March 6, 2019 - The Joe Rogan Experience
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| David. | ||
| So, first of all, thanks for doing this. | ||
| Oh, my pleasure. | ||
| I'm excited. | ||
| How much trouble are we in, legitimately? | ||
| I mean, it's pretty bad already, and it's gonna get, I think, a lot, lot worse. | ||
| It's not bad right now, right here. | ||
| It's raining. | ||
| It seems nice out. | ||
| I mean, how long ago were the fires right around the corner? | ||
| I got evacuated. | ||
| It was October. | ||
| Yeah, it was rough. | ||
| But, in all fairness, I've been evacuated three times over the past 20 years. | ||
| Yeah, I know the fires, California's fires are kind of interesting in that they both seem like it's like the future of the apocalypse. | ||
| They're here, but also it's so familiar from like decades of wildfires. | ||
| But, you know, there are scientific estimates that say that they're going to get, by the end of the century, 64 times worse. | ||
| What? | ||
| Yeah, I think that number's a little high because that would mean more than half of California burning every year. | ||
| But, I mean, it's going to get, yeah, it'll get crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And there's no way to avoid any of this wildfire stuff? | ||
| Well, I mean, you know, if we don't raise the temperature of the planet, then... | ||
| But is that the only thing that's causing wildfire? | ||
| I mean, like, obviously, if the temperature raises, there's more brown, dry leaves and grass and stuff like that, but... | ||
| There's a lot of preventative stuff you can do. | ||
| I mean, not building in certain areas. | ||
| I mean, it used to be, you know, the Indians who lived here before the white people came did a lot of controlled burning. | ||
| They, like, lived among fires. | ||
| And I think that's, like, a probably more responsible way to be. | ||
| But we've now built up the whole state so that... | ||
| There are all these homes that we don't want to burn. | ||
| There are all these properties we don't want to burn. | ||
| And 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. | ||
| You could do more controlled fire, you could take more aggressive action in terms of spraying foam and that kind of thing. | ||
| You could have a lot more firefighters. | ||
| But I was just talking to a guy yesterday, I'm out here actually doing some reporting on wildfires, who was saying that no Santa Ana powered wildfire has ever been stopped by firefighters. | ||
| And he's like an environmental historian. | ||
| It's like you can hope that the winds redirect them, but the action of firefighters is basically just spitting in the wind. | ||
| So the action is not to stop, it's to kind of contain it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| As best they can. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And minimize property damage. | ||
| Yeah, but, you know, it's hard because you have a lot more... | ||
| It's a lot easier to do that when... | ||
| If the land was totally raw, you'd be like, oh, we'll just try to direct the fire in this direction. | ||
| But if the land is full of homes, you're like, well, we can't. | ||
| Have you ever seen it live? | ||
| Not a person. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| One time, we were filming Fear Factor, and we were way up on the 5, like... | ||
| Probably, I would say, maybe 75 miles from here. | ||
| And for a full hour, driving about 50 miles an hour, there was fire on the right-hand side of the road for a full hour. | ||
| I mean, like, Lord of the Rings, end of the world. | ||
| Like, you're waiting for Satan to come riding on a burning fire. | ||
| Phoenix over the top of the hill. | ||
| It was crazy. | ||
| I've never seen anything like it in my life. | ||
| That was the worst one I've ever seen. | ||
| But I think that was just because of placement. | ||
| I think that this past one was actually worse in terms of physical damage and size. | ||
| It's just I didn't see it the way I saw this one. | ||
| Well, last year there were flames like hopping over the 405, right? | ||
| And that's really like crazy to me because, you know, I'm a New Yorker, I've lived my whole life in New York, and I just feel in my bones, I now know it's sort of not true, but like my inner emotional perspective on the world is that... | ||
| I live in a fortress, I don't live in nature. | ||
| Like, I walk down on concrete streets, I look up at steel buildings, nature can't come for me. | ||
| But when you see, like, fire straddling the 405, that's, you know, this is a major metropolis here. | ||
| And we're not safe. | ||
| We're certainly not totally safe. | ||
| And that's like, for me, that's a major, like a major revelation I've had, is that wherever you live, no matter how defended against nature you are, climate change is teaching us that, you know, you still live within climate, and when it gets fucked up, it will fuck you up. | ||
| It will affect you in some way. | ||
| Yeah, there was, both sides of the 405 were on fire last year. | ||
| Last year or the year before last, one of those. | ||
| But it was insane. | ||
| It was hitting Bel Air. | ||
| And people were like, well, we've never seen this before. | ||
| I talked to a firefighter once. | ||
| This was years ago. | ||
| And he told me, with the right wind, it's a matter of time for a fire hits the top of LA and burns all the way to the ocean. | ||
| And he goes, and there's not going to be anything we can do about it. | ||
| He goes, if the right wind catches and a fire starts at the top of Los Angeles, it'll just go straight through LA. Look at this. | ||
| What is that from, Jamie? | ||
|
unidentified
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It was the 405 fire. | |
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| Oh, that's it. | ||
| That's the crazy video. | ||
| So this is Bel Air on the left-hand side. | ||
| And so these are people driving down the 405, looking at, you know, the most insane sight for a place that has 30 million people, or whatever LA has, to see the entire hillside on fire. | ||
| And to me, Bel Air is really interesting because most climate impacts, they hit the world's poorest first. | ||
| And the wildfires, they work in the reverse because it's like people living in the hills. | ||
| Those are the rich people. | ||
| But it just shows you no matter how rich you are, no matter how comforted by that wealth you are, you might get hit. | ||
| Well, the best example was Point Doom. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And we were flying over it. | ||
| My friend Bill has a helicopter license. | ||
| And so we went around the peak of Point Doom. | ||
| It's crazy because you know these are like $20 million estates. | ||
| These massive bluff side homes. | ||
| They thought they were living in the peak of luxury, overviewing the ocean. | ||
| And like, wow, we're on top of the world. | ||
| And the fire just... | ||
| Scorched it to the ground. | ||
| That's what it looks like now. | ||
| Yeah, it's so crazy. | ||
| Well, it's really crazy because people have always said, oh, well, they'll protect the rich folks. | ||
| They didn't protect these ones. | ||
| They can't protect anybody when it gets this crazy. | ||
| I think they lost more than 600 homes in Malibu alone. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, and that's, I mean, yeah. | ||
| And you think about Miami Beach going underwater. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, Miami Beach is a weird one, right? | ||
| Because the ground is porous. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, so it's inevitable. | ||
| They've got to get out of there. | ||
| That's basically a sandbar that, like, some developers in the 20s decided that was, oh, we can make this into a fake paradise. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, there was, yeah, it was, I mean, LA's kind of the same way. | ||
| Like, nobody looking at LA in 1850 would have said, like, here's a great place to build a city. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But we did it anyway. | ||
| America, in its imperial swagger, was like, no, we can create some paradise out of this completely inhospitable land in both places. | ||
| And then, you know, it's just a lesson that, like, you know, it's just a matter of time. | ||
| Well, the most cocky people are the people that have those houses on stilts on the water in Malibu. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| How long is this going to work out for you? | ||
| Like, this thing moves back and forth over time, and it has forever. | ||
| I mean, if you think about, like, the long, long sweep of human history, most human settlements didn't happen on the coast. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, people lived in—maybe they lived on a river. | ||
| Maybe you'd have, like, a little community on a river. | ||
| But, 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. | ||
| I 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. | ||
| Yeah, I've been to Houston right after floods. | ||
| Houston is a crazy one. | ||
| There was a hotel that we used to stay at whenever I used to do gigs in Houston. | ||
| It's gone now, because the floodwaters just filled up the hotel. | ||
| So crazy. | ||
| I actually really love that city. | ||
| There's great food. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Houston's super underrated. | ||
| I think so, too. | ||
| It gets lumped into this weird sort of San Antonio vibe. | ||
| I don't know why, but I'm a big fan of Houston. | ||
| I'm a big fan of Texas in general. | ||
| They're fun people. | ||
| But yeah, if it gets hotter, they're fucked too. | ||
| In 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. | ||
| You're getting cooked. | ||
| There 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? | ||
| Well, it's a combination of heat and humidity, but usually the heat will be up around 130 combined with some bad humidity. | ||
| But we've already broken that threshold. | ||
| There have been temperature records set every year, but last year it broke 130 in Oman, I think. | ||
| But, like, the scarier parts are not some of these crazy desert places that have gotten really hot. | ||
| It's the cities. | ||
| It's like Calcutta has, like, 12 million people in it. | ||
| And you may not be able to live there in the summer in just 30 years. | ||
| And then you just think about where all those people are going and how much that's going to destabilize everything. | ||
| You know, I've talked to people who are terrified about this, and I've talked to people who are nonchalant about Where do you sit? | ||
| Are you terrified? | ||
| Are you thinking that you're going to be physically in trouble yourself? | ||
| Or do you think that with proper planning and just not being tied to one spot, you can move to another area? | ||
| I mean, I have different feelings about it at different times of day because it's that big a story. | ||
| It's, like, going to affect everything, I think. | ||
| You know, I think civilization's not going to collapse. | ||
| I think, like, there'll be people around even living, like, kind of rewarding, prosperous lives. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the question is, like, what shape those lives take and where they are. | ||
| So, me personally, you know, I'm like a relatively well-off person who lives in America, in, you know, New York. | ||
| I think I'll be able to do okay. | ||
| I think my children will be able to do okay. | ||
| And when I imagine their future... | ||
| I 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. | ||
| But when I look at the science, it paints a really, really bleak picture. | ||
| So the question of optimism and alarm, I think it's really all a matter of perspective, right? | ||
| So we're at 1.1 degrees Celsius right now. | ||
| I think there's basically no way that we avoid two degrees of warming, which is like the UN calls catastrophic warming. | ||
| The island nations of the world call genocide. | ||
| And that's when we would be making these cities in the Middle East unlivable. | ||
| It would mean like some ice sheets would start a permanent collapse, which could, if all of them melted, eventually bring 260 feet of sea level rise. | ||
| And we're on track for four degrees of warming. | ||
| So that would mean... | ||
| Six hundred trillion dollars in climate damages by the end of the century. | ||
| That's twice as much wealth as exists in the world today. | ||
| It would mean there'd be parts of the world, scientists say, where you could be hit by six simultaneous climate disasters at once. | ||
| There'd be at least a few hundred climate refugees. | ||
| The UN says the low-end estimate is 200 million. | ||
| The high-end estimate is a billion, which is as many people as live in North and South America combined. | ||
| Can I stop you for a second? | ||
| Six simultaneous natural disasters at once? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| Like flooding, hurricane, famine, you know, some public health issue, you know, like malaria. | ||
| It's like every category of modern life can be affected by this. | ||
| There aren't that many that could be hit by six, but like already right now in Australia, there's a crazy heat wave. | ||
| It's like over 120 in lots of Australia. | ||
| They're also dealing with like epic floods in other parts of the country. | ||
| And That's kind of the problem actually with wildfires in California. | ||
| It's not just that it's getting hotter, it's that it's also getting wetter. | ||
| So more rain means more growth means when it gets hot again, that growth gets baked and then becomes, you know, fire starter. | ||
| And that's the, you know, it's not just a temperature. | ||
| It's like higher temperatures mean crazier extremes. | ||
| In all directions. | ||
| And, 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. | ||
| But that's not to say that we'll all be destroyed by it either. | ||
| I think, like, we will find ways to live and adapt and mitigate. | ||
| It's just a question of how much it's going to screw up our politics, how much it's going to change the way we think of history. | ||
| You 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. | ||
| What 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. | ||
| So, like, at the end of the century, if we don't change course, the economists studying this say global GDP could be at least 20, possibly 30% smaller than it would be without climate change. | ||
| 30% is twice as big an impact as the Great Depression. | ||
| How did you get involved in this? | ||
| How did you get involved in studying this? | ||
| And what was your perception before you got involved? | ||
| And how did it shift? | ||
| So, I'm a journalist. | ||
| I'm an editor, mostly, actually, at New York Magazine. | ||
| And, you know, I'm interested in the near future. | ||
