Chris Field is the Director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Melvin and Joan Lane Professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies at Stanford University. Prior to his appointment at the Woods Institute, Chris was a staff member at the Carnegie Institution for Science and founding director of Carnegie s Department of Global Ecology. Chris s research has focused on climate change, and he is a very influential scientist in the field, widely cited. He s especially focused on solutions that improve our lives now and decrease the amount of future warming. He's been deeply involved in the national and international efforts to advance our understanding of global ecology and climate change. Chris has also overseen many of the efforts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and as you ll hear, he s also been elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Max Planck Research Award among others. In this episode, he talks about his background in biology and ecology, his early research interests, and what he s learned about climate change from his time as a scientist and from his work on the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report. He also talks about how we can take better care of our soils, our forests, and our oceans, and on the need to transition to an energy-based, food-based system that doesn t emit greenhouse gases. And, of course, it s a good thing that he s got a Ph.D. in biology. Thanks for listening! Sam Harris - Making Sense Podcast is a podcast that makes all of this possible. - EPISODE LINKS: This is another PSA: This is a PSA that makes it possible to subscribe to the podcast by clicking here to subscribe at Samharris.org - a podcast about the podcast is making all of that possible, right? And now I bring you, I am with Chris Field - let me know what you think of this podcast? - check it out on my website: . Thank you, Chris Field, and I ll be back next week! - Sam Harris, too - making it possible - in the Making Sense podcast on this podcast by by , , and so on and so forth -- thank you, in the making sense of it - Thank you - so much so that you ll get a chance to be involved in this podcast - I m talking about it.
00:20:16.260And the African fires are almost entirely savanna fires, grassland fires.
00:20:22.640And of course, the consequences for recovery for the global carbon cycle are much different for these grassland and savanna fires
00:20:33.100than they are for forest and chaparral fires like we have in North America.
00:20:37.660But it also is true that there are a number of factors that have contributed to the increase in fire risk in many of these fire-prone ecosystems.
00:20:51.680In western North America, we know that decades of fire suppression allowed the accumulation of large amounts of highly flammable material.
00:21:03.460And we know that in western North America, there's been a huge influx of people into what we often call the wildland-urban interface,
00:21:14.300but into forested regions that are susceptible to wildfire.
00:21:17.900And those two factors, when coupled with the increased tendency for these forests to generate unmanageable conflagrations as a result of climate change,
00:21:33.520And in western North America, especially in California, we really have seen a transition from fires that were manageable in a kind of professional fire sense,
00:21:48.300even though occasionally they had devastating consequences, to fire behavior that's really unprecedented.
00:21:54.120And it has resulted in a huge increase in the area burn and a frustrating and devastating increase in loss of lives and wildfires.
00:22:05.220And with any particular fire, it's hard to know what the contribution of climate change was until it's been thoroughly evaluated.
00:22:13.900I think with the fires in Maui, we still don't have a clear picture.
00:22:18.020Okay, so let's track through this somewhat systematically here.
00:22:22.280And what I'd like you to do is demarcate what is totally uncontroversial from a scientific point of view from the gray areas.
00:22:31.200Because insofar as there's a through line here that is analogous to the claim that smoking is bad for your health,
00:22:39.660you know, something that's totally non-debatable at this point in medicine,
00:23:00.240And what, if any, are the main sources of uncertainty with respect to the measurements and the models we're developing as a result of them?
00:23:10.300We have a really accurate record of global temperatures going back to the latter decades of the 19th century.
00:23:19.760Around 1880, we had a sufficient number of carefully instrumented and observed weather stations and ocean observations
00:23:31.580to be able to develop a high confidence record of global temperatures.
00:23:37.720And that core record, which is now maintained in a bunch of different research institutions,
00:23:44.340is based on tens of thousands of thermometers.
00:23:51.220There are millions of ocean observations and just an incredibly carefully curated record.
00:24:00.640And there's been a huge amount of scholarship in figuring out what happens when the area urbanizes around a weather station
00:24:15.800And all of that has been really super carefully filtered out so that the different groups that are doing the analysis,
00:24:24.200including one really prominent group that's based at UC Berkeley and started out to prove that the instrumented temperature record wasn't all that great,
00:24:35.660ended up demonstrating that it was spectacularly good.
00:24:39.720And they got exactly the same thing as NASA and the UK Met Office and the other groups that are doing the temperature records.
