Few people working in media have thought about climate change more than our guest today.

David Wallace-Wells is the author of The New York Times, number one bestselling book, The Uninhabitable Earth.

It's a big word, uninhabitable.

Today, we're going to be discussing exactly what that means.

But don't worry, it's not all doom and gloom.

I'm Jasmine Singer and this is Environmental Connections Today, we're delving into this tension between the hope of what we can achieve and the doom of what might be if we fail.

Well explore not just the impacts of our actions, but also the psychology behind our responses to climate change.

Recent surveys reveal a startling perspective among the youth.

Many people believe they're inheriting a world doomed by previous generations mistakes.

They're growing up with a climate legacy framed by fear, not promise.

And yet this generation is also at the forefront of demanding and creating change, proving that where there is a will to fight for the planet, there is a beacon of hope.

Today's esteemed guest is lauded New York Times journalist David Wallace-Wells, author of the number one New York Times best-selling book, The Uninhabitable Earth, which i portrayal of our possible future shaped by climate change.

David brings a perspective that balances the edge of climate realism with the potential for meaningful action.

David, thank you so much for joining us today.

Welcome to Environmental Connections.

Thanks so much.

It's great to be here.

So David, you have been a leading voice in articulating the urgent and multifaceted impacts of climate change.

Now, I don't want to get into all of the details off the bat, but for those of you who aren't familiar with what David has to say on the topic, David, I'm wondering if you can give us an idea of your 50,000 foot high view.

From the really big picture perspective.

The planet's already warmer than it has ever been in the entire history of human civilization, and that means that an awful lot that we have come to take for granted as part of that civilization is under some amount of threat, probably will have to reconsider what of the world we now live in today can continue as it is.

What will have to be renovated and reformed and what will have to be discarded?

And that's just at the temperature level that we're at today, which is about 1.11.2 degrees warmer than it was before the Industrial revolution.

We're expecting things to continue warming from there.

Exactly how much we don't know.

But we're rapidly losing the opportunity to stabilize the world's climate, a temperature levels that we had hoped to achieve five or ten years ago with measures like the Paris Agreement, where we had hoped to limit warming to 1.5 degrees or in a kind of backstop way two degrees.

Personally, I think that that more optimistic goal of about 1.5 degrees is functionally lost at this point.

But we still have some outside chance at keeping temperatures below two degrees and every 10th of a degree is certainly over half of what of a degree makes an enormous amount of difference to the amount of human suffering and human flourishing that we'll see on the planet in the in the head.

But whatever we do, whatever action we take, however fully we renovate our lives as we're going to be living in a transformed world.

It'll be transformed in part by climate impacts and transformed in part by the actions we take.

So what we're talking about is designing a new future, ideally one that is more resilient, more just more equitable, and also more stable and more safe, but, you know, the matter is up to us and we may well find ourselves stumbling into a a more jagged future instead.

Now, you have described, including right now a little bit the speed of climate change as worse than many perceive it is.

Now, I know it's early in our chat, but let's start with that big one.

How can we change public perception to better reflect this urgency?

Well, I'm not sure this is the honest answer.

It seems very, very complicated.

I think five or ten years ago, it was a relatively common feeling among climate activists that once we saw some really large climate impacts, that the world would wake up and that we would have lost an opportunity to take action ahead of time, but we would nevertheless be, you know, moved at scale towards political action by really, really visible, undeniable kind of disasters and climate disruptions.

And I think over that period, over the last five or ten years, we've started to see those disasters and those disruptions We saw just this past year, we saw the deadliest wildfire in North American history and Maui.

We saw the deadliest wildfire in South American history in Chile.

We saw about these incredibly large fires burning in Canada, so large that half the world's countries could fit inside the burn scar we've seen this winter.

It's the summer down there, but winter for us.

Fires in Australia that are eight times as large as the famous Black Summer fires from 2019-2020.

So even just looking at the fire impacts, which is just one of many, many impacts we're seeing, is really, really remarkable indeed on the scale of sort of human lifetimes, unprecedented climate disruptions and disasters.

And unfortunately, I think the public, they note some of these impacts.

They marvel at them a little bit, but mostly they move on from them and start to treat even those unthinkable, unprecedented disasters as a kind of a background noise to their normal lives.

And so I'm not sure if that confidence that we may have had five or ten years ago is really being borne out here.

I think it seems more to be the case that even in a world defined ever more by climate impacts, we're finding more and more innovative ways of normalizing those disasters and to some extent looking away from them.

That's not to say that nobody cares about climate change.

You know, public concern is growing, public alarm is growing.

And there has been an incredible awakening of political activism around climate over the last five years in particular, which has really changed a lot of the political discourse, too.