| Like, as a result, read a lot of scientific papers, read a lot of, like, obscure subreddits and that kind of thing. | ||
| And, um... | ||
| Just in 2016, 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. | ||
| And when I looked around at the other places that, like we think of as our competitors, you know, newspapers, TV shows, I just felt like the scarier end of the spectrum was just not at all being talked about. | ||
| So, most scientists talk about this two degree threshold as like the threshold of catastrophe. | ||
| And I think most laypeople think that that means that that's kind of a ceiling for warming. | ||
| Like, that'll be the worst it could get. | ||
| But actually, it's functionally the best-case scenario. | ||
| And yet, we hadn't had any storytelling, any discussion around what the world would look like north of two degrees. | ||
| And I just felt, as a journalist, I was like, holy shit, there's a huge story here. | ||
| Like, the way that this world could be completely transformed by these forces is not something that anybody is writing about, in part because it's a long story, but scientists and science journalists were really... | ||
| They were really focused on making sure that their messaging was hopeful and optimistic, and they were reluctant to talk about their scariest findings. | ||
| And so I was terrified by the science. | ||
| I looked at it, and I was like, nobody's talking about this. | ||
| It's scary. | ||
| Gotta, like, spread the word. | ||
| And I wrote a big piece in 2017 that was very focused on worst-case scenarios. | ||
| I mentioned before, I think two degrees is about our best case scenario, four degrees is where we're on track for now. | ||
| This piece was looking at five, six, eight degrees of warming, so things were not likely to get this century at least. | ||
| And it was a huge phenomenon. | ||
| It was read by a bunch of million people, the biggest story that New York Magazine had ever published. | ||
| And I just thought, man, I guess there are a lot of people like me out there who have intuitions about climate suffering and terror, but aren't seeing it in the way people are writing about the story. | ||
| So I decided, you know, there's more to say. | ||
| And even beyond like telling the bleak story, telling the really dark, talking about the really dark possibilities, I just thought there are all these categories of life that we haven't even thought about how they'll impact us. | ||
| So we know about sea level rise, but that's like, as I mentioned before, that makes you think if you live off the coast, you'll be okay. | ||
| But the whole planet is going to be touched by this. | ||
| Some places are going to be hit harder than others. | ||
| India is going to be hit by like 29% of all global climate impacts of the century. | ||
| But everyone's going to be affected in some way. | ||
| And the way that changes our politics, the way it changes our pop culture, the way it changes our psychology, our mood, our relationship to history, how we think about the future, how we think about the past, what we expect from capitalism, what we blame capitalism for, what we expect from technology, what we think technology can do. | ||
| Can technology save us? | ||
| Can technology entertain us while the world is burning? | ||
| These are all these kind of like humanities questions that I felt really had not been talked about. | ||
| And 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... | ||
| We're going to live here. | ||
| We're going to survive. | ||
| In what form? | ||
| What will it mean? | ||
| You know, at the mythological level, what will it mean at the personal level? | ||
| What will it mean the way we think about our kids and their futures and all that stuff? | ||
| And, you know, my big picture thinking about it is... | ||
| Yeah, it's really bleak. | ||
| And I think there are some possible ways that we could avert some of these worst case scenarios. | ||
| I mean, there is technology that can suck carbon out of the atmosphere already. | ||
| It hasn't been tested at scale. | ||
| It's really expensive. | ||
| But if we can, over the next decade or two, really build global plantations of these carbon capture machines... | ||
| Then not only can we, like, stop the problem from moving forward, we could actually reverse it a little bit. | ||
| Yeah, I've seen those before. | ||
| I've seen the designs for those where they had these enormous, like, apartment building-sized air filter things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's basically like... | ||
| They do exist in the real world, but only in laboratories. | ||
| They don't exist at anything like the scale they need to. | ||
| But there's a guy at Harvard named David Keith who has tested his machines. | ||
| They're able to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere at a cost of $100 a ton. | ||
| Which would mean we could totally neutralize the entire carbon footprint of the global economy. | ||
| We wouldn't have to change anything. | ||
| We could suck out all the extra carbon we're putting into the atmosphere for a cost of $3 trillion a year, which is a lot of money. | ||
| But there are estimates for how much we're subsidizing the fossil fuel business that are as high as $5 trillion a year. | ||
| So if we just redirected those subsidies to this technology, in theory, we could literally solve the problem immediately. | ||
| There are other complications. | ||
| It's like, in order to store the carbon, you 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. | ||
| It's complicated. | ||
| But we have the tools we need. | ||
| It's just a matter of deciding to put them into practice. | ||
| And I think we're pretty, like, that, you know... | ||
| Recent history shows that we're not doing that fast enough. | ||
| So one of the big, you know, points that I'd like I'm making 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. | ||
| But half of all the carbon that we've put into the atmosphere in the history of humanity from the burning of fossil fuels has come in 30 years, the last 30 years. | ||
| That's since Al Gore published his first book on warming. | ||
| it's since the UN established their climate change panel it's since the premiere of Seinfeld so like you and I have lived through the lion's share of all of the damage done to the climate in all of human history whoa yeah Yeah. | ||
| And the next 30 years are going to be just as consequential. | ||
| So we brought the world from basically a stable climate to the brink of total climate catastrophe in 30 years. | ||
| One generation. | ||
| We have about one generation to save it. | ||
| To me that's like, it makes me uncomfortable to use this language, but it's basically a theological story. | ||
| We have the entire fate of the planet in the hands of these two generations. | ||
| What happens 50 years from now, 100 years from now, will entirely be up to the way we act now and what we do. | ||
| And 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. | ||
| So 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. | ||
| We will be engineering problems for them to be solving 800, 1200, 1500 years from now. | ||
| And that damage will be done, if it is done, in the next 30 or 50 years. | ||
| So we are really writing this epic story about Earth, humanity, and our future on this planet in the time of a single lifetime, a single generation. | ||
| And that is, on the one hand, it's sort of like overwhelming, but it's also empowering. | ||
| You 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. | ||
| The main input in the system is how much carbon we put into the atmosphere. | ||
| There are feedback loops that people are worried about, there are things about climate that we can't control, but at least at this point, the main driver of future warming is what we do. | ||
| And so, 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. | ||
| It'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. | ||
| Well, one of the problems with climate change is that human beings like to react to things that are immediate and right in front of them. | ||
| And I think for us it's very difficult to see the future, especially if it's inconvenient, especially if it does something to inconvenience or get in the way of our day-to-day routine. | ||
| And that seems to be what's happening here. | ||
| And that seems to me... | ||
| That seems to me to be why people are so willing to dismiss it so flippantly, because in front of them right now, it's not an issue. | ||
| In front of them right now, this very second, this very day, I'm going to go to Starbucks. | ||
| It's right there. | ||
| It's open. | ||
| Look, I'm outside. | ||
| It's 65 degrees out. | ||
| Global warming's not a problem. | ||
| No, I think that's, I mean, totally true. | ||
| And I feel it in my own life. | ||
| Like, I mean, I've been living, I've been working in this material so long. | ||
| I know it so deeply. | ||
| And yet, when I look out the window, I'm like, you know, things are fine. | ||
| And I think that has a really powerful anchoring effect. | ||
| Like, we expect the world of the future to look like the world as it does today. | ||
| But all the science says that's totally naive. | ||
| And we're going to have at least twice as much warming as we've had to this point. | ||
| And I think we need to think about the future of the world in those terms, like what it will be at two degrees, at three degrees, at four degrees. | ||
| But it's not just like the immediacy. | ||
| I think we have so many biases that make, like we want to be optimistic about the future. | ||
| We have a status quo bias. | ||
| We don't want to change things. | ||
| We think that'll be complicated and expensive. | ||
| We have a hard time holding big ideas in our head, like that the entire planet is like subject to these forces. | ||
| I mean, the list goes on and on. | ||
| In the book, I have a little riff where I say, you know, There's this new, not so new now, 30-40 year discipline in economics, behavioral economics, which is about all of our cognitive biases, how we can't really see the world. | ||
| Every single one makes it harder to see climate. | ||
| There'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. | ||
| We can only see it. | ||
| It's like if you imagine seeing a four-dimensional object in three-dimensional space. | ||
| It's that kind of thing where you can only see it at an angle, only partially. | ||
| Climate change is so all-encompassing that we can't comprehend it properly. | ||
| But I think all of those things are reasons That we need to be listening to the scientists and what they're projecting. | ||
| Not to say that everything they're saying is going to come true will come true exactly as they predict it. | ||
| Obviously, that's not how science works. | ||
| It gets revised. | ||
| Some things are alarmist. | ||
| Some things are extreme. | ||
| Something's just wrong. | ||
| But, you know, I've been really working on this stuff for a couple years, and the number of papers I've read that show, that make me have a more optimistic idea about the future of climate, I could count on two hands. | ||
| And the number of papers I've read that make me have a bleaker view of the future, it's in the thousands. | ||
| And when you look at the totality of that, whether the six climate-driven natural disasters prediction is going to pan out exactly as those authors say, who knows. | ||
| But when you see, you know, so many 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. | ||
| I'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. | ||
| Those seem to be a problem with this whole concept we have of wrapping our head around it. | ||
| And if we find anything that we could point to that say, oh, back in the 80s, they said we'd all be dead by now and we're fine. | ||
| We're going to be fine. | ||
| That kind of thing is, that is an issue, correct? | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Yeah, there was a really famous book in the middle of the 20th century called The Population Bomb. | ||
| So this is a guy named Paul Ehrlich, who he was like, you know, the world just cannot support this many people. | ||
| Like if we get to 8 billion people, there just won't be enough food. | ||
| There won't be, you know, the planet can't sustain that. | ||
| And 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. | ||
| Basically, we figured out ways to make crops way, way, way more productive. | ||
| And that's encouraging. | ||
| Human civilization does that a lot. | ||
| We figure our way out of foxholes all the time. | ||
| but that revolution was literally like one dude norman borlag who figured out how to grow crops differently in one guy one set of innovations and he completely transformed the whole fate of the planet what did he do he just basically did um like genetically modified crops before like the you know before the Is he the golden rice guy? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, you know, the whole developing world benefited enormously. | ||
| And you're still seeing that today. | ||
| Like, we see all these charts that, you know, so much less poverty, so much less infant mortality in the developing world. | ||
| And that's great. | ||
| That's, like, incredible progress. | ||
| But a lot of that was powered by the industrialization of those countries. | ||
| So that bill is going to come due going forward. | ||
| And, you know, I think, like, when you look at climate change, You know, if there was just one threat, like let's take agriculture, since we're talking about agriculture. | ||
| Estimates say that if we continue on the path we're on by the end of the century, grain yields would be half as productive as they are today, just by the temperature effect. | ||
| So we'd have just as much land, just as much grain crops as we have now, but the food we'd get from it, we'd only get half as much as we get today. | ||
| What's the cause of that? | ||
| It's just the temperature effects. | ||
| Just the temperature alone? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I mean, there are other impacts, too, on food. | ||
| Like, insects. | ||
| There's, you know, hotter temperatures means more insects, which is bad for crops. | ||
| Carbon has a complicated relationship to crop growth. | ||
| Like, some plants grow better with more carbon. | ||
| But actually, they're, like, the weeds and the ones that we like to eat don't grow better with more carbon. | ||
| And, you know, by the end of the century, so we could have half as much grain, and we could have 50% more people than we have right now. | ||
| Now, there's a way you can imagine, oh, well, like, maybe there'll be another Norman Borlaug. | ||
| Maybe he'll figure out a way through that. | ||
| But when you look across the spectrum, it's like agriculture. | ||
| It's, you know, conflict. | ||
| For every half degree of warming, you're going to get between 10 and 20% more war. | ||