00:24:46.820So we have basically thermometers that have been deployed around the world that have been measuring temperatures of air and ocean water for about 140 years.
00:24:59.520And those are increasingly augmented with satellite data.
00:25:04.560For a while, there was a thread running through the skeptical climate science literature that the satellite data wasn't showing the same amount of warming that we were getting with the surface observations
00:25:21.500and that there must be something wrong with the surface observations.
00:25:25.420But it turns out that once the orbital dynamics of the satellites were understood and appropriately corrected,
00:25:35.300that the temperature record from the satellites is essentially identical to the temperature records from the thermometers.
00:25:43.100So we now have not only these instrument records and the satellite records,
00:25:48.400but we have literally tens of thousands of different kinds of ecosystem markers that are telling us the same thing.
00:25:57.180We have things like flowering dates of different plants.
00:26:01.040We have the hatching, nesting dates of birds.
00:26:06.080And these observations around the world really paint exactly the same picture,
00:26:11.500a picture where we have seen to date a warming of a little more than one Celsius,
00:26:19.840about two degrees Fahrenheit over the last century,
00:26:23.600and a warming that has rapidly accelerated since around 1990.
00:26:31.280How do we differentiate the natural climate variability from human-induced change?
00:26:38.460Obviously, the climate has changed over its history, and we have some record of that.
00:26:44.080And I guess I could also add the question here,
00:26:48.720how do current CO2 levels compare to historical levels?
00:26:55.460Do we actually think we know the percentage of change that is human-induced at this point?
00:27:00.240In the CO2 concentration and in the temperature, we have a good record of both.
00:27:05.360So this question of what historical variability will look like, of course, is quite different.
00:27:12.780If you look on different timescales, we have good records of temperature that we can extend back
00:27:22.340the order of a thousand years based on something that feels like instruments,
00:27:28.460and we can have high confidence that the instrumented temperature is now the highest it's been in the last
00:29:53.580Well, what we know now is that the biggest source of uncertainty in the decades ahead is what we do.
00:30:03.380And there's a huge difference between a world of ambitious mitigation where greenhouse gas emissions are tackled aggressively,
00:30:12.280brought down to zero, and the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere are removed,
00:30:17.320and the kind of opposite a world of continued high emissions where countries, companies, individuals decide that they're not going to tackle the problem
00:30:29.160and continue to invest heavily in infrastructure and utilization of fossil energy of emissions-intensive agricultural techniques and clearing of forests.
00:30:43.460And with the most ambitious conceivable actions, we can limit warming to somewhere in the range of one and a half to two C,
00:30:58.700the Paris Agreement says we're committed to limiting warming to well under two degrees Celsius.
00:31:04.820And in the world of continued high emissions, we might see a global average temperature in 2100 between four and five degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial.
00:31:21.220Now, one really dramatic, amazing, and encouraging sign is that 10 years ago,
00:31:29.620it looked like we were on a trajectory to be in this world of continued high emissions.
00:31:37.900In the IPCC literature, it's called RCP 8.5, representative concentration pathway with eight and a half degree of watts per square meter of additional climate heating.
00:31:51.380And that was designed as a picture of a world where there were no constraints on using fossil fuels,
00:32:02.360no particular progress in limiting them, and no real effort to turn away from a high emissions lifestyle.
00:32:11.660When we look now at where we're headed in a kind of a most likely outcome,
00:32:18.300the estimates range from this Paris compliant to one and a half to two C to more like three C globally.
00:32:56.680And it's in documentation that meaningful change can come from modest deployment of things that we already know how to do and are affordable.
00:33:08.080I think that that's in many ways the undersung triumph of the transition to a sustainable world is that we have moved dramatically away from this RCP 8.5 world of continuing high emissions.
00:33:25.600Well, I want to talk about the details of what it would take to transition further into a low carbon economy.
00:33:34.340But before we do that, let's talk about some of the feedback mechanisms here,
00:33:39.420because some of them are pretty surprising and even perverse.
00:33:45.120For instance, water vapor is a greenhouse gas,
00:33:49.060and yet certain forms of air pollution have a net cooling effect, right?
00:33:55.240So do we want less water vapor and more sulfur dioxide and soot in the atmosphere?
00:34:00.820I mean, it's just a, actually, there was a piece published in the New York Times today,
00:34:05.380citing, I believe, a paper in Nature from, I think, last year,
00:34:09.400that claimed that without all of our industrial air pollution over the last century,
00:34:14.260the temperature increase would have been 30 to 50 percent higher, right?