We've seen massive investments in green energy all around the world, EVs and transportation technologies.

And now it's hard to find even a single one These are, you know, the uptake here is really quite rapid, much more rapid than many people forecast a few years ago.

And so, as you said at the top, as we are, Many of them talk about it, even an existential terms.

you know, sleepwalking into a world that is defined ever more by climate disruption, we are also racing towards a green transition at the same time, and we're not doing enough fast enough to really allow ourselves a path to what we would have once considered a stable and comfortable climate.

But we're still doing a lot more than I think most people expected to see just a few years ago.

And so that's for me, The psychological, political, cultural and communication challenge of the moment is how do we wrap our heads around these two sets of facts at once?

The climate is behaving in unprecedented ways, presenting unprecedented challenges, and we are responding at the conference precedent of speed.

You know, Do we take these two sets of facts together and think things are going okay?

Do we take them together and think things are going poorly?

It's really both.

And we may feel different ways at different times as we reckon with different parts of the problem.

But unfortunately, we're going to be living in that kind of a future for the rest of our lives, defined both by the negative impacts and the positive transformations.

And ultimately, I guess where I come down is that climate change doesn't really care all that much about how we feel, how I feel, or how you feel.

The important thing is what's happening, what damage it's doing, what suffering it's imposing, and what humans are doing to respond, and what more humans could be doing If more people like us devoted our lives, or at least our votes to making sure that happened.

I want to go back to what you're talking about, about these catastrophic scenarios that you're pointing to, including social and economic impacts.

How should these be influencing current global policies and international relations in ways that they currently aren't?

because there's been this incredible transformation in the price of renewable energy, in particular over the last decade, with the price of wind and solar falling by 80-90%, the price of batteries falling similarly, such that now in 90 plus percent of the world, it's cheaper to build new green energy and continue running dirty energy.

This is meant that anyone who's sort of drawing the climate future or indeed the political or economic future of the world on a whiteboard and trying to say, here's where we should be going if we are at the optimal way.

They are now seeing that that optimal path is the green path and the dirt path is actually the path of greater impoverishment.

And indeed quite a lot of public health suffering.

On top of that, you know, estimates today are that at least 5 million people are dying every year from the air pollution produced from the burning of fossil fuels globally.

And even in the US where we have relatively clean air, something on the order of 350,000 Americans are dying every year from that air pollution, which is about as many people as died in the first year of COVID in the US.

So we're talking about an annual public health burden from our use of fossil fuels that is absolutely enormous.

And we now see a path where we can avoid that.

We can go green, electrify our power transportation system, and also add significantly to our pace of economic growth and activity for a number of reasons, including that doing so will mean producing, generating a sort of a new industrial revolution, a new green industrial revolution, and all of the investment and job creation that that that brings with it.

So regarding that impact of getting involved with policy work in order to address climate change, do you feel that it's only effective when it's on a national level, or are there things that can be done on a local level that you think are impactful?

Absolutely.

In a lot of ways, you know, local policy advocacy can be more effective because the obstacles are smaller and less organized and less well financed.

At the moment we're now in America dealing with the aftermath of this large piece of climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act that was passed about a year and a half ago now.

And seeing how that money, which is really, really large scale investment, much, much larger than the US has ever made before on green energy and decarbonization, how that investment is actually shaking out and being spent on the ground and that is being determined by local factors much more than by national factors.

I mean, the federal government has set these tax incentives, They've set some regulations and policies.

But, you know, whether a transmission line gets built or whether a large solar farm is built or whether there's actually opposition to those projects at the local level is again, being determined by those communities and whether they're supportive of those projects or the opposite.

The same is true, you know, in the in the public sector with local environmental policy.

You know, again, these are leaders who interface with their constituents in a much more direct way therefore and they should be much more responsive to local voices.

And that means that there's sort of more leverage when you're talking about these impacts or trying to, you know, try to have an impact at the local level than at the national level.

You know, a national vote, a vote for president is really important.

This fall is like a really big election for the kind of climate course of the country.

That almost goes without saying.

But even regardless of what happens in November, we're going to be figuring out a lot of this.

We're going to be spending a lot of this money.

We're going to be determining whether and using what standards we are.

We are making those investments.

And a lot of that is going to be shaped at the state and local level, not just the federal one.

So I think, you know, there's a place for action up and down the sort of the climate food chain and starting with at the very smallest level, just the act of climate communication that you can engage with the people around you, whether or not you're even organizing or planning on calling a local representative or, you know, state senator, a mayor, council person, whatever, or simply talking about your concerns, I think is the sort of smallest building block of political action.

And many surveys show that a huge number of Americans carry around climate anxiety without really sharing it with those around them, which means that we're all pulled into a place where we believe that we care about this more than the people around us.

