all be destroyed by it either.
00:12:36.000I think, like, we will find ways to live and adapt and mitigate.
00:12:40.000It's just a question of how much it's going to screw up our politics, how much it's going to change the way we think of history.
00:12:46.000You know, like 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.
00:12:55.000What does it mean if, like, climate change completely eliminates the possibility of economic growth, which probably won't be the case for the U.S., but there are huge parts of the world where that is going to be the case if we don't change course now.
00:13:04.000So, 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.
00:13:15.00030% is twice as big an impact as the Great Depression.
00:13:38.000Just in 2016, I 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.
00:13:46.000And 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 was just not at all being talked about.
00:13:56.000So, most scientists talk about this two degree threshold as like the threshold of catastrophe.
00:14:02.000And I think most laypeople think that that means that that's kind of a ceiling for warming.
00:14:06.000Like, that'll be the worst it could get.
00:14:08.000But actually, it's functionally the best-case scenario.
00:14:10.000And yet, we hadn't had any storytelling, any discussion around what the world would look like north of two degrees.
00:14:16.000And I just felt, as a journalist, I was like, holy shit, there's a huge story here.
00:14:20.000Like, the way that this world could be completely transformed by these forces is not something that anybody is writing about, in part because it's a long story, but scientists and science journalists were really...
00:14:32.000They were really focused on making sure that their messaging was hopeful and optimistic, and they were reluctant to talk about their scariest findings.
00:14:39.000And so I was terrified by the science.
00:14:42.000I looked at it, and I was like, nobody's talking about this.
00:15:04.000It was read by a bunch of million people, the biggest story that New York Magazine had ever published.
00:15:09.000And 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.
00:15:21.000So I decided, you know, there's more to say.
00:15:25.000And even beyond, like, telling the bleak story, talking about the really dark possibilities, I just thought...
00:15:55.000But everyone's gonna 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?
00:16:12.000Can technology entertain us while the world is burning?
00:16:16.000These are all these kind of like humanities questions that I felt really had not been talked about.
00:16:20.000And so the book does like, it's a tour through what the world would look like between two and four degrees, but it's also, which is a kind of hellscape, but it is also, you know, about half of it is about...
00:18:17.000It's like, in order to store the carbon, you need an industry that's two or three times the size of our present oil and gas industry, and where that goes, and next to whose homes and all that stuff.
00:18:30.000It's just a matter of deciding to put them into practice.
00:18:34.000And I think we're pretty, like, that, you know...
00:18:38.000Recent history shows that we're not doing that fast enough.
00:18:41.000So one of the big, you know, points that I make in the book and it sticks 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.
00:19:31.000We have about one generation to save it.
00:19:34.000To me that's like, it makes me uncomfortable to use this language, but it's basically a theological story.
00:19:40.000We have the entire fate of the planet in the hands of these two generations.
00:19:45.000What happens 50 years from now, 100 years from now, will entirely be up to the way we act now and what we do.
00:19:53.000And the timescale is so crazy because you have this really compressed, we must act now to avert these worst case scenarios timescale, but also the impacts will unfold if we don't do anything over millennia.
00:20:06.000So like, we could have, you know, if we really bring into being the total melt of all ice sheets, That means that 8 centuries from now, 12 centuries from now, people will be dealing with the shit that we're fucking up today.
00:20:20.000We will be engineering problems for them to be solving 800, 1200, 1500 years from now.
00:20:27.000And that damage will be done, if it is done, in the next 30 or 50 years.
00:20:32.000So 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.
00:20:46.000And that is, on the one hand, it's sort of like overwhelming, but it's also empowering.
00:20:52.000You know, like all the climate impacts that I talk about, all the climate horrors that are really terrifying, if we make them happen, we will be making them happen.
00:21:03.000The main input in the system is how much carbon we put into the atmosphere.
00:21:06.000There 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.
00:21:15.000And so, if we get to a four-degree hellscape with hundreds of millions or a billion climate refugees, that'll be because of what we're doing.
00:21:24.000It's not some system outside of our control, even though we find it kind of comforting to think that it's outside of our control, because that means We don't have to change anything.
00:21:34.000Well, 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.
00:21:41.000And 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.
00:21:52.000And that seems to be what's happening here.
00:22:23.000And yet, when I look out the window, I'm like, you know, things are fine.
00:22:27.000And I think that has a really powerful anchoring effect.
00:22:30.000Like, we expect the world of the future to look like the world as it does today.
00:22:33.000But all the science says that's totally naive.
00:22:36.000And we're going to have at least twice as much warming as we've had to this point.
00:22:40.000And I think we need to think about the future of the world in those terms, like what it will be at two degrees, at three degrees, at four degrees.
00:23:07.000In the book, I have a little riff where I say, you know, There's this new, not so new now, 30-40 year discipline in economics, behavioral economics, which is about all of our cognitive biases, how we can't really see the world.
00:23:19.000Every single one makes it harder to see climate.
00:23:22.000There's this, he's actually an English professor named Timothy Morton who wrote a book about climate, and he calls it a hyperobject, which is like, it's a phenomenon that's so big that That we can't actually hold it in our heads at once.
00:24:13.000But, 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.
00:24:24.000And the number of papers I've read that make me have a bleaker view of the future, it's in the thousands.
00:24:30.000And 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.
00:24:38.000But when you see, you know, so many terrifying studies that you could fill, like I did, a 300-page book with them, You realize that there's a huge margin for error and we would still be really in bad shape.
00:24:54.000I'm sure there have been some studies that made mistakes in terms of past studies that projected that by now we'd all be dead.