00:34:19.240Because all of these polluting aerosols exert this cooling effect by reflecting sunlight back into space.
00:34:26.300And yet, we know that air pollution, it's estimated, kills around 10 million people a year, right?
00:34:31.960So air pollution is a major concern in its own right.
00:34:34.980And it's also true that the air pollution and the greenhouse gases are produced by the same behavior.
00:34:39.920But it's just, there's this perverse fact that if we just got busy cleaning up the pollution side of it,
00:36:23.940So water vapor is simply a part of the system that amplifies the effect of carbon dioxide.
00:36:33.520There's one important wrinkle on that, and it's that water vapor doesn't get very much
00:36:42.240into the upper layers of the atmosphere, the stratosphere.
00:36:45.420And one of the reasons that the emissions from jet airplane travel are so important for climate
00:36:55.060is that jets deliver a substantial amount of water to the stratosphere where it has this
00:37:01.780warming effect and stays in the atmosphere longer than it would if it was at lower elevations.
00:37:08.260So water vapor, super interesting, important.
00:37:10.740And except for the wrinkle about jet airplane travel is not a lever about climate that we
00:37:18.960can control, but we are always going to see this amplifying effect of water vapor.
00:37:25.220Air pollution aerosols have the effect in general of reflecting sunlight back into space,
00:37:34.880resulting in conditions that are cooler than they would otherwise be.
00:37:41.540But air pollution aerosols are devastating for human health around the world.
00:37:47.180Millions of people every year die as a result of exposure to air pollution.
00:37:52.640And a critical priority for environmental action is to find a way to decrease this pollution,
00:37:59.020recognizing that if we were dramatically successful at decreasing levels of aerosols, we would end
00:38:10.260up with climate conditions that were substantially warmer in some places.
00:38:17.520And it is also the case that the aerosol effects tend to be quite local because the lifetime of
00:38:27.940most of the pollutant aerosols is for a short few hours to a few days, as opposed to centuries for carbon
00:38:35.800dioxide. With carbon dioxide, the climate effects are felt everywhere. Aerosols tend to be much more
00:38:42.360local. So that means that, as is the case for water vapor, that aerosols don't make the job easier,
00:38:52.020but they, but they, but they still point a path to a solution and we need to clean up the air pollution
00:38:59.040that's responsible for all these deaths. And, and the biggest problem areas are emissions from coal-fired
00:39:07.180power plants and emissions from diesel engines. We know how to address both of those with renewable energy
00:39:13.900to make more progress. And we need to recognize that as we do that, we'll save millions of lives,
00:39:21.020but we'll have to work harder and faster on decreasing emissions of greenhouse gases because the aerosols have
00:39:29.280been hiding some of the greenhouse gas effect. Let me mention one other aspect of aerosols that
00:39:38.220people are increasingly beginning to discuss. We know from observations of air pollution aerosols from
00:39:47.080power plants and stuff, and, and especially from historic volcanic eruptions that injections of large
00:39:55.620amounts of aerosols into the stratosphere and elevations of 12 to 20 miles above the surface
00:40:03.420can produce a significant cooling of climate. The Philippine volcano Pinatubo that erupted in
00:40:12.0201991 resulted in a global cooling of nearly one degree Fahrenheit for about two years as a result of putting
00:40:24.000large amounts of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, producing aerosols that reflected sunlight and cooled
00:40:32.400the planet. And there have been many calls for exploration of whether we might want to use
00:40:41.500this. It's often called solar geoengineering or solar radiation management to prevent some of the
00:40:49.980warming from occurring. Even at the same time, we're recognizing that that's not a comprehensive
00:40:55.860solution to climate change. The idea of injecting essentially air pollution into the stratosphere is
00:41:04.480that that's a part of the atmosphere, which is not primarily influencing people's health. And where because of the
00:41:14.120way the atmosphere works, material in the stratosphere stays there for one to two years, and the quantity that you
00:41:22.320would need in order to have a significant effect on climate would be much less than the quantity
00:41:27.200that would have the same effect closer to the surface.
00:41:31.220Is there much energy behind that as a mitigation approach at this point? Or is that just a
00:41:37.540kind of a Faustian bargain that we don't really want to think about?