| So if we get to the end of the century, we're going to have more than twice as much war as we have today. | ||
| And this is projected because of battles over resources? | ||
|
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No. | |
| Mainly that famines, droughts, weather impacts, basically everything about unstable societies get stressed by temperature rise. | ||
| The Syrian Civil War wasn't singly caused by climate change, but that's one of the causes. | ||
| There was a drought that produced it. | ||
| And that conflict, it's not just at the level of nation states or even civil war, it's also at the level of individuals. | ||
| So if you look at crime statistics, when temperatures go up, there's more murder, there's more rape. | ||
| People get admitted to mental hospitals more when it's warmer out. | ||
| Babies develop less well in the womb when it's hotter out. | ||
| For every day over 90 degrees that a baby's in the womb, you can see those days in that baby's lifetime earnings. | ||
| And we're going to be living on a planet that's considerably warmer, That's going to have real dramatic effects on everything. | ||
| Air pollution, there's a big study that I write about in the book that's totally alarming and eye-opening. | ||
| Just between 1.5 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. | ||
| That's just air pollution, just between 1.5 and 2 degrees. | ||
| And 2 degrees, for me, is our best case scenario. | ||
| So our best case scenario is 25 holocausts worth of death from air pollution. | ||
| And that sounds terrifying. | ||
| People, when I say that to them, they're like, holy shit, how could we possibly... | ||
| That's unconscionable. | ||
| But already, 9 million people are dying every year from air pollution. | ||
| And we don't pay attention to it. | ||
| So I think the likeliest outcome, even as we enter into this climate hellscape, is that we find ways to turn away and not look at the real pain of people, especially in the developing world. | ||
| But 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, how are you going to solve the conflict problem? | ||
| How are you going to solve the problem of having 30% less economic growth? | ||
| You know, like I said, that's an impact that's twice as big as the Great Depression, and it would be permanent. | ||
| $600 trillion in climate damages, twice as much wealth as exists in the world today. | ||
| And that's just, you know, refugees, food, I mean it's so all-encompassing. | ||
| And I think that's another reason why we don't want to look at it closely, because it's terrifying. | ||
| Well, there's also a matter of how it's being projected to the public, right? | ||
| Like in certain circles, particularly Right-wing circles. | ||
| There are people that are trying to paint this with rose-colored glasses, right? | ||
| They're trying to maximize short-term profits and sort of dismiss the risks of climate change and dismiss the risks of, or rather the impact of our, what we've done in terms of raising the carbon in the atmosphere. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| There's some people that point to that, like, this is nonsense science, this has been disproven. | ||
| There's a few people like that, but it's overwhelming, the overwhelming consensus of scientists who study this are terrified of it. | ||
| Yeah, I would say there was some recent report that said it now passed the standard of physics, that, like, climate science is now more reliable than physics. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| But, you know, to the deniers who say things like... | ||
| You know, the planet was hotter than this before. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| Yeah, dinosaurs lived here. | ||
| Humans were not here. | ||
| I mean, if we were four degrees warmer, the last time the planet was four degrees warmer, there were palm trees in the Arctic. | ||
| What? | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Really? | ||
| We've already exited the entire window of temperature that enclose all of human history. | ||
| So the planet is now warmer than it ever has been when humans were around to walk on it. | ||
| Which means, to me, it's an open question whether humans would have ever evolved in the first place. | ||
| And this is all from the Industrial Revolution. | ||
| From then on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And to that question, it's like there are people who say there's some natural warming going on. | ||
| I don't think that's true. | ||
| I think most scientists would say it isn't. | ||
| But I also think if what we're seeing is natural warming, that should terrify us even more. | ||
| Because it would mean that it's outside of our control. | ||
| And if we're really heading down the path that we're heading down and we have no control over it, that's even more scary. | ||
| It should be a comfort that we're doing it because that means we can stop doing it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, it should be a comfort that there's people smarter than the people that don't think that we're doing it. | ||
| That there are people that can possibly consider some sort of way to mitigate this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And what are the ways that are being proposed and how seriously are they being taken? | ||
| Other than the idea of building these machines to extract carbon from the atmosphere, I'm sure you're probably aware of... | ||
| There'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. | ||
| Yeah, 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. | ||
| And that means probably suspending sulfur is like the most useful thing in the atmosphere. | ||
| Oh great, we're going to smell like sulfur? | ||
| Well the sky would get red. | ||
| Oh Jesus. | ||
| There are all of these aesthetic effects too which nobody talks about. | ||
| So like trees are going to just turn immediately brown. | ||
| They're not going to turn color. | ||
| There was a study a couple weeks ago that the oceans are going to change color. | ||
| This is if we do that? | ||
| If we suspend these particles? | ||
|
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No, no, no. | |
| This is just from warming. | ||
| Just from warming. | ||
| The ocean's going to change color? | ||
|
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To what? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I think just from more green to more blue. | ||
| That'd be nice. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But 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. | ||
| And that would mean that the sun would absorb less sunlight. | ||
| I mean, the earth would absorb less sunlight, which would make it a little bit cooler. | ||
| The problem is that would have some crippling impacts on agriculture. | ||
| And we basically don't know other side effects that it would have. | ||
| And how would you take that stuff out? | ||
| Well, you could just stop doing it. | ||
| It has a shelf life of, I don't know what it is, 10 years. | ||
| So you could just stop doing it. | ||
| And that's a big concern, actually, because if we did that just to mask the amount of global warming that we were doing... | ||
| Then whatever program was responsible for it would be really vulnerable to terrorism, 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, | ||
| Then 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. | ||
| Because we would adjust to it. | ||
| Over a century or several centuries, in ways, we'd be able to adjust to it. | ||
| So it would be immediate. | ||
| Now, why sulfur? | ||
| I think it's just something about the particular characteristic of it. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Wouldn't it smell horror? | ||
| I mean, it would literally be like hell. | ||
| Like, that's what you always hear about with horror movies, right? | ||
| The devil smells like sulfur? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, I mean, it's what farts smell like. | ||
| And the reason we're able to smell farts is because sulfur is also, I mean, some related compounds, hydrogen sulfide, are really toxic. | ||
| That brings me to methane. | ||
| That's another issue as well, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If a cow is producing methane gas because of large-scale agriculture. | ||
| Yeah, wait, let me just say one more thing about the solar geoengineering. | ||
| So the thing about that, this sounds horrifying, this program. | ||
| People are excited about it because it's really cheap. | ||
| It's way cheaper than carbon capture. | ||
| And so there's a positive for it. | ||
| But it's also, we are basically already doing this. | ||
| So we have what's called small particulate pollution, or aerosol pollution, stuff suspended in the atmosphere. | ||
| That's why Delhi is really hard to breathe in, because we have a lot of particulate in the atmosphere. | ||
| That is already... | ||
| Suppressing 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. | ||
| So 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. | ||
| So we're sort of already doing this program, just not in a systematic way, we're doing it in a haphazard way. | ||
| The methane that you mentioned, there are basically two big issues with methane. | ||
| The first is cows. | ||
| So, 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. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| Yeah, it's really intense. | ||
| But 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%. | ||
| So if that was scalable, which is not clear it is, but if it was, we could immediately eliminate the entire carbon footprint of beef, which people talk about a lot now. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| Yeah, it's a reminder to me that you get told, oh, you should eat less hamburgers or whatever. | ||
| But obviously, this is a problem that's too big to be solved with individual choices. | ||
| We need some kind of global policy or national policy about it. | ||
| But the scarier methane issue is... | ||
| There's all this carbon stored in frozen permafrost in the northern latitudes. | ||
| That permafrost is melting, and when it melts, that carbon will be released into the atmosphere. | ||
| We don't know the proportion that it will be released as carbon dioxide versus methane, but there is in that permafrost twice as much carbon as now exists in the atmosphere, which means if it were all released possibly in a relatively sudden way, it could make our carbon problem immediately three times worse. | ||
| And the effect could even be more dramatic than that if it was released mostly as methane, because methane is a stronger greenhouse gas. | ||
| Most scientists think that that's not something that we need to freak out about in the short term, but it's there, it is melting, and methane is being released at some rate. | ||
| The craziest solution that I ever heard for that one was to bring back the woolly mammoth. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're trying to do that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the idea that the woolly mammoth is going to save us all by releasing them throughout Siberia. | ||
| Yeah, it's crazy, right? | ||
| I mean, I think that we're going to have a whole century of shit like that and shit like cows eating seaweed. | ||
| That everything, you know, we'll have our global politics will be reoriented around climate change so that you'll start to see sanctions put against nations that are behaving badly. | ||
| MBS, 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. | ||
| But the impacts are everywhere. | ||
| Yeah, 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. | ||
| Its effects on cognitive performance are really dramatic, can lower cognitive performance by like 10 to 15%. | ||
| Its effects on the development of kids is really dramatic. | ||
| There 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? | ||
| No, we don't have tolls. | ||
| Oh, right. | ||
| Isn't that amazing? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You guys just think, what, like, one or two places? | ||
| Yeah, but, like, depending on where you live, you have to take that every day. | ||
| Dude, in New York, they're everywhere. | ||
|
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I know, I know. | |
| It's me. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So it used to be the case that cars had to, like, slow down and pay a toll. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And because they were slowing down, they produced more exhaust. | ||
| When they instituted easy pass, cars could just drive through and that meant they produced less exhaust. | ||
| And the effect on premature birth and low birth weight in the areas where they instituted these new easy pass toll plazas, it reduced them by like 15% each. | ||
| That's how dramatic just the exhaust effect is on development of babies. | ||
| How much is an effect of electric cars? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that will be huge. | ||
| Right now it hasn't had enough of an effect because there's not enough of them? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, that problem on the technological level has been solved. | ||
| We know how to replace cars with electric cars. | ||
| We can make them even pretty affordable. | ||
| Not quite as affordable as they need to be, but the new Teslas are like 35 grand, I think. | ||
| If you get it down to 15 grand, that'll be a huge solution. | ||
| But then there are a lot of other problems that are more difficult, like air travel. | ||
| We don't have electric planes around the corner. | ||
| You can't fly planes. | ||
| Is there anything like that on the horizon? | ||
| There are some people who are trying to develop it, but it seems like probably it's at least a decade away. | ||
| One seat on one cross-country flight is the equivalent of eight months of driving. | ||
| Every time you fly from New York to London and back, you melt three square meters of ice. | ||
| Every single seat on every flight from New York to London melts three square meters of ice. | ||
| What? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| That's real? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Every time you fly across the country, it's like eight months of driving? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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Whoa! | |
| So globally, air travel is only 2% of the carbon footprint, so it's relatively small. | ||
| But for people in, especially rich people in rich countries, it's a much bigger part of the footprint. | ||
| Because they fly around all over the place. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| But yeah, no, the average American, I think the stat is the average American every year emits enough carbon to melt 10,000 tons of ice. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| That's just the average American. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And if you're a person like me who flies like every other weekend, it's way worse. | ||