00:25:05.000Those seem to be a problem with this whole concept we have of wrapping our head around it.
00:25:11.000And if we find anything that we could point to that say, oh, back in the 80s, they said we'd all be dead by now and we're fine.
00:25:21.000Yeah, there was a really famous book in the middle of the 20th century called The Population Bomb.
00:25:25.000So this is a guy named Paul Ehrlich, who he was like, you know, the world just cannot support this many people.
00:25:33.000Like if we get to 8 billion people, there just won't be enough food.
00:25:37.000There won't be, you know, the planet can't sustain that.
00:25:40.000And he's often pointed to as this sort of like prophet of doomsday and his prophecy totally didn't work out because we had this thing that's called the Green Revolution.
00:25:48.000Basically, we figured out ways to make crops way, way, way more productive.
00:26:39.000But a lot of that was powered by the industrialization of those countries.
00:26:43.000So that bill is going to come due going forward.
00:26:48.000And, 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.
00:26:58.000Estimates 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.
00:27:09.000So 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.
00:28:26.000And that conflict, it's not just at the level of nation states or even civil war, it's also at the level of individuals.
00:28:33.000So if you look at crime statistics, when temperatures go up, there's more murder, there's more rape.
00:28:37.000People get admitted to mental hospitals more when it's warmer out.
00:28:42.000Babies develop less well in the womb when it's hotter out.
00:28:45.000For every day over 90 degrees that a baby's in the womb, you can see those days in that baby's lifetime earnings.
00:28:51.000And we're going to be living on a planet that's considerably warmer, That's going to have real dramatic effects on everything.
00:28:59.000Air pollution, there's a big study that I write about in the book that's totally alarming and eye-opening.
00:29:05.000Just between 1.5 degrees and 2 degrees of warming, just through the effects of air pollution, that one half degree of warming would cause an additional 153 million deaths, which is 25 holocausts.
00:29:21.000That's just air pollution, just between 1.5 and 2 degrees.
00:29:24.000And 2 degrees, for me, is our best case scenario.
00:29:27.000So our best case scenario is 25 holocausts worth of death from air pollution.
00:29:48.000So I think the likeliest outcome, even as we enter into this climate hellscape, is that we find ways to turn away and not look at the real pain of people, especially in the developing world.
00:29:58.000But to answer your earlier question, 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, you know,
00:30:14.000how are you going to solve the conflict problem?
00:30:16.000How are you going to solve the problem of having 30% less economic growth?
00:30:20.000You know, like I said, that's an impact that's twice as big as the Great Depression, and it would be permanent.
00:30:26.000$600 trillion in climate damages, twice as much wealth as exists in the world today.
00:30:31.000And that's just, you know, refugees, food, I mean it's so all-encompassing.
00:30:37.000And I think that's another reason why we don't want to look at it closely, because it's terrifying.
00:30:44.000Well, there's also a matter of how it's being projected to the public, right?
00:30:48.000Like in certain circles, particularly Right-wing circles.
00:30:53.000There are people that are trying to paint this with rose-colored glasses, right?
00:30:59.000They'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.
00:31:15.000There's some people that point to that, like, this is nonsense science, this has been disproven.
00:31:19.000There's a few people like that, but it's overwhelming, the overwhelming consensus of scientists who study this are terrified of it.
00:31:27.000Yeah, 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.
00:32:54.000And what are the ways that are being proposed and how seriously are they being taken?
00:32:58.000Other than the idea of building these machines to extract carbon from the atmosphere, I'm sure you're probably aware of...
00:33:06.000There's some of the programs that they've talked about, suspending reflective particles in the atmosphere to minimize the amount of solar radiation we receive.
00:33:15.000Yeah, so it's interesting, this guy who I mentioned earlier, who's done the 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.
00:33:30.000And that means probably suspending sulfur is like the most useful thing in the atmosphere.
00:33:35.000Oh great, we're going to smell like sulfur?
00:33:59.000But yeah, so the sulfur thing is, so we could, you know, we could suspend these, basically an umbrella of sulfur around in the atmosphere, which would mean that some of the sunlight coming to the earth would be reflected back into the atmosphere.
00:34:13.000And that would mean that the sun would absorb less sunlight.
00:34:16.000I mean, the earth would absorb less sunlight, which would make it a little bit cooler.
00:34:20.000The problem is that would have some crippling impacts on agriculture.
00:34:26.000And we basically don't know other side effects that it would have.
00:34:29.000And how would you take that stuff out?
00:34:36.000And that's a big concern, actually, because if we did that just to mask the amount of global warming that we were doing...
00:34:43.000Then whatever program was responsible for it would be really vulnerable to terrorism, to war, because if the planet were functionally warmed, say, five degrees, but we were suspending enough sulfur that it was actually only two degrees warmer,
00:35:01.000Then if we just, for instance, like somebody bombed 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 five degrees.
00:36:29.000Suppressing global temperatures by as much as a half degree or maybe one degree, which means, and that's the reason that those nine million people are dying every year from air pollution.
00:36:37.000So if we solve that problem, if we solve the air pollution problem, save those nine million lives every year, we would immediately make the planet at least a half a degree warmer and possibly one degree warmer, which would put us at the threshold of catastrophe or above it.
00:36:51.000So we're sort of already doing this program, just not in a systematic way, we're doing it in a haphazard way.
00:36:56.000The methane that you mentioned, there are basically two big issues with methane.
00:37:04.000So, yeah, cows produce a ton of methane, which is, depending on how you count, about 35 or maybe 85 times stronger greenhouse gas than carbon.