00:41:41.600Well, the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy recently released a report recommending that
00:41:50.960the U.S. government invest in understanding whether or not this kind of solar geoengineering
00:41:58.180is worth considering. I'd say we're at the very early stages. But at the stage where there have been
00:42:04.880in the order of 2,000 scientific papers published on how it would work, what the risks might be,
00:42:12.660what the social and political dynamics might be associated with it. So there are tons of things we
00:42:19.400don't understand, but it's increasingly coming into focus as what you might think of as an emergency
00:42:28.140action for dealing with overshoot. So what do you perceive to be the most important challenges
00:42:36.320in our transitioning to a truly sustainable, low-carbon economy? What are the major impediments
00:42:46.100at this point? I think the biggest challenge we face is the challenge of building a durable
00:42:53.840political coalition around action on climate. The Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan
00:43:02.520Infrastructure Law and the CHIPS Act from the Biden administration of all put large amounts of
00:43:07.860money out there. And we're beginning to see real progress as a result of deploying those funds.
00:43:13.880But we still live in a world where the results of the next presidential election could knock a whole
00:43:21.200bunch of those policies and knock a bunch of that funding out of the arena. And I think for entities
00:43:28.700that need to make long-term plans, utilities, auto manufacturers, energy producers, it's really
00:43:38.220important to have a predictable landscape for long-term investments. And I think that without a durable
00:43:46.980political coalition around action, we'll continue to operate much more slowly than we should. And I think
00:43:55.080there are some key features of this durable political coalition that we haven't yet tackled
00:44:01.200with the seriousness that we need to. One is what happens to the individuals and the communities
00:44:09.540that are negatively impacted by action on climate. What happens to coal mining communities?
00:44:16.360What happens to oil and gas producing states? What happens to the nations that depend on
00:44:22.160exporting fossil fuels for their economic viability? And those questions need to be answered
00:44:30.300in a much more serious way than they have been now. I think there's serious questions about
00:44:36.800the inequalities and injustices that are introduced by action on climate that need to be dealt with.
00:44:46.240And there's serious questions about how we're going to think about balancing diverse interests that are
00:44:57.440aligned on many things, but not perfectly aligned. And one of the cases where we see the kind of
00:45:04.160challenge that I think is going to be really important for the future and really needs to be solved is
00:45:09.700is all of the controversy over the siting of offshore wind power installations. Everybody's in favor of
00:45:17.300offshore wind except where they see the windmills or in favor of utility-scale solar except where it has the
00:45:26.820potential to alter the migration of a desert tortoise or impact an endangered species. And those concerns are
00:45:36.820really important. They can't be dismissed out of hand. But we need to figure out some way to make progress
00:45:44.380around these barriers that are in most cases purely in the human dimension. It's not that we lack the
00:45:52.820technology or that we don't have the engineering capability to deploy a solution. It's that we haven't
00:46:01.180not the political and financial landscape laid out in a way that lets us make progress.
00:46:08.740Well, it seems to me that a lot of the politics is driven by this claim, either implicit or explicit,
00:46:16.180that the consequences of really transitioning to a low-carbon economy would be economically ruinous,
00:46:24.880right? It's just way too expensive. Our economy requires continuous growth. I mean, it's really,
00:46:31.720you know, all of our systems and institutions assume continuous growth. It's really almost a Ponzi scheme.
00:46:39.340And the renewables really aren't up to the task of providing all the energy we need. There's this piece
00:46:47.420about nuclear that I'd love you to address because, you know, it seems like nuclear needs to be part of
00:46:54.320this conversation. And we're really, you know, we really haven't done what we've needed to do to
00:46:59.220build, you know, new generations of nuclear plants. So there's just, there's sense that it's just too,
00:47:04.840it'll be too costly to take this message, this imperative, really, to decarbonize seriously,
00:47:13.200in the, you know, especially in the developed world, you know, places like the United States and
00:47:18.780Europe. And then when you look at other countries in the developing world or between the developing
00:47:25.560world and the most developed places, you know, places like India, it seems a species of first world
00:47:32.180cynicism to say that they need to be thinking about their carbon footprint when they simply are
00:47:40.420following the industrial path that we in the developed world followed toward prosperity,
00:47:46.600right? So we're demanding of them things that we didn't do ourselves. And then there's the question
00:47:51.760of, you know, how to actually make that demand and incentivize them, you know, appropriately,
00:47:57.340ethically and politically. So how do you respond to that arguably disjointed set of concerns about
00:48:06.080just the cost of all of this, both, you know, in the developed world and in the developing world?