| Way worse. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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So... | |
| Holy shit. | ||
| You put it in that perspective, it's... | ||
| How much fucking ice is there? | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of ice. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's going to melt. | ||
|
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Well... | |
| That's how you get, you know, the outside projections, the high-end projections for a sea level rise are 260 feet. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Now, the plus sign is it's way better to get hotter than it is to get colder, right? | ||
| Like ice ages kill everything. | ||
| Well, you know, each of the – so there have been five mass extinctions in planetary history, in Earth history before. | ||
| One of them was caused by an asteroid, but the other four were produced by global warming related to greenhouse gas. | ||
| And one of them – What about the ice age? | ||
| Well, the Ice Age doesn't count. | ||
| It didn't kill as many? | ||
| No. | ||
| Really? | ||
| The biggest mass extinction, the end Permian extinction, which was 252 million years ago, 90 to 95% of all life on Earth died. | ||
| When was that? | ||
| 252 million years ago. | ||
| God. | ||
| So each of these mass extinctions basically is like a complete slate wiping of the evolutionary record. | ||
| It's like we're starting over from scratch. | ||
| So we want to think that the asteroid that hit the Yucatan did the most damage in terms of the fossil record. | ||
| Is that not true? | ||
| Is the one that was the global warming, was that more? | ||
| Well, so there are five and four of them were from global warming. | ||
| And the worst one was just from greenhouse gas warming. | ||
| But yeah, the one that killed the dinosaurs was also really bad. | ||
| It was something like 70% of all life hunters. | ||
| But it's less than the one where there was a temperature rise. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| There was a volcano – this is a little bit sketchy science, but there was a volcano explosion something like 30,000 years ago or something. | ||
| I 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. | ||
| I think it was two degrees. | ||
| And the human population at the time then shrunk to 7,000. | ||
| There was this incredible bottleneck. | ||
| Yeah, we've talked about that a bunch of times. | ||
| That's less people than live on Nantucket. | ||
| And it just makes you see, like, everything about the way that we live on this planet is dependent on climate conditions. | ||
| Like, we'll figure a way to, like, have a civilization, but it will be transformed, it will be very different if the world is four degrees warmer. | ||
| And, you know, everything about the way that we take for, everything we take for granted today is, like, a permanent feature. | ||
| Of the modern world, I think we're going to learn is much more precarious, much more unstable. | ||
| And yeah, like I said earlier, you know, Climates were stable for all of human history. | ||
| That's how we were able to evolve. | ||
| That's how we were able to invent agriculture. | ||
| The part of the world where we did invent agriculture, the Middle East, it's now getting almost too hot to grow crops. | ||
| It's also going to be too hot to go to Mecca for a pilgrimage in just a couple decades. | ||
| We'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. | ||
| And it's going to keep changing. | ||
| So 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. | ||
| And yeah, it's like those impacts could be totally overwhelming and catastrophic. | ||
| Now, the Al Gore film is something that scared a lot of people, but was also very widely dismissed by a lot of other people as well. | ||
| How accurate was that movie? | ||
| I think it proved to be too sanguine. | ||
| It didn't deal with a lot of extreme weather. | ||
| It thought that stuff was far away. | ||
| And I think this is one of the big shortcomings of most writing about climate. | ||
| Kind of communication about climate for 25 years is that we were told it was slow. | ||
| We were told it was going to be coming, maybe at the scale of centuries, something we'd have to worry about for our grandchildren. | ||
| But when you realize that half of all the damage we've done has been done in the last 30 years, and you see already the extreme weather. | ||
| We had a global heat wave last summer, totally unprecedented. | ||
| People died In Canada, they died in Russia, they died in the Middle East. | ||
| The same season, three million people were evacuated in China from a typhoon. | ||
| Unprecedented rains in Japan. | ||
| We had multiple hurricanes in the Caribbean all at once. | ||
| There was an island in Hawaii, East Island, a small island, not one that most people have gone to, but got literally wiped off the map by a hurricane. | ||
| They're thinking about inventing a new category of hurricane, category six. | ||
| All of these impacts are coming much faster than scientists predicted even a decade or two ago. | ||
| And so I think the first inconvenient truth is a little too complacent. | ||
| But Al Gore is also, you know, I know him a little bit. | ||
| I've talked to him a few times. | ||
| Temperamentally, he's a technocrat. | ||
| He's an optimist. | ||
| He thinks market forces can solve all this stuff. | ||
| And I don't even totally disagree with him. | ||
| I think that market forces are really powerful. | ||
| We've had a huge green energy revolution in the U.S. that's, you know, and has spillover effects elsewhere in the world. | ||
| So solar power is now cheaper than anybody expected. | ||
| It would be a decade or two ago. | ||
| Although it's also the case that we haven't replaced any of our dirty energy with it. | ||
| We've just added to our capacity. | ||
| So the ratio of renewable energy to dirty energy is now the same as it was 40 years ago. | ||
| We made no progress. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| Because we just, if we're like, rather than saying, oh, let's retire this coal plant and replace it with a wind farm, we think, oh, we'll have the coal plant and the wind farm. | ||
| We'll have more energy. | ||
| You know, we just grow the pie of energy. | ||
| And this is unnecessary? | ||
| It's not because there's just a massive demand? | ||
| Is it just because they don't want to end that industry? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, there is a demand. | ||
| People like energy. | ||
| Trump was talking about clean coal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And everybody was like, what the fuck are you talking about? | ||
| Clean coal? | ||
| I mean, I think on some level, American policy is a red herring. | ||
| The U.S. is 15% of global emissions and we're falling. | ||
| The future climate of the world will be determined by China, by India, by Sub-Saharan Africa. | ||
| Those are carbon footprints that are growing. | ||
| China's now almost twice as big a carbon footprint as the U.S. And they're building all this infrastructure outside of China that doesn't even count in Asia and Africa. | ||
| You know the Belt and Road, you know this project. | ||
| So basically taking the model that the U.S. had with like the Suez Canal and the Panama Canal... | ||
| And they're building the infrastructure of the developing world. | ||
| So recently they loaned Kenya a huge amount of money to build a new rail line which was being built with Chinese workers. | ||
| They built the rail line. | ||
| Then Kenya couldn't pay back the debt. | ||
| So China is threatening to take over the entire port of Mombasa as debt repayment. | ||
| And this is like going on all around the world. | ||
| Highways across Africa, across Asia are being built by Chinese workers in an effort to build a new imperial infrastructure for themselves. | ||
| And is the thought that they're doing this in terms of setting up the debt in a way that's unpayable so that they could take over? | ||
| That's one motive. | ||
| I think that the Kenya example... | ||
| But they'd be happy if the debt got repaid. | ||
| I think they're stitching together an alternative to the Western infrastructure of trade and transit. | ||
| They're basically stitching together an entire second system of how the world will work, how the economy will work, and it will be conducted through their own infrastructure and through their own ports and through their own airports. | ||
| And that's being done by their own standards. | ||
| So China is now pouring more concrete... | ||
| Every three years than the U.S. poured in the entire 20th century. | ||
|
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Jesus Christ. | |
| And if concrete were a country, it would be the world's third biggest carbon emitter. | ||
| So, the path of development of these other countries, China, India, and Sub-Saharan Africa, are really what's going to be writing the story of the future. | ||
| America has a kind of, I think, like a moral obligation to lead because historically we had the biggest carbon footprint, but at the moment we're 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. | ||
| So, the real issue is how do we figure out a new geopolitics that forces countries like China to act better? | ||
| And one answer may be, as weird as it is to say, that, you know, Xi Jinping is basically a dictator. | ||
| If 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. | ||
| And 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. | ||
| And that means they've paid, you know, they've invested a ton in solar and wind. | ||
| They've done a lot with air pollution. | ||
| So Beijing used to be really awful in 2013. More than a million Chinese people died of air pollution. | ||
| And now that's much better. | ||
| What have they done? | ||
| Just imposing stricter standards on pollution. | ||
| So emissions, coal plants, things like that. | ||
| That kind of stuff, yeah. | ||
| But we think about carbon and the whole problem, I think, a little too much in terms of energy. | ||
| Energy is just 30% of the global carbon footprint, and it's the easiest one to solve because wind and solar is actually really cheap now. | ||
| Most parts of the world is cheaper than dirty energy. | ||
| What's the majority of the footprint? | ||
| Well, it's all, nothing's a majority. | ||
| So there's energy, there's infrastructure, there's transportation, and agriculture is like a huge underappreciated part of it. | ||
| It's something like, I don't know, 30% of the global footprint. | ||
| Is it because of tractors or what is it because of? | ||
| Everything. | ||
| Everything. | ||
| Everything that you need to do to run a farm. | ||
| I mean, really, everything you need to do to live in the world has some kind of carbon footprint. | ||
| But, you know, if we were able to feed all our cattle seaweed, that would have a big impact. | ||
| But all kinds of crops have carbon footprints. | ||
| But they would still have to do something to get the seaweed and have the seaweed travel, the seaweed... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Deliver it to these farms. | ||
| Well, you could imagine lab-grown meat having a much smaller carbon footprint. | ||
| I mean, it should if it proceeds as we expect it will. | ||
| And like I said before, when you look at each particular threat, you can see reasons for optimism. | ||
| You can see like, oh, we'll figure it out in this way, we'll figure it out in that way. | ||
| But 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. | ||
| And the projects that we need to put into place in those 11 years are just much bigger than I think we're capable of pulling off. | ||
| They say, the UN says, what is necessary is a global mobilization 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. | ||
| I mean, maybe 10 years from now we'll get there. | ||
| That may even be optimistic. | ||
| But the total decarbonization that's required is we need to totally zero out on carbon by 2050, they say. | ||
| And I just think, you know, a lot of these sectors are much trickier. | ||
| We could maybe zero out on energy, zero out on carbon when it comes to energy in 15 years if we wanted to. | ||
| But again, that's just 30% of the total problem. | ||
| Which is why I think there's the negative emission stuff, the carbon capture is so important because it will allow us... | ||
| To move more slowly than the UN says we need to, and still, if it works out, you know, keep the planet relatively stable, relatively livable. | ||
| But 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. | ||
| So it's sort of a leap of faith to think that they could solve that problem. | ||
| Do you think that we're dealing with 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. | ||
| It needs to be hammered home to people. | ||
| It needs to be something that's a global discussion that accelerates. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| And I think that that's happening. | ||
| You know, I think there was this big report that the UN did in October that spurred a lot of conversation about it. | ||
| And I think that in a grotesque way, the best teacher is just extreme weather. | ||
| You know, when you see every year these California wildfires, every year they're burning. | ||
| And that is really dramatic. | ||
| People I talk to in Europe are focused on the California fires, even though they have wildfires over there. | ||
| There's something about the California fires that they're really worried about. | ||
| When you see these global heat waves, when you see unprecedented hurricane seasons, we just had a typhoon in the Pacific in February, first time in recorded history. | ||
| You know, every day on the news, there's some, you know, dramatic extreme weather. | ||
| And when they come one after the other, I think that's a really powerful teaching tool. | ||
| So, you know, there's this term, it's now outdated, but 500-year storm you hear a lot about. | ||
| 500-year storm means, you know, a hurricane that would hit a particular area once every five centuries, right? | ||
| That means five centuries ago there were no white people in America. | ||
| So that means we're talking about a storm that would 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, as 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. | ||
| Hurricane Harvey was the third 500-year storm to hit Houston in three years. | ||
| We are living in such unprecedented climate that it's impossible to look at the news and not learn that. | ||
| Despite all of our inclinations, all of our reflexes to look away, I think it is seeping in. | ||
| I think people are beginning to be more alarmed about it. | ||
| And I think alarm is really useful. | ||