00:37:15.000But there are also these small-scale studies that show if we feed cattle just a little bit of seaweed, their methane emissions could fall by 95% or 99%.
00:37:24.000So 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.
00:37:49.000There's all this carbon stored in frozen permafrost in the northern latitudes.
00:37:55.000That permafrost is melting, and when it melts, that carbon will be released into the atmosphere.
00:38:00.000We 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,
00:38:15.000it could make our carbon problem immediately three times worse.
00:38:20.000And the effect could even be more dramatic than that if it was released mostly as methane, because methane is a stronger greenhouse gas.
00:38:26.000Most 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.
00:38:35.000The craziest solution that I ever heard for that one was to bring back the woolly mammoth.
00:38:51.000I mean, I think that we're going to have a whole century of shit like that and shit like cows eating seaweed.
00:38:58.000That 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.
00:39:08.000MBS, the 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 because he knows that the global community will not tolerate someone producing more oil as soon as a few decades from now.
00:39:30.000Yeah, like, in California now, you can, you know, during wildfire season, you can buy masks to, you know, to shield yourself from the smoke, which is really, really damaging.
00:39:40.000Its effects on cognitive performance are really dramatic, can lower cognitive performance by like 10 to 15%.
00:39:46.000Its effects on the development of kids is really dramatic.
00:39:50.000There was an incredible study a few years ago, where if you looked at places where they instituted EZ... Do you have EZPass out here in California?
00:40:14.000And because they were slowing down, they produced more exhaust.
00:40:16.000When they instituted easy pass, cars could just drive through and that meant they produced less exhaust.
00:40:21.000And the effect 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.
00:40:30.000That's how dramatic just the exhaust effect is on development of babies.
00:40:35.000How much is an effect of electric cars?
00:44:02.000There was a volcano – this is a little bit sketchy science, but there was a volcano explosion something like 30,000 years ago or something.
00:44:11.000I don't remember the exact dates, but volcanoes can cool global temperature for the same reason we're talking about with suspending particles because it basically clouds the atmosphere with – And it dropped global temperatures.
00:44:29.000Yeah, we've talked about that a bunch of times.
00:44:30.000That's less people than live on Nantucket.
00:44:35.000And it just makes you see, like, everything about the way that we live on this planet is dependent on climate conditions.
00:44:41.000Like, we'll figure a way to, like, have a civilization, but it will be transformed, it will be very different if the world is four degrees warmer.
00:44:48.000And, you know, everything about the way that we take for, everything we take for granted today is, like, a permanent feature.
00:44:56.000Of the modern world, I think we're going to learn is much more precarious, much more unstable.
00:45:03.000And yeah, like I said earlier, you know, Climates were stable for all of human history.
00:45:10.000That's how we were able to invent agriculture.
00:45:12.000The part of the world where we did invent agriculture, the Middle East, it's now getting almost too hot to grow crops.
00:45:17.000It's also going to be too hot to go to Mecca for a pilgrimage in just a couple decades.
00:45:23.000We're entirely outside of that window of temperatures, which means we're functionally now living on an entirely different planet than humans ever lived on before.
00:45:34.000So by the time we get to 2, 3, 4 degrees, We'll be living 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.
00:45:47.000And yeah, it's like those impacts could be totally overwhelming and catastrophic.
00:45:53.000Now, 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.
00:46:56.000We had multiple hurricanes in the Caribbean all at once.
00:46:58.000There was an island in Hawaii, East Island, a small island, not one that most people have gone to, but got literally wiped off the map by a hurricane.
00:47:05.000They're thinking about inventing a new category of hurricane, category six.
00:47:10.000All of these impacts are coming much faster than scientists predicted even a decade or two ago.
00:47:16.000And so I think the first inconvenient truth is a little too complacent.
00:47:20.000But Al Gore is also, you know, I know him a little bit.
00:48:00.000Because we just, if we're like, rather than saying, oh, let's retire this coal plant and replace it with a wind farm, we think, oh, we'll have the coal plant and the wind farm.
00:48:29.000I mean, I think on some level, American policy is a red herring.
00:48:33.000The U.S. is 15% of global emissions and we're falling.
00:48:39.000The future climate of the world will be determined by China, by India, by Sub-Saharan Africa.
00:48:45.000Those are carbon footprints that are growing.
00:48:46.000China's now almost twice as big a carbon footprint as the U.S. And they're building all this infrastructure outside of China that doesn't even count in Asia and Africa.
00:48:55.000You know the Belt and Road, you know this project.
00:48:57.000So basically taking the model that the U.S. had with like the Suez Canal and the Panama Canal...
00:49:01.000And they're building the infrastructure of the developing world.
00:49:05.000So recently they loaned Kenya a huge amount of money to build a new rail line which was being built with Chinese workers.
00:49:50.000But they'd be happy if the debt got repaid.
00:49:52.000I think they're stitching together an alternative to the Western infrastructure of trade and transit.
00:50:00.000They'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.
00:50:11.000And that's being done by their own standards.
00:50:14.000So China is now pouring more concrete...
00:50:17.000Every three years than the U.S. poured in the entire 20th century.
00:50:22.000And if concrete were a country, it would be the world's third biggest carbon emitter.
00:50:27.000So, 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.
00:50:37.000America 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 a relatively small part of the problem, and within the U.S., market forces are doing a lot of, are making a lot of progress for us.
00:50:54.000So, the real issue is how do we figure out a new geopolitics that forces countries like China to act better?
00:51:03.000And one answer may be, as weird as it is to say, that, you know, Xi Jinping is basically a dictator.