00:48:11.980A few years ago, it was really unclear how we would ever bring emissions of carbon dioxide,
00:48:19.420especially down to zero. But now there are really clear pathways that combine being equitable,
00:48:30.120affordable, affordable, reliable, and safe. And I hope it's well known that electricity from
00:48:40.540photovoltaics is now in almost every part of the world cheaper than electricity from fossil. And we've
00:48:48.280learned a huge amount about how to integrate large amounts of renewable electricity into the grid
00:48:56.560and are making really impressive progress in figuring out how to combine renewable sources into a truly
00:49:06.720reliable system. But there are big problems with what's called intermittency with what do you do when
00:49:15.140the wind's not blowing or the sun's not shining? And if we were going to deploy expensive lithium ion
00:49:22.260batteries to be the source of electricity, it would be terribly expensive. But there are a whole bunch
00:49:31.620of strategies we can use to provide the kind of reliability in the electrical system and in
00:49:40.340transportation and in manufacturing that we need. One set of options does involve power from sources like
00:49:48.280nuclear. Nuclear is non-emitting. And we have many countries that are relying on nuclear and have been
00:49:57.300for decades. There are obviously profoundly important questions about the safety of nuclear, about their
00:50:05.700connection with weapons proliferation, and about the susceptibility to terrorism. But there's also a lot of
00:50:14.140progress being made in nuclear. And my personal feeling is that it's important to encourage that progress,
00:50:22.420even if it turns out that nuclear can't compete on price. And at this point, the impression I have is that
00:50:29.940nuclear will have real trouble being competitive in most parts of the world because renewables are so cheap.
00:50:37.580One of the challenges with nuclear is that every increment of extra nuclear power you add to the grid is
00:50:45.360investment of hundreds of millions of dollars. And it's hard to experiment and try different things when each
00:50:52.500increment is so expensive. The nice thing about photovoltaics and windmills is that they can scale in tiny little
00:51:01.100increments. Another feature of the future energy system that we need to think fairly seriously about is
00:51:08.600continuing to use fossil fuel resources but connect them with carbon capture and storage. We know how to
00:51:17.520capture carbon dioxide and compress it and pump it into underground formations. That's one of the main
00:51:25.100techniques we use for extracting oil and gas now. And we know how to run a power plant with
00:51:34.220CO2 capture. We know how to run a biofuels plant with CO2 capture. And especially at the margins where
00:51:42.160we're trying to figure out how to provide that last increment of reliability, how we're trying to fill in the
00:51:48.820gaps where the renewables aren't working. We have lots of potential for using, especially for countries
00:51:57.040that already have a lot of deployed infrastructure, fossil with CCS. And then an area that I think is
00:52:04.500incredibly exciting and really has the potential to map out the bridge from where we are now to a
00:52:12.940system that's fully based on non-technologies involves hydrogen. Currently we make hydrogen from
00:52:21.660natural gas and the way you make hydrogen from gas is the carbon part of the natural gas goes
00:52:29.280into the atmosphere of CO2 when the hydrogen gets used. We could capture that carbon and pump it into
00:52:35.960underground reservoirs. That's often called blue hydrogen. And then we can use the hydrogen to make
00:52:42.160electricity either by burning it or by running it through a fuel cell. But we also know a lot about
00:52:48.620how to make hydrogen from electricity by splitting water. That's currently quite a lot more expensive
00:52:55.840than making it from natural gas, but we're seeing progress there. And once we have large amounts of
00:53:03.300hydrogen available, we can use that hydrogen as the equivalent of a gigantic unlimited battery and use
00:53:13.100the hydrogen to make electricity when the sun's not shining, use the sunshine to make hydrogen when the sun
00:53:19.380is shining. And the pathway that looks to me the most attractive for this transition to a truly
00:53:28.380non-emitting energy system is to take advantage of our ability to make blue hydrogen now, hydrogen from
00:53:37.160natural gas, capturing the CO2 so it's a non-emitting. And then as the cost of making hydrogen
00:53:44.760from sunshine, from electricity goes down, we can transition over to that. It's going to take decades,
00:53:52.020but that's a pathway that looks at this point like it'll be cheaper than continuing to get energy from
00:53:59.480fossil fuels. You look across the transportation and manufacturing and electricity spectrum, there
00:54:06.180are lots of details that need to be worked out and there are some new technologies that are needed,
00:54:11.560but the new technologies aren't the limiting factor at this point. We have access to a lot of amazing