And in fact, other polling shows that that's not really true, that in fact, we systematically underestimate how much concern, not just those closest to us have about climate change, but the country as a whole.

So we've been sort of led to believe for a variety of reasons, or we've allowed ourselves to believe for a variety of reasons, that we are all lonely in our climate anxiety and feelings of climate urgency, when in fact, the more we talk about it, the more we learn.

There are people who feel the same way or even more intensely all around us.

Well, we decided we are going to put that to the test.

We're here in Rochester, New York, at Highland Park.

At the Lilac Festival on what is probably the most beautiful day of the spring.

And we want to chat with some Rochesterians and find out what exactly are they thinking when it comes to climate change.

Well, you can see it all around.

The summers are hotter, winters are almost non-existent.

Right?

We used to get a lot of snow, a lot of snowstorms easily be frigid.

And I was like, Yeah, yeah, we might get snow.

I think about it more when I hear people denying it.

Okay, tell me more about that.

Well, there are people who deny that there is climate change and it's pretty obvious, You know, the polar ice cap is shrinking.

Mm hmm.

We're in trouble if we don't do anything about it.

I'm not scared in the sense that it's, you know, it's not going to impact me to watch, but the next couple of generations are going to have to have had to deal with it.

I know personally, I feel the weight of climate change, the weather changes.

And not only that, but it's important to be conscious of the things you're buying, what you're doing and how they impact the world and climate change.

I say as I hold a giant stuffed animal.

I think there's a lot more to worry about climate change at the moment.

Like what?

Our government.

The way everything's run.

Prices of everything.

This isn't just a small, nuanced idea of like, Oh, just drive your car less and go to work.

You have to put more effort in.

And there's also more need for accountability across all generations.

I don't want to go and generalize the whole generations and say they didn't do it right.

But, you know, they were discovering the issue and creating their own opinions.

Being conscious about like our effect on the environment is definitely a good thing.

I think especially as Gen Z, the next generation, like we have a responsibility to this planet to try to help you.

Do you think that you want to be nice to the planet?

Yeah.

Do you know what that would mean?

Like, what would you do to be nice to the planet?

Oh, I will hug it.

Yeah, that's a good idea.

I love that idea.

You are so smart.

Can you give me high fives?

Do you feel like people around us care as much as you do?

I know there's a lot of people that care as much as I do.

There's certainly people who don't.

And we need to win them over somehow.

You know, we're not going to do it by shouting.

And frankly, we're not going to do it purely by legislation.

We have to you know, this is a phrase from a long time ago, we've got to win their hearts and minds.

Yeah.

On a regular basis, we're just trying to be conscious of what we're doing and what our carbon footprint is and not putting out a lot of garbage.

We recycle everything we can and hope goes the right places.

Yeah.

We try to our best to be educate and do what we can, but we could do better.

So I'm sure that everyone can do better.

Just be conscious of, you know, the things that you do and the toll and the effects that you can have, whether they be good or bad.

You know, some people know and they just don't care.

But when you know, when you know better, you do better, right?

What more do you feel that the Biden administration should be doing that it isn't?

Well, you know, in a really big picture, in a universe in which political action was sort of unencumbered by political reality, I would like to see a lot more what are called supply side constraints on the use of fossil fuels.

So the IRA was, as I said, an enormous bill.

I mean, it was officially budget by the Congressional Budget Office as a $369 billion, but it's likely to end up being at least twice as expensive in the end, just because these are untapped tax credits.

So when people claim them, the government pays you.

And if you claim more of them, the government pays you more.

So the faster and larger the green transition is, the bigger this bill will actually end up being.

It's an enormous bill, but it's almost all on that sort of carrot side, on that incentive side, and very little on that stick side on the regulation and punishment side.

There are a couple of little things in there.

There's a thing about methane that is a regulatory thing.

But, you know, in general, we have a challenge when it comes to climate because we are continuing to produce fossil fuel emissions.

That's true at the global level and it's true at the American level.

We are seeing really impressive and inspiring world out of renewables.

But even incredibly large scale rollout of renewables is only beginning to dent our at the global level the amount of fossil fuels that we're using.

And if we you know, it doesn't matter if we have 50 times as many renewables as we have today or we're still burning the same number of fossil fuels, we're going to be doing as much damage to the planet's climate future as we are doing today in order to start limiting that damage and ultimately get it down to zero, we need to really rapidly draw down our use of fossil fuels.

And I think that the Biden administration, but really governments all around the world, could be doing much more to address that production and supply side of the equation, not just trying to, you know, try to effect whether American consumers can afford it even more easily, which is the sort of the kind of approach that they've taken to this point.

if we leave it to the market, even if we're trying to shape the market through tax incentives, we are going to get action, we are going to get a transition, we're going to see an energy transformation.