00:51:10.000If he wants to impose 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 authoritarianism.
00:51:26.000And he has, especially since Trump has been elected, been a lot more aggressive about talking about climate because he sees if America is not going to be leading, this is an opportunity for China to be like the real face of climate.
00:51:39.000And that means they've paid, you know, they've invested a ton in solar and wind.
00:51:44.000They've done a lot with air pollution.
00:51:46.000So Beijing used to be really awful in 2013. More than a million Chinese people died of air pollution.
00:53:05.000Well, you could imagine lab-grown meat having a much smaller carbon footprint.
00:53:09.000I mean, it should if it proceeds as we expect it will.
00:53:14.000And like I said before, when you look at each particular threat, you can see reasons for optimism.
00:53:19.000You can see like, oh, we'll figure it out in this way, we'll figure it out in that way.
00:53:21.000But the UN says we need to have all of our global emissions By 2030, to have a chance of averting two degrees of warming, which they call catastrophic warming.
00:53:34.000And 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.
00:53:43.000They say, the UN says, what is necessary is a global mobilization of 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.
00:54:00.000I mean, maybe 10 years from now we'll get there.
00:54:05.000But the total decarbonization that's required is we need to totally zero out on carbon by 2050, they say.
00:54:13.000And I just think, you know, a lot of these sectors are much trickier.
00:54:19.000We could maybe zero out on energy, zero out on carbon when it comes to energy in 15 years if we wanted to.
00:54:24.000But again, that's just 30% of the total problem.
00:54:28.000Which is why I think there's the negative emission stuff, the carbon capture is so important because it will allow us...
00:54:34.000To 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.
00:54:45.000But that's, you know, those technologies have been called magical thinking by, like, the Journal of Nature, which is like the biggest scientific journal, writing about this stuff.
00:54:55.000So it's sort of a leap of faith to think that they could solve that problem.
00:54:59.000Do you think that we're dealing with shifts in degrees of perception that things like your book, things like Al Gore's movie, things like anytime there's a new story that's written in the New York Times or in any periodical, we need more of this.
00:55:16.000It needs to be hammered home to people.
00:55:18.000It needs to be something that's a global discussion that accelerates.
00:55:45.000People I talk to in Europe are focused on the California fires, even though they have wildfires over there.
00:55:50.000There's something about the California fires that they're really worried about.
00:55:52.000When 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.
00:56:01.000You know, every day on the news, there's some, you know, dramatic extreme weather.
00:56:08.000And when they come one after the other, I think that's a really powerful teaching tool.
00:56:13.000So, you know, there's this term, it's now outdated, but 500-year storm you hear a lot about.
00:56:20.000500-year storm means, you know, a hurricane that would hit a particular area once every five centuries, right?
00:56:28.000That means five centuries ago there were no white people in America.
00:56:32.000So that means we're talking about a storm that would come once As colonists came to America, as they, you know, committed genocide against Native Americans, as they built their own empire, as they built an empire of slaves and cotton, as they fought a civil war,
00:56:48.000as they fought World War I, as they fought World War II, everything that we've done, we expect one, one storm of that kind in that time.
00:56:57.000Hurricane Harvey was the third 500-year storm to hit Houston in three years.
00:57:03.000We are living in such unprecedented climate that it's impossible to look at the news and not learn that.
00:57:12.000Despite all of our inclinations, all of our reflexes to look away, I think it is seeping in.
00:57:18.000I think people are beginning to be more alarmed about it.
00:57:28.000I'm somebody who's awakened to this out of fear.
00:57:31.000And when I look at the history of environmental activism, when I look at activism generally, we don't try to get people to stop smoking cigarettes by messaging through optimism.
00:57:39.000We try to get them to stop because we tell them how bad it's going to be for them.
00:57:42.000Drunk driving, nuclear proliferation, same thing.
00:57:45.000Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring about pesticides.
00:58:04.000And I think that that should be part of how we think about this story, obviously.
00:58:09.000I 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.
00:58:25.000They don't think of it as the overarching, all-encompassing story of our time that requires an existential response.
00:58:34.000And even saying those words make me uncomfortable because it's hard for me to believe that the threat is that big.
00:58:45.000And, 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 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,
00:59:02.000in addition to probably planning to adapt.
00:59:13.000Well, I mean, I think in a situation like that, most people emerge from a particular disaster and think, my God, since this is so awful, it must be an anomaly.
00:59:28.000And, you know, I think New York was really horrified as a city by Sandy, but...
00:59:35.000There's going to be Sandy's, I don't remember the exact stat, like once every five years by the end of the century.
00:59:52.000I was talking to a really prominent climate scientist a few months ago who was one of the lead authors on the UN report, lives in New York, does a lot of consulting with the city, and I said, so are we going to build a seawall to protect New York from flooding?
01:00:08.000And he was like, oh absolutely, Manhattan real estate is way too expensive to let flood, so we'll definitely build a seawall.
01:00:15.000But an infrastructure project like that Takes at least 30 years to build.
01:00:20.000And if we started right now, we wouldn't be able to finish in time to save Howard Beach and parts of Brooklyn and Queens.
01:02:24.000And this is all because of the raising sea level, because of the melting ice, because of the temperature, and all this is happening.
01:02:30.000And 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 is all connected.
01:03:16.000Oh, but if you see, look at, like, doesn't that look like a water level on the apartment buildings on the right-hand side near where your cursor is?
01:03:35.000I mean, it's going to take a long time, so you can adjust to that a little bit.
01:03:37.000But that's always been the case, right?
01:03:41.000I mean, they find these artifacts and things in the middle of the ocean, in areas where people used to be able to live, and now they can't live anymore.