00:54:20.800technology now that can get us a long way to the solutions. I'd like to say a couple things about your
00:54:28.120comment about what should be the timing for the engagement of countries that are not the richest, including
00:54:37.060countries that are the poorest. And there is a strong motivation that the wealthy countries should be
00:54:46.760leading the transition. They're the ones that are responsible for the historical emissions. They're the
00:54:53.200ones that have the economic resources to make the transition. And they also are the ones that have the
00:54:59.960finances to make it affordable. And as the non-emitting energy sources become the cheapest sources and the most
00:55:09.420reliable ones, they'll be increasingly attractive in the developing world. With the middle-income
00:55:16.440countries like India and China that clearly want to be leaders in climate responsive space, there are lots of
00:55:25.860opportunities for them to invest in new technologies now. But they also will be slower than the richest
00:55:33.960countries simply as a result of the fact that they don't have the full kind of capabilities that we have. And we're
00:55:41.420going to need to think really hard about how the rich world interacts with the poor world in terms of driving the
00:55:49.640energy transition. There are kind of two models you can think about. One is that in the rich world, we make the
00:55:58.140non-emitting options so cheap that they're the obvious choice. And the other option is that we really rethink what
00:56:07.280international assistance means and whether financial assistance for accelerating the transition in poorer countries is in the
00:56:17.080interest of the rich world, because it decreases things like risks of political instability.
00:56:23.520And we may see some of that. And I suspect that if we see it, it will be in subtle mechanisms like changes in the
00:56:31.180way that the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund think about their loan portfolios. But one of the things we need to
00:56:40.940make sure to make sure of, and this is again in the spirit of building durable political coalitions, is that this isn't
00:56:48.400going to work if the rich world turns to the poor world and says, you folks have to impoverish yourself further by
00:56:58.140investing resources that you don't have in an accelerated transition.
00:57:02.800I think there are likely to be decades when the rich world has made tremendous progress, may even have
00:57:14.180greenhouse gas emissions down to zero, when countries in the poor world will still tend to
00:57:19.700need to rely on fossil fuels for transportation and electricity generation and manufacturing.
00:57:26.640And we need to build that into the way we think about what the timing of reaching net zero should be. One of the
00:57:35.020things that I'm always frustrated at is that when we talk about the Paris compliant time goal being zero emissions by
00:57:43.8202050, even the richest countries, the richest institutions tend to say, okay, well, I can make a plan to reach net zero by
00:57:55.0602050. When if everybody needs to reach zero emissions by 2050, the richest actors need to be way ahead of that. And I think we still
00:58:10.160haven't stepped up to addressing that aspect of the equity challenge.
00:58:15.060What role does a carbon tax play in this picture?
00:58:18.520There are lots of ways you could think about incentivizing decreases in emissions. Economists tend to
00:58:26.720love carbon tax because it really lets the market sort out which approaches are going to be most
00:58:34.620effective and which are going to be wastes of money. And at least in principle, a carbon tax could be
00:58:43.260deployed in a in a strategic way that would be globally fair that could really encourage the rapid deployment of the best possible
00:58:53.080technologies. There are other things we can do. If you look at the history of environmental regulations, we've actually made more
00:59:01.360progress with command and control approaches than we have with market based approaches. So with the Clean Water Act, the
00:59:11.460most of the requirements have simply said, you can't put this pollution in the water, or you can't pollute it at a higher level than this.
00:59:19.860And there's nothing particular to say that a carbon tax would work better than a command and control approach. It really depends on what the politically enabling conditions are.
00:59:34.620There's been a lot of discussion recently about what's called a border adjustment, where a country with a carbon tax would say, okay, well, any product that is imported from a country that doesn't have a carbon tax has to pay a carbon tax at the border to the country that the product's coming into.
00:59:55.460And of course, that is a big boost for local manufacturing, as well as for addressing the emissions associated with different products.
01:00:08.020And, you know, maybe the concept of a carbon tax with a border adjustment will make it more politically palatable.
01:00:15.640My sense is that in the U.S. we're not very close to agreement on the value of a carbon tax, even though it could, for example, be used to produce a dramatic decrease in income taxes.