| There are people in the climate community who think, you know, it's dangerous to scare people. | ||
| It turns them off. | ||
| I'm somebody who's awakened to this out of fear. | ||
| And when I look at the history of environmental activism, when I look at activism generally, we don't try to get people to stop smoking cigarettes by messaging through optimism. | ||
| We try to get them to stop because we tell them how bad it's going to be for them. | ||
| Drunk driving, nuclear proliferation, same thing. | ||
| Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring about pesticides. | ||
| It was called hyperbolic alarmist. | ||
| It led to the creation of the EPA. | ||
| And you know, when you think about that UN directive that we should be mobilizing the scale of World War II to combat climate, we didn't fight World War II out of hope. | ||
| We fought World War II out of panic. | ||
| And I think that that should be part of how we think about this story, obviously. | ||
| I think, you know, when I look around the world, when I talk to anyone, when I talk to my family, when I watch TV, when I watch whatever, read stuff, it just seems obvious to me that there are many more people who are still too complacent about this issue, even if they're concerned about it a little bit, even if they're aware of it. | ||
| They don't think of it as the overarching, all-encompassing story of our time that requires an existential response. | ||
| And even saying those words make me uncomfortable because it's hard for me to believe that the threat is that big. | ||
| But that is what the science says. | ||
| And, like I said before, some of that science is not going to get borne out, but when you look at the full scope of it, and just how 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, in addition to probably planning to adapt. | ||
| Now, you live in New York. | ||
| Were you living in New York when Tribeca flooded a few years ago? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What was that like? | ||
| Well, I mean, I think in a situation like that, most people emerge from a particular disaster and think, my God, since this is so awful, it must be an anomaly. | ||
| And, you know, I think New York was really horrified as a city by Sandy, but... | ||
| There's going to be Sandy's, I don't remember the exact stat, like once every five years by the end of the century. | ||
| What category storm was Sandy? | ||
| I think it made landfall as a category three. | ||
| So it's not even a five. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So if a five hit, is it possible for a five to hit New York or is it too far north? | ||
| No, it's possible. | ||
| Totally possible. | ||
| I 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? | ||
| And he was like, oh absolutely, Manhattan real estate is way too expensive to let flood, so we'll definitely build a seawall. | ||
| But an infrastructure project like that Takes at least 30 years to build. | ||
| And if we started right now, we wouldn't be able to finish in time to save Howard Beach and parts of Brooklyn and Queens. | ||
| If we started right now, he said. | ||
| He said, the city knows this. | ||
| And you'll see in the next few years, they'll stop doing repairs on infrastructure. | ||
| They'll stop attending to the subway lines in those neighborhoods. | ||
| And even a few years after that, they'll start staying explicitly to the people who live there. | ||
| You might be able to continue living in these homes for a couple decades, but you're not going to be able to leave them to your kids. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| This isn't New York City. | ||
| It's like the richest country and the richest city in the world. | ||
| And yeah, huge parts of southern Brooklyn and Queens are going to be underwater. | ||
| So for the people that live there right now, what parts are you talking about? | ||
| Well, the one that he mentioned most explicitly was Howard Beach, which is like a mob neighborhood. | ||
| Still? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Because that was like the Gotti neighborhood, right? | ||
| Yeah, that's where they buried all the dead bodies. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I didn't know that was still a mob neighborhood. | ||
| Well, to the extent that there is a mob. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, yeah, I mean, that's true everywhere on the coast, everywhere. | ||
| It's not just New York. | ||
| New York's not exceptional. | ||
| You know, there are projections that, like, $30 billion of New Jersey real estate could be underwater by 2030. 2030! | ||
| Why is that not as alarming? | ||
| I was born in New Jersey, too. | ||
| It's not as alarming. | ||
| And then, you know, Miami Beach is done for. | ||
| Yeah, Miami Beach is almost inevitable, correct? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, you know, they could build a seawall. | ||
| But that's not going to help because of the ground, right? | ||
| And it's just so expensive. | ||
| So you really have to pick your poison. | ||
| And then when you look around the world, you know... | ||
| It's like Bangladesh. | ||
| That country is going to be almost entirely underwater. | ||
| That's hundreds of millions of people. | ||
| If we wanted to build a seawall, they can't afford that. | ||
| Who's going to pay for that? | ||
| And this is all because of the raising sea level, because of the melting ice, because of the temperature, and all this is happening. | ||
| And I think, you know, we think of sea level as really a thing that happens on the coastline, which it is primarily, but it also increases flooding on rivers because the water is all connected. | ||
|
unidentified
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Of course. | |
| So flooding in the UK is expected to grow 50-fold by the end of the century. | ||
| What? | ||
| 50-fold? | ||
| London is already underwater a couple times a year. | ||
| I mean, not the whole city. | ||
| What is this, Jamie? | ||
|
unidentified
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This is Bangladesh. | |
| I just went to Bangladesh underwater. | ||
| This is a video that pops up. | ||
| Oh my god, these people are fucked. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It says 18 million residents live here. | ||
| That's a swamp. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| That looks crazy. | ||
| Like, if you're a real estate projector and you're flying over, you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we can't build here. | ||
| Yeah, Jakarta will be totally underwater. | ||
| Look at those apartment buildings. | ||
| Like, you could see the water level. | ||
| Look, back up a little bit. | ||
| This is just a running little thing. | ||
| Oh, but if you see, look at, like, doesn't that look like a water level on the apartment buildings on the right-hand side near where your cursor is? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, that's going to go up to where that orange level is. | ||
| Fucking Christ. | ||
| Well, I mean, over millennia, they're going to rise hundreds of feet. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| I mean, it's going to take a long time, so you can adjust to that a little bit. | ||
| But that's always been the case, right? | ||
| I 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We have to move. | ||
| People have to move. | ||
| So what's a good spot? | ||
| Alberta? | ||
| Anywhere north, anywhere off the coast. | ||
| Edmonton. | ||
| That's the spot now. | ||
| I mean, I think I would, like, people ask me that all the time, and I say, you know, honestly, the place that I would move to is somewhere in Scandinavia. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Because, you know, I talked about the impacts of economic growth before, but... | ||
| There are going to be parts of the world that benefit economically from this. | ||
| Anywhere in the north. | ||
| So Canada, Russia, and Scandinavia will benefit because... | ||
| Don't go to Scandinavia. | ||
| Go to Canada. | ||
| It's right there. | ||
| Well, but Scandinavia seems kind of prettier to me. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, Scandinavia is nice, but... | |
| Canada's like our neighbors. | ||
| They're like our friends. | ||
| Yeah, they have wildfires there too. | ||
|
unidentified
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Canada? | |
| Yeah, we do. | ||
| And in the Arctic Circle in Finland last year. | ||
| They also have bears. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Mount lions. | ||
| But so, you know, the economists who study this stuff say that there is actually an optimal temperature for human productivity. | ||
| It's 13 degrees Celsius, which is the historical median temperature of the U.S. It's also the historical median temperature of Germany. | ||
| What is 13 Celsius? | ||
| Was that 60 degrees or something like that? | ||
| Yeah, I think it's like in the high 50s. | ||
| What do we got, Jamie? | ||
| Google didn't. | ||
| Google didn't give it to you? | ||
| Whenever I'm in Canada, I'm always like, I don't know what you're saying. | ||
| Yeah, they're like, holy shit, it's 22 degrees. | ||
| 55.4. | ||
| And 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. | ||
| That means that we're losing about a half percentage point of GDP every year from it. | ||
| But there are parts of the U.S. that were cooler than 13 and are now brought up to this optimal level. | ||
| Silicon Valley is like exactly at 13 degrees right now. | ||
| Which is, you know, notable because they're like... | ||
| Super productive. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's going to be... | ||
| So that'll be true for Scandinavia generally. | ||
| And it may be part of the explanation why there's been so much economic productivity in Scandinavia over the last generation is that they have already... | ||
| Started doing better with temperature. | ||
| Crops are gonna be more bountiful in Russia. | ||
| Like, Russia will have better agriculture because of global warming. | ||
| Which is why they make such a, you know, they're such a complicated figure in the geopolitical story about climate. | ||
| So they are a petrostate. | ||
| They have almost all of their economic activity has to do with burning oil. | ||
| But they're also poised to benefit from warming. | ||
| So they're doubly motivated to produce more global warming. | ||
| And they have such a fuck the rest of the world perspective that they're not going to stop. | ||
| Whereas 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. | ||
| But that's a dilemma that faces every nation. | ||
| You 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. | ||
| Angela 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. | ||
| And every country in the world It's a collective action problem. | ||
| Every country in the world is incentivized to behave badly and let the rest of the world clean up the mess. | ||
| So I was talking to this guy yesterday about wildfires, and he was like, you know, California is doing so great, you know, with all of the emission standards. | ||
| They're basically, you know, holding themselves to the Paris Accords, even though the country as a whole isn't. | ||
| But that impact isn't local. | ||
| It's global. | ||
| So it's dissipated. | ||
| The temperature impact on California wildfires will be determined by, like I said earlier, basically what China does. | ||
| So, in terms of, you know, what any individual area, what any individual nation is doing, the motivations are really, really complicated there. | ||
| And 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. | ||
| And yet, all of those gains now are wiped out every year by the fires. | ||
| Because fires are trees. | ||
| Trees are burning. | ||
| Trees are basically coal in the sense that they are stored carbon. | ||
| When they burn, they release carbon into the atmosphere. | ||
| So every time there are wildfires like there were last year in California, it literally wipes out all of the progress that the state made in all of its green initiatives that year. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you know about in Brazil, the president of Brazil wants to like basically deforest the Amazon. | ||
| The 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. | ||
| So plant life is really good for fighting climate change. | ||
| When you say he wants to deforest the Amazon, like at what scale? | ||
| What is he talking about doing? | ||
| So 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. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And this is just to pump up Brazil's economy? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, he has a kind of a Trumpy, like, I'm gonna fuck the environmentalist's perspective, too. | ||
| So he's just, like, a little bit, like, you know, whatever, flipping the bird to people who care about it. | ||
| And that just makes you think that, like, it seems crazy now, but it really won't be crazy, I think, a generation from now, for another country to threaten at least sanctions and maybe military action to deal with that. | ||
| You know, after World War II, we built a whole liberal international order around the principle of human rights. | ||
| That would have been unthinkable in the 20s, and yet it led to a series of military interventions over the next half century. | ||
| Because people were behaving badly towards their own citizens. | ||
| If we could do that, it doesn't seem all that crazy to me that, say, 30 years from now, an empowered imperial China looking at someone like Bolsonaro in Brazil would just be like, no, you can't do that. | ||
| We're just going to go in and take you out. | ||
| And this is what I mean when I say it's a kind of all-encompassing, all-impacting threat. | ||
| Our politics will be shaped by it. | ||
| Our geopolitics will be shaped by it. | ||
| Our, you know, everything will be shaped by it. | ||
| We could have climate wars, like, in the not too distant future. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| How is this being received? | ||
| The book? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Are people resisting it? | ||
| Is there anybody that wants to debate you on this? | ||
| So, 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. | ||
| And, 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. | ||
| The book has had none of that. | ||
| I mean, first of all, it's been... | ||
| The first week it was on the Times bestseller list, number six, bestseller in England. | ||
| It's been in and out of the Amazon top ten. | ||
| And all of the reviews have been really kind. | ||
| I think this goes to what you were saying before. | ||
| I think the conversation is changing. | ||
| People 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. | ||
| Where is the resistance, though? | ||
| Is there any resistance to it right now? | ||