01:04:02.000I 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.
01:05:13.000And so, for every degree north of that, you lose about a percentage point of GDP. So, the U.S. is now at about 13.5 degrees Celsius at our median temperature.
01:05:24.000That means that we're losing about a half percentage point of GDP every year from it.
01:05:29.000But there are parts of the U.S. that were cooler than 13 and are now brought up to this optimal level.
01:05:34.000Silicon Valley is like exactly at 13 degrees right now.
01:05:38.000Which is, you know, notable because they're like...
01:05:43.000So that'll be true for Scandinavia generally.
01:05:45.000And it may be part of the explanation why there's been so much economic productivity in Scandinavia over the last generation is that they have already...
01:05:52.000Started doing better with temperature.
01:05:54.000Crops are gonna be more bountiful in Russia.
01:05:56.000Like, Russia will have better agriculture because of global warming.
01:06:00.000Which is why they make such a, you know, they're such a complicated figure in the geopolitical story about climate.
01:06:09.000They have almost all of their economic activity has to do with burning oil.
01:06:12.000But they're also poised to benefit from warming.
01:06:14.000So they're doubly motivated to produce more global warming.
01:06:17.000And they have such a fuck the rest of the world perspective that they're not going to stop.
01:06:22.000Whereas Canada, probably they're likely to, even though they'd benefit from more warming, they'll probably get on board with any program to avert warming.
01:06:29.000But that's a dilemma that faces every nation.
01:06:33.000You know, like Justin Trudeau He talks a lot of shit about Donald Trump and his climate policy, but Justin Trudeau is also approving new pipelines.
01:06:42.000Angela Merkel does the same, but she's retiring nuclear so quickly in Germany that they're having to use dirty energy, and even though they've had this incredible green energy revolution there, their emissions are going up.
01:06:56.000And every country in the world It's a collective action problem.
01:07:00.000Every country in the world is incentivized to behave badly and let the rest of the world clean up the mess.
01:07:06.000So 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.
01:07:13.000They're basically, you know, holding themselves to the Paris Accords, even though the country as a whole isn't.
01:07:23.000The temperature impact on California wildfires will be determined by, like I said earlier, basically what China does.
01:07:29.000So, in terms of, you know, what any individual area, what any individual nation is doing, the motivations are really, really complicated there.
01:07:38.000And in California in particular, this is a bit of a tangent, but, you know, the state has done incredible stuff with emission standards, fuel efficiency, green energy.
01:07:49.000And yet, all of those gains now are wiped out every year by the fires.
01:08:00.000Trees are basically coal in the sense that they are stored carbon.
01:08:03.000When they burn, they release carbon into the atmosphere.
01:08:06.000So 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.
01:08:19.000And you know about in Brazil, the president of Brazil wants to like basically deforest the Amazon.
01:08:27.000The Amazon is responsible for something like 30% of the world's oxygen and is a huge – so all plants obviously absorb carbon and produce oxygen.
01:08:37.000So plant life is really good for fighting climate change.
01:08:41.000When you say he wants to deforest the Amazon, like at what scale?
01:08:45.000So the scientists who've studied his proposal say that his plans would be the equivalent of adding, over a 10-year period, adding a second China to the world's global footprint.
01:09:05.000Well, he has a kind of a Trumpy, like, I'm gonna fuck the environmentalist's perspective, too.
01:09:09.000So he's just, like, a little bit, like, you know, whatever, flipping the bird to people who care about it.
01:09:17.000And 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.
01:09:30.000You know, after World War II, we built a whole liberal international order around the principle of human rights.
01:09:35.000That would have been unthinkable in the 20s, and yet it led to a series of military interventions over the next half century.
01:09:43.000Because people were behaving badly towards their own citizens.
01:09:45.000If 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.
01:09:56.000We're just going to go in and take you out.
01:10:00.000And this is what I mean when I say it's a kind of all-encompassing, all-impacting threat.
01:10:21.000Is there anybody that wants to debate you on this?
01:10:24.000So, I wrote this article a couple years ago that produced, I mean, it was a huge sort of viral phenomenon, but it produced also some scientific criticism.
01:10:31.000And, 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.
01:11:06.000People are actually really interested in Talking seriously about just how big a deal this is in a way that they might not have been just a year ago.
01:12:03.000And there's now a huge partisan split on whether 12 Years a Slave deserves an Oscar.
01:12:08.000Partisanship has 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 fucking high number, actually.
01:12:21.000I don't think that the Republican Party is really any more a denier party.
01:12:25.000I think they're just a party of skeptics and self-interest.
01:12:29.000They want to look out for business interests, which actually the calculus there is changing, which I'll talk about in a second.
01:12:35.000But people don't want to believe that horrifying things are real because who would?
01:13:02.000And I do think that the economic logic is really powerful here.
01:13:06.000So it used to be the case that there was economic conventional wisdom that action on climate was going to be really expensive because it would require massive upfront investment and it would mean also foregoing economic growth.
01:13:18.000But all of the new research the last couple of years reverses that logic totally.
01:13:22.000So there's a big report 2018 that said that we could add $26 trillion to the global economy through rapid decarbonization by just 2030. We could avoid all of these horrible $600 trillion impacts that we're talking about if we decarbonize rapidly.
01:13:39.000And there are also obviously business opportunities there, their whole solar empires to build, their whole new electric grid to build.
01:13:46.000So the economic conventional wisdom is now that fast action on climate is better for the economy than slow action on climate.
01:13:53.000That hasn't yet totally taken over the perspective of our policymakers globally, but I think it will soon.