01:00:31.160And I think what's really important is that we come up with something that people can agree on politically and move forward with that and not let the perfect be the enemy of the good, even though carbon tax might be something like the perfect.
01:00:49.540Finally, what are you expecting here, if you had to guess what path we're going to take through this, the range of possible outcomes in terms of mitigating, failing to mitigate, creating political consensus necessary to mitigate, failing to do that?
01:01:07.960If you had to guess about what the world is going to look like in 20 years, 30 years, what are you expecting?
01:01:16.900Well, is there a degree of optimism or pessimism?
01:01:19.540That's underwriting your current efforts, or are you just agnostic and doing what you feel we need to do in any case?
01:01:27.580Well, you know, I want to make it clear at the outset that I don't have any special insight into what kind of decision countries around the world are going to make.
01:01:39.140I am optimistic that the progress that I've seen in the past decade has been really consequential on what emissions levels are.
01:01:52.180In most of the rich countries, emissions have been decreasing on a year-by-year basis.
01:01:59.280I think they increased in the U.S. last year, but that was mainly a consequence of the decrease in the COVID pandemic activities.
01:02:07.400But in most countries, emissions are decreasing.
01:02:09.300We now live in a world where electricity from renewables is cheaper than electricity from fossil.
01:02:16.280We live in a world where the most attractive transportation options for private vehicles are electric and where heat pumps can improve the air quality in homes and where we know that pollution from gas stoves is harming people.
01:02:36.360So, you know, lots and lots of indications that technology is ripe for an accelerated transition, but there's still lots of pushback from vested interests, from oil and gas companies, from fossil producing regions of the world, and lots of need to work on the kind of political coalition that I've been talking about.
01:03:03.180I expect us to not achieve the very best outcomes, but to make the transition in a way and at a pace that's going to preserve a livable world.
01:03:19.200And what that might mean is that while we don't meet the Paris Agreement goal of stabilizing warming at well under 2C above pre-industrial, we might end up pretty close to 2C, maybe a couple of tenths above it.
01:03:37.000And there will be incalculable damage associated with not making the goal, but it's a lot better to be at 2 or 2.2 than 3.5 or 4.
01:03:51.200What do you picture is some of those consequences being necessary just for rhetorical effect to get us politically aligned enough to take this seriously over a time horizon that exceeds the four-year presidential election cycle?
01:04:10.620It seems to me that to speak locally about the United States in particular, it's so hard for us to make any decision with a time horizon beyond four years politically that it could well take something so noxious and durable as a stimulus for us to say,
01:04:31.120okay, whatever our political differences, we have to be responding to this year after year after year.
01:04:37.720You know, this is now a non-negotiable decrease in our quality of life.
01:04:42.700Are you picturing that being part of the process where it just, you know, take, you know, whatever it is, wildfires or any other stimulus that just becomes so onerous and obscene to be living with these consequences year after year that we just reset our politics around that?
01:04:59.620Yeah, I have many colleagues who talk about the possibility that truly catastrophic extreme event, a Category 5 hurricane hitting Miami or the kind of mega heat wave that Kim Stanley Robinson describes in Ministry for the Future.
01:05:19.480And it's possible that one of these truly catastrophic events will galvanize national and world opinion.
01:05:29.860My expectation is that it'll probably be a little more incremental than that, that the non-emitting technologies will continue to be cheaper and better and more attractive in the marketplace,
01:05:45.220that an appreciation that the climate change needs to be addressed will get nailed down with each wildfire and each extreme precipitation event,
01:05:56.560and that we'll just gradually transition to a much stronger focus on making progress in this than we have to date.
01:06:08.120And I think that a lot of that is going to be dependent on having this be a world in which there are opportunities for the kinds of individuals and actors that are not seeing opportunities now.
01:06:24.120And that's going to be things like energy producing states, oil and gas companies, individuals who currently work in manufacturing or energy production.
01:06:37.640And I just want to close with the thought that until we're really serious about these interests that are displaced by progress on climate,
01:06:50.340it's going to be really, really hard to come up with the kind of broad political coalition that we need.
01:06:56.980And we'll go more slowly as a result of not building out that coalition.
01:07:02.680Well, Chris, thank you for the tour of the possible apocalypse.
01:07:08.560I feel much better educated and strangely more optimistic for having spoken with you.
01:07:13.640So thanks for what you're doing and thanks for bringing your voice here on the podcast.
01:07:18.500I enjoyed the conversation. Thanks so much.