| To the book? | ||
| Well, not just the book, but just the concept in general. | ||
| 73% of Americans believe climate change is real. | ||
| 70% of Americans are concerned about it. | ||
| Those numbers are up 15% since 2015. Who are the 27 that don't? | ||
| I mean, I think it's, you know, it's- Hard right-wingers. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, you know, those numbers are – we live in a culture now where, like, most people's worldview passes through a prism of partisan politics. | ||
| So, like, you know, there's amazing studies that show that in the early 90s, there was no partisan divide between – on the question of whether O.J. Simpson was guilty – When you control for race, Republicans and Democrats had the same idea about O.J. Simpson's guilt. | ||
| That is totally unthinkable today. | ||
| And there's now a huge partisan split on whether 12 Years a Slave deserves an Oscar. | ||
| Partisanship 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. | ||
| I don't think that the Republican Party is really any more a denier party. | ||
| I think they're just a party of skeptics and self-interest. | ||
| They want to look out for business interests, which actually the calculus there is changing, which I'll talk about in a second. | ||
| But people don't want to believe that horrifying things are real because who would? | ||
| It's terrifying. | ||
| But 73% of the country, that's a lot. | ||
| I mean, that's more support than there is for just about anything. | ||
| So I'm like, basically, and the speed at which those numbers have grown is really dramatic. | ||
| I said 15 points since 2015, 8 points just since March. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| And I do think that the economic logic is really powerful here. | ||
| So it used to be the case that there was economic conventional wisdom that action on climate was going to be really expensive because it would require massive upfront investment and it would mean also foregoing economic growth. | ||
| But all of the new research the last couple of years reverses that logic totally. | ||
| So 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. | ||
| And there are also obviously business opportunities there, their whole solar empires to build, their whole new electric grid to build. | ||
| So the economic conventional wisdom is now that fast action on climate is better for the economy than slow action on climate. | ||
| That hasn't yet totally taken over the perspective of our policymakers globally, but I think it will soon. | ||
| And when it does, I think that we'll see like a real sea change in their world. | ||
| Perspective, because I think for a long time, even people who cared about climate thought, well, I want to do something, but if I have to cost some people some jobs and cost a percentage point of economic growth, that's not worth it. | ||
| Let me just kick the can down the road. | ||
| This is a slow-moving phenomenon. | ||
| We'll invent our way out of it. | ||
| We'll grow our way out of it. | ||
| But all of the new research says, let's get started right now. | ||
| And... | ||
| We'll see how that plays out. | ||
| I mean, if we really have to have global emissions by 2030, it means really, really aggressive action, which I don't think is possible. | ||
| But I do think that we'll see much more aggressive action in the decade ahead than we've had in the decades in the past. | ||
| So you think that once there's a financial incentive For people to either some sort of an industry that reduces carbon or something along those lines. | ||
| Industries that are working to mitigate global warming. | ||
| That 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? | ||
| Yeah, well, also that, I mean, direct investment of particular companies, but also, you know, government leaders who look around and say, if the economic picture is going to be better 10 years from now, if we make massive investments in green energy, then it would be, and even, like, past laws, you know, regulating, say, fuel efficiency, or even banning internal combustion engines, which I think will happen within a couple decades. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If 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. | ||
| And, you know, again, the question is how aggressively, how quickly, and in what form. | ||
| But I do think that, you know, I do think the incentives will be different. | ||
| Five years from now than they looked five years ago. | ||
| And that'll be huge. | ||
| So that, you think, would be a great motivator for people to shift their perceptions, and particularly right-wing folks, maybe amongst the 27% that are in denial. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I mean, if you look around the world, denial is not really a problem anywhere but the U.S. There's a little bit in the U.K., but it's a totally American phenomenon. | ||
| And when you understand that the U.S. is only 15% of all global emissions... | ||
| Is that just typical American arrogance? | ||
| Like, what do you think is the root of that? | ||
| I think it's basically bad behavior by the oil companies. | ||
| I mean, they've put out really aggressive disinformation and denial. | ||
| You ever see the movie Merchants of Doubt? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Perfect example of that, right? | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| Yeah, and I know the people who wrote the book, too, who are really, really great. | ||
| And, 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. | ||
| So they're, you know, then they ended up suppressing that going forward. | ||
| But They knew shit about how the planet was going to change before any of the rest of us. | ||
| But there was no alternatives back then. | ||
| And there was no real emission standards. | ||
| That's when catalytic converters started being enacted, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, 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. | ||
| We're now at a spot where we have to cut them by about 10% per year. | ||
| And if we wait another decade, we're going to have to cut them by 30% per year, which is like an unthinkable rate. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So... | |
| We wouldn't have had to take such aggressive action if we had started early. | ||
| We would have had to just be doing moderate, kind of on the margins changes. | ||
| But we're now in a situation where the problem is way too big for that. | ||
| And there are people who want to talk about the solutions that could have been useful 20 years ago now. | ||
| Talking about the carbon tax is like one quite popular thing to talk about. | ||
| The 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. | ||
| And the places in the world where they do have carbon taxes, everybody's emissions are still going up. | ||
| So 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. | ||
| But we're sort of past that point now, unfortunately. | ||
| But 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. | ||
| Because 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. | ||
| And so you think, well, what is the sickness here? | ||
| Is it the Republican Party and their climate denial? | ||
| Or is it the fact that all of us just want more, better, cheaper stuff? | ||
| And 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. | ||
| I mean, people say financial capitalism is the problem. | ||
| I have some sympathy for that view, but I also look around the world. | ||
| I see social democracies who are behaving really poorly when it comes to carbon. | ||
| I see socialist countries who are behaving really poorly when it comes to carbon. | ||
| It seems on some level like it's even deeper than the systems that we have to organize and manage our cultural priorities. | ||
| And 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. | ||
| And they may be victorious. | ||
| They may put some of these companies out of business. | ||
| I think it's not that likely, but it's possible. | ||
| There are also other lawsuits that are happening that are really interesting. | ||
| There's one in the Netherlands that some people held the Dutch government. | ||
| Basically, the Dutch government was not honoring the Paris Accords and citizens sued to hold them to that and won the case. | ||
| So the Dutch government is now obligated legally to do better on climate than they were doing on their own. | ||
| And in the US, there's this amazing court case called Juliana versus the United States, which is a lawsuit being brought by kids. | ||
| Using this kind of ingenious 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. | ||
| And so they're saying, this climate policy is a violation of the equal protection clause. | ||
| You're not protecting us in the same way that you protected our parents. | ||
| That's at the district court in Oregon, which is just one level below the Supreme Court. | ||
| I think it'll win in the district court. | ||
| It almost certainly won't win at the Supreme Court. | ||
| But 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. | ||
| But 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. | ||
| And 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. | ||
| It's just there's a lot of slow-moving bureaucracy and slow-moving public opinion. | ||
| And in the same way that a lot of civil rights victories were fought and won in the courts, I think we might be able to make some progress in the courts on climate too. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| If you had a magic wand, if they made you the king of the world, and they said, you can decide what we do, what would the first step be? | ||
| The first step is just ending fossil fuel subsidies. | ||
| I mean, there's no reason why these companies should be receiving public money. | ||
| And why are they? | ||
| Just incumbency advantages. | ||
| They're well-connected companies. | ||
| A lot of them are really big and powerful, and any government in the world is not going to want a major industry to completely collapse. | ||
| But, 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. | ||
| It could be poured into carbon capture, like we talked about before. | ||
| That's just an unbelievable resource and it would accelerate... | ||
| The decline of coal in particular and other oil, other fossil fuel businesses, which would be great. | ||
| Is there any discussion about that? | ||
| In individual countries, yeah, but it's slow moving. | ||
| You know, there's stuff about – people are taking action in all different ways at all different levels, which I think is basically necessary. | ||
| So there are cities in Europe where cars are now being banned. | ||
| Cars? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In a city? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just people biking around? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You've been living in L.A. too long. | ||
| You can do that. | ||
| In Amsterdam, you can do that. | ||
| It just seems ridiculous. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I mean, I think maybe it'll just be you can only have an electric car. | ||
| You know, maybe 10 years from now, like, it'll be illegal in the U.S. to build, like, you know, a gas guzzling car. | ||
| I got an electric car recently, and it's amazing the blowback from my friends. | ||
| What do they say? | ||
| Well, first of all, it's always homophobic or feminine. | ||
| They're always going after you about your estrogen levels and your manhood. | ||
| It's like, it's weird. | ||
| It's kind of like a space... | ||
| I mean, Teslas are kind of like... | ||
| They're kind of like spaceships, though. | ||
| They feel... | ||
| I mean, there's a... | ||
| Have you been in one? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You driven one? | ||
| I haven't driven one. | ||
| I've been driven in one, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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Dude. | |
| I drove in one years ago and I wasn't that impressed. | ||
| I want to say like maybe five or six years ago. | ||
| But now I have one of the new ones that's crazy fast. | ||
| It doesn't even make sense. | ||
| Regular cars are stupid. | ||
| They're stupid. | ||
| And you spend all that money on gas. | ||
| Why would you want to do that? | ||
| Yeah, but I mean they're stupid. | ||
| Like they don't work as good. | ||
| Like that thing is way better than any car I've ever driven. | ||
| And it's only going to get better. | ||
| They don't even make sense how fast they are. | ||
| And they drive themselves. | ||
| Like, you hit this little thing, go doo-doo, and it just fucking steers. | ||
| It takes over. | ||
| Like, it drives. | ||
| And it stays within the speed limit, and you can just kind of half-ass space out. | ||
| Just keep your hand on the steering wheel, and it breaks when there's cars in front of you. | ||
| It's very strange. | ||
| It'll even change lanes for you. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| It's fucked. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| It's very difficult to let go and to give in like that. | ||
| But the strange thing that I felt was the blowback from my friends. | ||
| And they're joking around, obviously, most of my friends are comedians. | ||
| But it's hilarious. | ||
| Even people have heckled me about it. | ||
| Well, I feel that, just at the aesthetic level, I understand that mocking of the Prius. | ||
| But I feel like the Tesla is actually a little more macho. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Well, the piece is a piece of shit. | ||
| It's like a cheese wedge with wheels. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, I mean, it's like, you know, yeah, we live in a sick culture where, like, being, like, healthy and responsible is, like, understood. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| We like cigarettes and whiskey. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You mock someone eating a salad. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's very weird. | ||
| It is very weird. | ||
| But I was... | ||
| But that is an American problem. | ||
| Like other parts of the world, they're not as attached. | ||
| They're trucks and shit. | ||
| We're gross. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We're gross. | ||
| But there's something particularly strange about being on that side of it. | ||
| Because I was... | ||
| I don't want to say I was pessimistic about electric cars, but when Elon did the podcast, I told him I'd buy one of his cars. | ||
| He was telling me how they're great there. | ||
| I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll buy one of your cars. | ||
| But I really did not expect to like it as much as I do. | ||
| And then once I got it, I was like, okay, now I get it. | ||
| But then I was thinking about my own resistance to it, because I like cars. | ||
| I have... | ||