01:14:01.000And when it does, I think that we'll see like a real sea change in their world.
01:14:06.000Perspective, 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 cost some people some jobs and cost a percentage point of economic growth, that's not worth it.
01:14:19.000Let me just kick the can down the road.
01:14:33.000I mean, if we really have to have global emissions by 2030, it means really, really aggressive action, which I don't think is possible.
01:14:40.000But 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.
01:14:45.000So you think that once there's a financial incentive For people to either some sort of an industry that reduces carbon or something along those lines.
01:14:55.000Industries that are working to mitigate global warming.
01:14:59.000That once there's a financial sort of benefit for these people to innovate and to move forward with this, that that's when we're going to see real change?
01:15:07.000Yeah, 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, then it would be, and even,
01:15:23.000like, past laws, you know, regulating, say, fuel efficiency, or even banning internal combustion engines, which I think will happen within a couple decades.
01:15:35.000If the economic picture of taking that path is much rosier than the economic picture of inaction, I think they'll go down the path of action.
01:15:44.000And, you know, again, the question is how aggressively, how quickly, and in what form.
01:15:49.000But I do think that, you know, I do think the incentives will be different.
01:15:54.000Five years from now than they looked five years ago.
01:15:59.000So 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.
01:16:09.000Well, I mean, if you look around the world, denial is not really a problem anywhere but the U.S. There's a little bit in the U.K., but it's a totally American phenomenon.
01:16:16.000And when you understand that the U.S. is only 15% of all global emissions...
01:16:19.000Is that just typical American arrogance?
01:16:21.000Like, what do you think is the root of that?
01:16:25.000I think it's basically bad behavior by the oil companies.
01:16:28.000I mean, they've put out really aggressive disinformation and denial.
01:16:33.000You ever see the movie Merchants of Doubt?
01:16:39.000Yeah, and I know the people who wrote the book, too, who are really, really great.
01:16:43.000And, you know, it's especially horrifying because in the 60s and 70s, the oil companies were, like, doing some of the most ambitious research on climate.
01:16:52.000So they're, you know, then they ended up suppressing that going forward.
01:16:56.000But They knew shit about how the planet was going to change before any of the rest of us.
01:17:04.000But there was no alternatives back then.
01:17:06.000And there was no real emission standards.
01:17:09.000That's when catalytic converters started being enacted, right?
01:17:12.000Well, you know, if we had started decarbonization in 2000, which just coincidentally was the year that Al Gore won the popular vote for president, we would have had to globally cut emissions by about 3% per year to get below 2 degrees.
01:17:27.000We're now at a spot where we have to cut them by about 10% per year.
01:17:30.000And if we wait another decade, we're going to have to cut them by 30% per year, which is like an unthinkable rate.
01:17:36.000We wouldn't have had to take such aggressive action if we had started early.
01:17:40.000We would have had to just be doing moderate, kind of on the margins changes.
01:17:46.000But we're now in a situation where the problem is way too big for that.
01:17:49.000And there are people who want to talk about the solutions that could have been useful 20 years ago now.
01:17:54.000Talking about the carbon tax is like one quite popular thing to talk about.
01:17:58.000The UN says that in order to be effective, a global carbon tax would need to be perhaps as high as $5,500 a ton, and there's nowhere else in the world where there's a tax that's even one one-hundredth as high as that right now.
01:18:13.000And the places in the world where they do have carbon taxes, everybody's emissions are still going up.
01:18:17.000So there was a time when you don't have to change anything, we'll just fiddle on the margins here, could have worked if we had really been focused on it.
01:18:26.000But we're sort of past that point now, unfortunately.
01:18:30.000But it's interesting, talking about the oil companies, I think they're responsible for denial, but I also think that denial is not all that important in American politics.
01:18:40.000Because when you look around the world, you see many countries 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.
01:18:52.000And so you think, well, what is the sickness here?
01:18:54.000Is it the Republican Party and their climate denial?
01:18:56.000Or is it the fact that all of us just want more, better, cheaper stuff?
01:19:02.000And we have a really hard time conceiving of different paths that don't push us towards more consumption and, you know, more of the modern amenities that we sort of assume will keep accumulating over time.
01:19:16.000I mean, people say financial capitalism is the problem.
01:19:19.000I have some sympathy for that view, but I also look around the world.
01:19:21.000I see social democracies who are behaving really poorly when it comes to carbon.
01:19:24.000I see socialist countries who are behaving really poorly when it comes to carbon.
01:19:28.000It seems on some level like it's even deeper than the systems that we have to organize and manage our cultural priorities.
01:19:36.000And there are now, you know, getting back to the villainy of the oil companies, there are now all these lawsuits that are being brought against them for basically on the model of the cigarette companies like that for climate damages.
01:19:52.000They may put some of these companies out of business.
01:19:54.000I think it's not that likely, but it's possible.
01:19:57.000There are also other lawsuits that are happening that are really interesting.
01:20:00.000There's one in the Netherlands that some people held the Dutch government.
01:20:06.000Basically, the Dutch government was not honoring the Paris Accords and citizens sued to hold them to that and won the case.
01:20:13.000So the Dutch government is now obligated legally to do better on climate than they were doing on their own.
01:20:17.000And in the US, there's this amazing court case called Juliana versus the United States, which is a lawsuit being brought by kids.
01:20:25.000Using this kind of ingenious use of the equal protection clause, they're arguing that their generation has been exposed to climate damages that the previous generation, their parents' generation, were protected from.
01:20:39.000And so they're saying, this climate policy is a violation of the equal protection clause.