| I have muscle cars. | ||
| I have an older Porsche. | ||
| I love them. | ||
| They're fun. | ||
| I like those kind of cars, but they're stupid. | ||
| They really are dumb. | ||
| It's a dumb way to get around. | ||
| The Tesla's a way better way to get around. | ||
| And he's got one that's coming out in 2020 that's going to have a 660 mile range, which is insane. | ||
| I mean, you drive all the way to San Francisco and back with one charge. | ||
| No, I mean, he's incredible. | ||
| I think, you know, like, there are reasons why he gets the shit that he gets, but I also think, like, Tesla and SolarCity are incredibly important. | ||
| And I'm actually, I don't understand why there aren't more people in Silicon Valley who are focused on climate in this way. | ||
| Like, obviously, they want, like, these are people who see themselves as gods, who want to be world historical figures. | ||
| They're literally- You think they do that? | ||
| Who do you think is doing that? | ||
| Well, like, like Jeff Bezos, for instance. | ||
| You think he thinks himself as a god? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Really? | ||
| You don't? | ||
| Nah, I read those text messages he sent to that chick. | ||
| I don't think a god would say that. | ||
| A god would say, you should be lucky to get this dick. | ||
| All the space exploration stuff, though, it's like, you know, people are obsessed with the life extension. | ||
| But don't you think that that's just a side effect of having $150 billion? | ||
| But you can do so much good with that! | ||
| Yes, I agree. | ||
| So Bezos is pouring a billion dollars a year into his space exploration project, which is like, I mean, I'm excited by space, too. | ||
| I think it'd be cool to go up there. | ||
| But there's some pressing problems here, which we could really benefit. | ||
| You know, that money could really benefit. | ||
| And I agree. | ||
| But long term, I think the philosophy is that we're going to have to get off this planet. | ||
| If the human race is going to succeed, because of not just the threat of global warming, but of asteroid impacts and many other factors. | ||
| It's an asteroid thing, I think. | ||
| Supernovas. | ||
| There's a lot of factors. | ||
| On the particular question of climate… There's just no way that the Earth is going to get as inhospitable as Mars is. | ||
| So the idea of building a colony there as a hedge against global warming is just crazy. | ||
| It is ridiculous. | ||
| But on the positive note, if we could fix that shithole… Like, imagine what we could do here. | ||
| Yeah, paradise. | ||
| Yeah, well, the idea is terraforming, right? | ||
| That they're going to go there with some kind of massive machine that's going to create oxygen in the environment. | ||
| Yeah, well, it's a good place to practice because no one lives there. | ||
| So you could do all kinds of goofy shit and go, well, good news and bad news. | ||
| The good news is we figured out a way to terraform. | ||
| The bad news is we already fucked up Mars. | ||
| So we're going to try another spot. | ||
| We're going to go to... | ||
| You know, we're going to move on to some other planets. | ||
| Uranus, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Well, you know, Venus used to be actually quite Earth-like. | ||
| And they went through a really rapid global warming. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That made it, now it's like a total hellhole. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that's like the sort of worst case for Earth, is the Venus scenario. | ||
| Well, ultimately, the sun's going to burn out, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But that's many millions of years. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But if we really do look into the future, something has to be done. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know? | |
| I mean, this is the... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| On the grandest of grand scales, the concept of some sort of interstellar arcs. | ||
| I mean, I believe that, and I'm with it. | ||
| I just think the timescale of the threat that we need to avert by space exploration, that's a timescale of millennia. | ||
| We have a lot of new technology develop over the next thousand years that'll allow us to do it better and more efficiently. | ||
| But climate change, the timescale, is like the next 30 years. | ||
| So we need to focus on it now to give ourselves the opportunity to do the other shit. | ||
| Do you think it's sexier to go to space? | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| Like rockets and... | ||
| I mean, I think for these dudes... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a big metal dick shooting off in the atmosphere. | ||
| That's what we're doing. | ||
| We're trying to fuck space. | ||
| I actually made that argument about Mars. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That it's like they're shaped like dicks. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's something to that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, also, this generation of people really grew up in the age of, like, the space race. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's... | ||
| And the aftermath of landing on the moon. | ||
| And I think there is... | ||
| Like, Peter Thiel talks about this. | ||
| There's this kind of unfulfilled sense of future that we all... | ||
| Like, anybody who grew up in the post-war years in the 60s, 70s, they were like... | ||
| Whatever his famous line, we're promised flying cars and all we got was 140 characters or whatever. | ||
| I think that applies to the space exploration stuff. | ||
| It's like, well, the government is no longer doing the really ambitious shit, but we can do it privately. | ||
| On the other hand, there is a government in the world that is doing that shit in China. | ||
| They just landed on the far side of the moon. | ||
| They're doing really aggressive space exploration. | ||
| And I haven't been there in 20 years, but the people I know who live there say... | ||
| There is so much faith in the future there. | ||
| They just believe in a very inherent, deep-down way that the future will be better and sci-fi-y in an exciting way. | ||
| And that's so foreign from the way that Americans think about the future. | ||
| Is that part of the benefit of having a dictator run things? | ||
| I think it's just like they're on a huge upswing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But it's also like there's no debate about how things get done. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| I mean, that's what I was saying before. | ||
| It's like, it gives you some hope for climate. | ||
| If, like, Xi Jinping is just like, okay, immediately, no more coal. | ||
| They'll all stop. | ||
| But he's also throwing two million Muslims in concentration camps. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| This Bezos thing. | ||
| I mean, I'm not criticizing you, because I think it's a very common thought. | ||
| But 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? | ||
| Isn't it sort of just how you're always going to look at someone who lives in a hundred million dollar house? | ||
| It's possible. | ||
| I think when you look at, I mean, not to get too like armchair psychologizing about Bezos, but when you look at the physical transformation that he's put himself through, when you think about like the life extension. | ||
| What has he done physically? | ||
| Well, he's just like, I mean, if you look at photos of him when he's like a young man, he's, you know, just kind of like dweeby. | ||
| And now he's like an action hero. | ||
| Is he really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, maybe not like you, but he's pretty... | ||
| Is Bezos jacked? | ||
| Am I missing something? | ||
| Let me show you. | ||
| He definitely looks different. | ||
| Pull up some images of Jeff Bezos jacked. | ||
| I didn't know. | ||
| He's got a trainer. | ||
| No, I'm not blaming him, but that's only one part of it. | ||
| I would say bigger than that is just how thin-skinned the world's... | ||
| Okay, let me say. | ||
| Zoom in. | ||
| Well, I guess. | ||
| I guess he's got some arms. | ||
| There he is. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| That's a big difference. | ||
| Yeah, but he's also got a vest on. | ||
| I guess his arms do look pretty big. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In most ways, I'm not a Bezos hater. | ||
| I think Amazon has been actually really pretty great. | ||
| I'm a fan. | ||
| I like listening to the guy talk. | ||
| And I loved his letter to the National Enquirer. | ||
| There he is right there. | ||
| Yeah, so he looks fit in front of the King Kong Rampage movie. | ||
| Is that him? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, he looks pretty good. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I guess physical transformation. | ||
| But life extension, like uploading your brain to the computer. | ||
| Is he into that shit? | ||
| He is actually, I think, not as into it as some other people. | ||
| That is so sci-fi. | ||
| You 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... | ||
| These guys are, they're talking about something that they think will be invented, and they're acting as if it's been invented. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| I mean, Eric Schmidt has said about climate change that the solution is already here in the sense that AI will just solve it. | ||
| And it's like, well, no! | ||
| That's nonsense. | ||
| That's a weird thing that we do, though, right? | ||
| We always look to like, oh, someone's going to handle this. | ||
| Yeah, 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. | ||
| So if the world is on fire and full of suffering... | ||
| Maybe we can just upload our minds to some machines and not live in the real world anymore. | ||
| And when I think about even my relationship to my phone, like tech addiction generally, we're sort of being taught to think of the world on our screens as more real than the world that's around us. | ||
| and that sounds in a lot of ways like declinist and whatever, but I also think it may be a kind of coping mechanism for a world that we're about to head into where there is that much more suffering, and when I see, for instance, like the whole wellness movement, I think there are intuitions there about like the toxicity of the world and how we have to avoid it. I think there are intuitions there about like the toxicity I think the way that it will reshape our own sense of self and relationship to the world and idea of our place in nature and history, | ||
| all of these things are really up in the air and will be affected by climate change, I think, you know, in ways that we don't all of these things are really up in the air and will be affected different. | ||
| So, to wave the wand, what would be step number one? | ||
| Step number one is ending fossil fuel subsidies. | ||
| Ends fossil fuel subsidies. | ||
| Step number two. | ||
| Step number two, just massive R&D investment. | ||
| Massive investment in R&D and new infrastructure. | ||
| Which would be great for the economy, right? | ||
| Totally. | ||
| So, these things, taking a positive, or taking a negative, and looking at positive aspects of mitigating the problem. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, yeah, new energy sources. | ||
| I mean, you know, there are already new business empires that are from the climate change era. | ||
| There are new solar empires. | ||
| There are new wind empires. | ||
| But that can happen globally. | ||
| That needs to happen globally. | ||
| And, you know, then we have to deal with agriculture, which may be about seaweed. | ||
| It may be about lab-grown meat. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But, you know, it's like... | ||
| The big picture, it's all carbon. | ||
| It's all just how much carbon we put into the atmosphere. | ||
| So I think it will come to be the case that in the decades ahead, everything about the way that we interact with the world will be described and understood in terms of carbon so that For instance, you walk down the aisle in the supermarket, you see organic food, you see non-GMO food, you'll also see carbon-free food. | ||
| I think that'll be a big part of the way that we consume everything, that things will be advertised that way, promoted that way. | ||
| But globally, we just need to really focus on reducing carbon. | ||
| And wherever it is, which is almost everywhere, we need to figure out new ways to do whatever it is we're doing that's causing that problem. | ||
| We need to make it trendy in LA. That's what we do. | ||
| Have some organic, gluten-free, carbon-free food. | ||
| I feel like that's already kind of happening. | ||
| It should be. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| As long as that kicks in and people realize there's some street cred to being carbon-free. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I think in different parts of the world, people will relate differently to it. | ||
| So, like, yeah, in China, they're scheduled to have this huge... | ||
| Boom in beef consumption and dairy consumption because it's expected that as that country gets richer, the people will adopt a more Western diet. | ||
| But it's also possible that they won't. | ||
| That, like, the new Chinese middle class will be still really interested in, you know, tofu, less interested in beef, less interested in milk. | ||
| And It might be easier to have them follow that path than it will be to make the average American eat less beef. | ||
| But, you know, it's everywhere. | ||
| Everywhere you look, there's some little problem to solve. | ||
| But then when you pull back, it really is just carbon. | ||
| If you think about everything you do in terms of the carbon impact it has, then... | ||
| The solutions suggest themselves. | ||
| And I do think that in the coming decades, even if you and I don't start to think in those terms, our policymakers will. | ||
| Everything will be. | ||
| Oh, we're entering into a new trade agreement with Japan. | ||
| What's the carbon budget here? | ||
| How's their carbon behavior? | ||
| Oh, we're providing some public subsidies for this factory over here. | ||
| What's their emission situation like? | ||
| Can we ask them to... | ||
| Bring along some carbon capture plants so that they reduce their footprint. | ||
| At 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. | ||
| What about, is there a way to educate people in a way that's not preachy, that sort of moves the needle in that direction? | ||
| I think conversations like this are important, I think your book's very important, and I think, you know, Yeah. | ||
| kind of like ups the needle or ups the perception of it a little bit. | ||
| But is there anything else that can be done that can educate people in a way that's not preachy or it's not aggressive in a way that annoys people? | ||
| Because it's a horrible thing to say. | ||
| No, I feel totally the same way. | ||
| We're like, we need sugar in the medicine, you know, like the song from Mary Poppins. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I think in general, like, climate messaging, climate communication has really suffered for a long time because it was so preachy and because it was so holier than thou. | ||
| And because the people that get involved in it, part of the reason why they get involved in it is for virtue signaling. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| And I've been asked, as I've been promoting the book by a lot of people, what have you done in your life to change? | ||
| And it's like, well, I'm flying a little bit less. | ||
| Flying really makes me feel guilty. | ||
| But otherwise, I basically haven't changed anything because I do think that politics and policy are the most important impact you can have. | ||
| And I'm spreading the word. | ||
| Whether I eat a couple fewer hamburgers a year just doesn't really matter that much. | ||
| But the idea that you would... | ||
| Ask a newcomer to the movement to demonstrate their commitment by making themselves the most optimally committed that they possibly could be. | ||
| That's just going to alienate so many people. | ||
| And this is obviously an issue where we need more people engaged in a more direct, profound way. | ||
| So I think for me, it's like anyone who wants to care about climate, who wants to vote about climate, like, come on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think that, you know, Hollywood can be really important here. | ||
| I 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. | ||
| I mean, in the book, I read about this story that happened a couple years ago where... | ||
| You know, anthrax that had killed a reindeer in Russia in the early 20th century. | ||
| The reindeer was frozen in permafrost for the entire 20th century. | ||
| Permafrost melted, the reindeer thawed, the anthrax was released, and killed at least one boy and a number of other reindeer in Russia. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And that is true. | ||
| So, in the ice, in the Arctic ice, you know, we know of rock as like a record of geological history. | ||
| Ice is also a record of geological history. | ||
| So, like the bubonic plague is trapped in ice. | ||
| The Spanish flu from 1918 that killed hundreds of millions of people is trapped in ice. | ||
| There are diseases trapped in the Arctic ice from before humans were around, which means that humans' immune system have no experience with them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's so many horror movies that you can make about this subject. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| I didn't even think of that. | ||
| I didn't know that the Spanish flu was trapped in ice. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, and there have been instances where, like, in lab conditions, anyway, they've revived bacteria that are millions of years old. | ||
| One Russian doctor literally injected a bacteria that he had revived from, like, 35,000 years ago. | ||
| It had been frozen for 35,000 years. | ||
| He brought it back to life and injected it into himself. | ||
| Why would he do that? | ||
| Just to see what would happen. | ||
| That's a fucking Marvel comic book. | ||
| You become like the Red Skull or some shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's what I mean about this. | ||
| This story is so big. | ||
| It's like the world that we live in in the next couple of decades will be completely transformed. | ||
| Like, we will be reading... | ||
| About diseases coming out of the Arctic ice. | ||
| We will be 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. | ||
| We will be reading about climate conflict. | ||
| We'll be reading about, you know, I mean, all this shit. | ||
| It's everywhere. | ||
| You know, air pollution increases the rates of autism and ADHD. It changes the development of babies in utero. | ||
| It's like, it's all-encompassing. | ||
| Wow, the disease in the ice thing is really freaking me out. | ||
| I never even considered that. | ||
| But that is something to think about, along with the methane and carbon that's going to be emitted into the atmosphere as it melts. | ||
| Well, let me tell you the story. | ||
| So, there... | ||
| So, there are this species of antelope called a cyuga antelope. | ||
| They're mostly in Siberia. | ||
| They're kind of dwarf antelopes. | ||
| And they've been around for millions of years. | ||
| And all of a sudden, in 2016 or 2015, they literally all died. | ||
| It's called a megadeath. | ||
| The entire species died. | ||
| They're extinct? | ||
| They're now extinct. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| And that happened because a bacteria that had been living inside their guts was changed by temperature conditions. | ||
| It was an unusually hot, unusually humid summer. | ||
| And this bacteria that had been living inside them, presumably for millions of years, Comfortably, as a kind of peaceful cooperator, became a killer and killed the entire species. | ||
| Now, we have, inside us, Countless bacteria and viruses. | ||
| Scientists believe millions in every human. | ||
| So our guts are full of bacteria that do our digestion for us, they monitor our moods. | ||
| There 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. | ||
| And most of those bacteria and viruses are not going to be dramatically transformed by a degree or two degrees of warming. | ||
| But there are so many of them. | ||
| The chances that one could... | ||
| It's hard to dismiss that. | ||
| And whether that would mean we'd all immediately go extinct? | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| But what if that means suddenly schizophrenia increases by 15% because schizophrenia is related to a bacterial infection called Toxoplasma, I think it's bacteria, Toxoplasma gondii. | ||
| That's that cat parasite. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Schizophrenia is related to that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, it like triples your chances of getting schizophrenia. | ||
| And our bodies are so complex, such intricate ecosystems, like you say, that if one little thing gets disturbed, it could have really catastrophic impacts on us. | ||
| And that's true of the planet as a whole. | ||
| I think that's one of the big lessons of my book, is that this is such a delicate system. | ||
| It's been stable for all of human history, and now it's not stable. | ||
| What that means for how we live, we don't know yet, but the changes will be significant, will be profound. | ||
| But it's also true of the individual. | ||
| You know, our bodies will be living differently in a world that's two degrees warmer than they are today. | ||
| We can't really predict what those impacts will be, but they could be quite dramatic. | ||
| And they could be things that we can't even imagine today because there are, you know, by some counts, millions of bacteria inside us that we haven't even identified yet. | ||
| Jesus Christ, you're freaking me out, David. | ||
| God damn it. | ||
| It's a crazy world out there. | ||
| Well, not just crazy, but it seems like... | ||
| When 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. | ||
| It's really terrifying. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| And part of the problem is people here are like, oh, relax, everything's fine. | ||
| This is this constant thing that we do, where if it's not affecting us currently, right now, in the moment, there's not a fire in front of us, we don't worry about it. | ||
| It's a weird compartmentalization thing that human beings do. | ||
| Yeah, and... | ||
| You'd think that evolution would have trained us differently. | ||
| You'd think that evolution would have trained us over time to have at least some long-term capacity. | ||
| And I guess we do have some long-term planning capacity, but we choose to think in really short-term ways just about all the time. | ||
| Now, you've already freaked me out. | ||
| How's your book going to freak me out more? | ||
| I mean, it's every page. | ||
| Every page is more of this? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Jesus, man. | ||
| How do you sleep at night? | ||
| Are you okay? | ||
| I mean, I sleep through compartmentalization and denial, too. | ||
| I'm not, 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. | ||
| That's not who I am. | ||
| I'm not an environmentalist. | ||
| Until a couple years ago when I started really worrying about this stuff, I had the same disinclination to take it seriously that most people do. | ||
| You know, I thought climate change was real. | ||
| I thought it was something that we need to worry about and deal with. | ||
| But I thought it was, like, a small problem that could be dealt with without much change to my life. | ||
| I still basically feel that way. | ||
| I like going on vacations in nature, but I'm not someone who spends months hiking the trail or whatever. | ||
| I've never even had a pet. | ||
| I don't love animals. | ||
| But the more I looked at the science, the more I just realized this isn't about affecting some part of nature over there. | ||
| It's about affecting all of human life, every aspect of human life as it's lived on this planet, and that really terrified me. | ||
| But even knowing that, even staring at it straight in the face, I mean, I still get up in the morning and, you know, whatever, do the same shit. | ||
| Go to the gym, watch basketball, go to my day job, and... | ||
| I don't think that we should be ashamed of that. | ||
| I 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. | ||
| But 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. | ||
| But, 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. | ||
| I'm imagining the world that I grew up in. | ||
| And again, that's not like... | ||
| That's how everybody relates to the world. | ||
| And 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. | ||
| There's no way that the climate system as it exists today will be stabilized forever. | ||
| It will get hotter. | ||
| All of these things will get worse. | ||
| Every tick upward of temperature will create more climate suffering somewhere in the world. | ||
| And if we get to really dramatic levels of warming, that suffering will be basically everywhere. | ||
| We can't continue orienting our perspective on the future on the world as it is today. | ||
| We have to take seriously this range of 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. | ||
| If we keep looking out the window and thinking the world as it is now will continue, we're not going to do anything. | ||
| And that's what we've done over the last 30 years, which has been catastrophic. | ||
| I think that message is really important and I think that also the message of that we need to change and evolve as a civilization but as a human being you need to still enjoy your life and that you know it just it's it's a it's not 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%. | ||
| What's the difference? | ||
| What do they do differently? | ||
| They drive less. | ||
| That's weird because they make the best cars. | ||
| Yeah, but it's like less territory. | ||
| I mean, there aren't many people in Europe who commute an hour and a half to work every day, and that's not so uncommon in America. | ||
| Their diet is better, carbon-wise. | ||
| And they have some more aggressive green energy stuff going on. | ||
| How is their diet better, carbon-wise? | ||
| They waste less food, basically. | ||
| So a third of all American food, I think it's a third, is wasted. | ||
| That's just wasted carbon. | ||
| And, you know, I think the number of electricity is like 70% of American electricity is wasted because of how bad the grid is. | ||
| Like, it just is so bad at delivering from one source to another. | ||
| This is one reason why SolarCity is so important because the battery can be a much more efficient transporter of electricity. | ||
| Well, there's just no excuse for California. | ||
| I mean, other than this winter, it's sunny every day. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But so if 70% of American electricity is wasted, it's like, we're just throwing all that carbon away. | ||
|
unidentified
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70%. | |
| Yeah, that's giant. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And if we were less wasteful, we'd have, you know, less of a problem on our hands. | ||
| But we still, like, order twice as much food as we want and then throw it out. | ||
| I mean, I do that. | ||
| Yeah, so you can understand why someone would say to you, like, what are you doing? | ||
| But it's that sentiment behind it that's kind of gross, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like they're looking for you to be a hypocrite. | ||
| They're trying to catch you. | ||
| Well, when I look at hypocrisy, what I see is like, you know, you want the world to be a better place than you yourself are doing. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's like, that to me, there's a way of, it's like, we think of hypocrisy as like a negative quality. | ||
| I think it's kind of a positive, it can be a positive quality. | ||
| You believe we should be behaving in one way collectively. | ||
| Better than you are. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We just need to adjust. | ||
| You're saying not just what everybody needs to do, but you need to do as well. | ||
| You're being conscious of this need to change. | ||
| And if someone believes in, say, better healthcare, we don't ask them to donate all of their money to hospitals. | ||
| That's what taxation is for. | ||
| Policy directs our cultural energy towards targets that we want to reach. | ||
| So again, as a civilization we need to adjust. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And as an individual we need to be aware so that we promote and support this idea of a civilization shifting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Listen, man. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thanks for scaring the shit out of me. | ||
| Thanks for coming down here. | ||
| Tell people the name of your book one more time, please. | ||
| It's called The Uninhabitable Earth. | ||
| The subtitle is Life After Warming. | ||
| It's on my Instagram, and we'll put a link to it on Amazon, on Twitter. | ||
| And thank you, David. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| Great to meet you. | ||
| I really appreciate it, man. | ||
| It's great to meet you, too. | ||
| Good luck with your book, man. | ||
| I really, I think it's going to make a big impact. | ||
| Thank you. |
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