01:20:44.000You're not protecting us in the same way that you protected our parents.
01:20:48.000That's at the district court in Oregon, which is just one level below the Supreme Court.
01:20:51.000I think it'll win in the district court.
01:20:53.000It almost certainly won't win at the Supreme Court.
01:20:54.000But if it did win in the Supreme Court, it would immediately obligate the U.S. 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.
01:21:09.000But they'd be obligated to do everything they could, which would mean sort of suddenly something like the The World War II scale mobilization that the UN calls for, which would be really kind of dramatic and incredible.
01:21:20.000And I think that's one path forward is through litigation because so many places in the world, it's not just politics are inert like American politics are inert.
01:21:30.000It's just there's a lot of slow-moving bureaucracy and slow-moving public opinion.
01:21:36.000And 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 the courts on climate too.
01:22:04.000A lot of them are really big and powerful, and any government in the world is not going to want a major industry to completely collapse.
01:22:14.000But, you know, if we're really subsidizing them $5 trillion a year, that's a ton of money that could be poured into green, like to R&D of new technology.
01:22:24.000It could be poured into carbon capture, like we talked about before.
01:22:26.000That's just an unbelievable resource and it would accelerate...
01:22:30.000The decline of coal in particular and other oil, other fossil fuel businesses, which would be great.
01:22:39.000In individual countries, yeah, but it's slow moving.
01:22:43.000You know, there's stuff about – people are taking action in all different ways at all different levels, which I think is basically necessary.
01:22:49.000So there are cities in Europe where cars are now being banned.
01:26:20.000I think, you know, like, there are reasons why he gets the shit that he gets, but I also think, like, Tesla and SolarCity are incredibly important.
01:26:28.000And I'm actually, I don't understand why there aren't more people in Silicon Valley who are focused on climate in this way.
01:26:35.000Like, obviously, they want, like, these are people who see themselves as gods, who want to be world historical figures.
01:26:42.000They're literally- You think they do that?
01:31:05.000I mean, I'm not criticizing you, because I think it's a very common thought.
01:31:09.000But why is it that when we look at these super rich 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?
01:31:19.000Isn't it sort of just how you're always going to look at someone who lives in a hundred million dollar house?
01:31:27.000I 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.
01:33:00.000You know, I interviewed Kurzweil a while back when I was doing this sci-fi show and I went to this 2045 conference that they had in Manhattan and it was...
01:33:11.000These guys are, they're talking about something that they think will be invented, and they're acting as if it's been invented.
01:33:30.000That's a weird thing that we do, though, right?
01:33:32.000We always look to like, oh, someone's going to handle this.
01:33:35.000Yeah, well, the brain upload stuff is interesting to me with regard to climate just because it's like a portal through which we can escape environmental degradation.
01:33:46.000So if the world is on fire and full of suffering...
01:33:49.000Maybe we can just upload our minds to some machines and not live in the real world anymore.
01:33:55.000And 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.
01:34:06.000And that sounds in a lot of ways like declinist and whatever, but I also think it may be a kind of coping mechanism for I think?
01:34:30.000And relationship to the world and idea of our place in nature and history, all of these things are really up in the air and will be affected by climate change, I think, in ways that we don't yet appreciate or understand.
01:34:45.000So, to wave the wand, what would be step number one?
01:34:50.000Step number one is ending fossil fuel subsidies.
01:35:44.000It's all just how much carbon we put into the atmosphere.
01:35:47.000So 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 described and understood in terms of carbon so that For instance, you walk down the aisle in the supermarket,
01:36:02.000you see organic food, you see non-GMO food, you'll also see carbon-free food.
01:36:08.000I think that'll be a big part of the way that we consume everything, that things will be advertised that way, promoted that way.
01:36:14.000But globally, we just need to really focus on reducing carbon.
01:36:20.000And wherever it is, which is almost everywhere, we need to figure out new ways to do whatever it is we're doing that's causing that problem.
01:36:28.000We need to make it trendy in LA. That's what we do.
01:36:30.000Have some organic, gluten-free, carbon-free food.
01:36:33.000I feel like that's already kind of happening.
01:36:42.000I mean, I think in different parts of the world, people will relate differently to it.
01:36:47.000So, like, yeah, in China, they're scheduled to have this huge...
01:36:51.000Boom in beef consumption and dairy consumption because it's expected that as that country gets richer, the people will adopt a more Western diet.
01:37:02.000But it's also possible that they won't.
01:37:06.000That, like, the new Chinese middle class will be still really interested in, you know, tofu, less interested in beef, less interested in milk.
01:37:17.000And It might be easier to have them follow that path than it will be to make the average American eat less beef.
01:38:15.000Bring along some carbon capture plants so that they reduce their footprint.
01:38:21.000At every level, the level of the individual, like talking about buying a Tesla or buying a Range Rover or whatever, I think we'll start to think in terms of carbon, and that'll be a sign of just how totally climate change will have conquered Yeah.
01:38:49.000What about, is there a way to educate people in a way that's not preachy, that sort of moves the needle in that direction?
01:38:58.000I think conversations like this are important, I think your book's very important, and I think, you know, Yeah.
01:39:30.000I 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.
01:39:39.000And because the people that get involved in it, part of the reason why they get involved in it is for virtue signaling.
01:39:54.000But otherwise, I basically haven't changed anything because I do think that politics and policy are the most important impact you can have.
01:40:08.000Ask a newcomer to the movement to demonstrate their commitment by making themselves the most optimally committed that they possibly could be.
01:40:19.000That's just going to alienate so many people.
01:40:22.000And this is obviously an issue where we need more people engaged in a more direct, profound way.
01:40:27.000So I think for me, it's like anyone who wants to care about climate, who wants to vote about climate, like, come on.
01:40:33.000And I think that, you know, Hollywood can be really important here.
01:40:36.000I mean, since I've been out here, I've had a couple meetings about shows and stuff, and I do think that we've had really corny storytelling about climate change, and that there are actually opportunities for, like, really incredible new kinds of storytelling.
01:40:52.000I mean, in the book, I read about this story that happened a couple years ago where...
01:40:59.000You know, anthrax that had killed a reindeer in Russia in the early 20th century.
01:41:05.000The reindeer was frozen in permafrost for the entire 20th century.
01:41:09.000Permafrost melted, the reindeer thawed, the anthrax was released, and killed at least one boy and a number of other reindeer in Russia.
01:41:18.000So, in the ice, in the Arctic ice, you know, we know of rock as like a record of geological history.
01:41:24.000Ice is also a record of geological history.
01:41:25.000So, like the bubonic plague is trapped in ice.
01:41:28.000The Spanish flu from 1918 that killed hundreds of millions of people is trapped in ice.
01:41:34.000There are diseases trapped in the Arctic ice from before humans were around, which means that humans' immune system have no experience with them.
01:41:46.000There's so many horror movies that you can make about this subject.
01:42:31.000About diseases coming out of the Arctic ice.
01:42:33.000We will be reading 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.
01:42:42.000We will be reading about climate conflict.
01:42:45.000We'll be reading about, you know, I mean, all this shit.
01:43:40.000And that happened because a bacteria that had been living inside their guts was changed by temperature conditions.
01:43:51.000It was an unusually hot, unusually humid summer.
01:43:54.000And 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.
01:44:07.000Now, we have, inside us, Countless bacteria and viruses.
01:44:14.000Scientists believe millions in every human.
01:44:18.000So our guts are full of bacteria that do our digestion for us, they monitor our moods.
01:44:22.000There are some scientists who think it's really misleading to even think of the human as a unitary animal rather than a kind of composite creature.
01:44:32.000And most of those bacteria and viruses are not going to be dramatically transformed by a degree or two degrees of warming.
01:44:50.000But what if that means suddenly schizophrenia increases by 15% because schizophrenia is related to a bacterial infection called Toxoplasma, I think it's bacteria, Toxoplasma gondii.
01:45:07.000Yeah, it like triples your chances of getting schizophrenia.
01:45:09.000And 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.
01:45:20.000And that's true of the planet as a whole.
01:45:22.000I think that's one of the big lessons of my book, is that this is such a delicate system.
01:45:26.000It's been stable for all of human history, and now it's not stable.
01:45:30.000What that means for how we live, we don't know yet, but the changes will be significant, will be profound.
01:45:37.000You know, our bodies will be living differently in a world that's two degrees warmer than they are today.
01:45:42.000We can't really predict what those impacts will be, but they could be quite dramatic.
01:45:46.000And 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.
01:45:55.000Jesus Christ, you're freaking me out, David.
01:46:00.000Well, not just crazy, but it seems like...
01:46:05.000When you're talking about things like this, when you're talking about climate change affecting our actual gut parasites or 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.
01:46:23.000And part of the problem is people here are like, oh, relax, everything's fine.
01:46:27.000This 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.
01:46:36.000It's a weird compartmentalization thing that human beings do.
01:47:11.000I mean, I sleep through compartmentalization and denial, too.
01:47:14.000I'm not, you know, I mentioned earlier, like, I think it's been a problem for environmentalism for a long time, this kind of holier-than-thou thing.
01:47:23.000Until a couple years ago when I started really worrying about this stuff, I had the same disinclination to take it seriously that most people do.
01:47:30.000You know, I thought climate change was real.
01:47:32.000I thought it was something that we need to worry about and deal with.
01:47:35.000But I thought it was, like, a small problem that could be dealt with without much change to my life.
01:47:53.000But the more I looked at the science, the more I just realized this isn't about affecting some part of nature over there.
01:48:03.000It's about affecting all of human life, every aspect of human life as it's lived on this planet, and that really terrified me.
01:48:09.000But 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 shit.
01:48:15.000Go to the gym, watch basketball, go to my day job, and...
01:48:20.000I don't think that we should be ashamed of that.
01:48:24.000I think all of us are going to have different reactions to this story, different perspectives on the crisis, and that's good, that's human.
01:48:34.000But spreading the word generally, making people a little more alarmed, is going to make people take some more action, and that's what we need.
01:48:43.000But, you know, Like I said before, the psychological biases are so strong that when I imagine my daughter's life, I'm not imagining a hellscape.
01:48:53.000I'm imagining the world that I grew up in.
01:49:00.000That's how everybody relates to the world.
01:49:04.000And it's just 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.
01:49:16.000There's no way that the climate system as it exists today will be stabilized forever.
01:49:25.000Every tick upward of temperature will create more climate suffering somewhere in the world.
01:49:29.000And if we get to really dramatic levels of warming, that suffering will be basically everywhere.
01:49:36.000We can't continue orienting our perspective on the future on the world as it is today.
01:49:41.000We have to take seriously this range of temperatures, 2 degrees to 4 degrees, that we're on track for this century as a way of generating sufficient Activity and response and adapting as we need to.
01:49:56.000If we keep looking out the window and thinking the world as it is now will continue, we're not going to do anything.
01:50:01.000And that's what we've done over the last 30 years, which has been catastrophic.
01:50:07.000I 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 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 a civilization yeah 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%.