But it's going to be considerably slower than, you know, the timelines that the climate is sort of screaming at us we have to hit.

I recently received a letter from a listener who said, What is the point of doing anything when China is creating so many greenhouse gases?

And as you mentioned of note, the U.S. has historically emitted more carbon than any other country on the globe.

So is China making progress more progress than we are?

It depends how you want to think about it.

But, you know, certainly in terms of providing green energy, they are not just doing better than we are.

They're doing better than everybody else.

Half of all of the renewables that were installed last year were installed in China.

Two thirds of all the EVs sold last year anywhere in the world were sold in China.

And they're a country that is still burning a lot of coal.

In fact, they're still opening up new coal plants and they're funding coal and other countries.

This is, you know, all falls on the bad side of the ledger.

They are producing considerably more carbon than the U.S., although on a per capita basis, they're actually producing less than we are.

all those reasons, I think it's a complicated comparison to make.

But ultimately, I think that as a country and as a sort of a national political discourse, we've done too much vilification of China and don't appreciate how much they're doing to accelerate the green transition, not just within their borders, but around the world.

They could be doing a lot better.

They're still increasing their emissions, whereas we're declining them, as are most rich countries in the world.

And you know, that's concerning, but presumably, probably most analysts believe that they'll reach a peak sometime this decade and will start a relatively rapid decline.

And at the moment, the fact that other places in the world are driving down their greenhouse gases already is in some meaningful way due to the R&D investment and indeed, like cheap industrial production of that green capacity that's happening inside China.

And it's not happening.

It's not a perfect world like there's a lot of ugly labor practices there.

There's a you know, there's a lot of environmental contamination that's happening as a result.

But if what we're hoping for is a more urgent global response, I think that the single country that is doing most to accelerate that speed mission is China.

They're also doing more damage than anyone else, but also doing more to bring about resolution of that damage.

So again, it's another story where we have to sort of keep two seemingly contradictory points in our heads at once.

But I would just urge the listener and indeed anyone else listening that, you know, anytime we're really vilifying China, we're oversimplifying the state of play over there and maybe also trying to avoid looking at what we are doing here in the United States.

Right on that point, I mentioned the historical emissions, which are really quite significant.

I mean, we are the U.S. is responsible for something like 20 times as much carbon damage as has been produced by all of sub-Saharan Africa, which is a home to 1.2 billion people.

We've done about 20 times as much damage.

But even looking at the very present tense, the EPA under Joe Biden recently revised its social cost of carbon, which is an economic way of measuring the amount of damage we expect every tonne of carbon to do once we put it into atmosphere.

They And that means that given how much damage, how much carbon are putting into the atmosphere every year, the Joe Biden EPA believes that this country, the United States, is doing about $1 trillion of damage every year to the planet's climate.

That is a really, really large number and that's the damage that we're doing right now today.

So, you know, we may want to point fingers at China.

We may want to shake our fists at them and tell them they're not doing enough.

I would like to see China moving more quickly to.

But here we are in a country that is imposing $1 trillion of damage on the world every year and is also at all time highs of oil production and gas production and oil exports and gas exports.

So even as we are undergoing a pretty rapid transition here, like China, we are also continuing to do a lot of damage and we should you know, any time we're pointing the finger at any other country, you know, probably makes sense to look in the mirror at the same time.

Yeah, I absolutely David one of your central theses is that vast regions of the planet are going to become inhospitable to humans since large scale human migrations are apparently inevitable.

What should governments, especially ones like Rochester, which may in fact in the not too distant future receive hundreds or thousands or even tens of thousands of refugees be doing to Well, you know, there are a few different layers to that question.

And I think ultimately, you know, taking in the full scope of the story, you have to say people like us are really in a profound way responsible for this crisis.

And therefore, we have a really profound responsibility to do what we can to care for and attend to the needs of those who are being hit most intensely.

And I think that, you know, that requires something of us at a political level.

That means we should be moving fast to decarbonize, because that's one thing we can do.

It also means we should be trying to shape our national politics around more generosity and empathy.

If climate change teaches us anything, really, ultimately it should teach us that we're all on this one planet together and we need to take care of one another.

at the local level, I think what that means is that, you know, again, it's sort of an echo of what we were talking about earlier in terms of policy action, we are globally seeing a great human migration.

We are seeing that at a national level.

These are many people who are struggling to get a foothold in a place that is more comfortable and may allow them a more flourishing human life than the one they have elsewhere.

Anything that we can do to make that easier and softer on them, I think we should.

And that's to say we should first of all, say welcome.

But also, you know, invest and volunteer in efforts to help those who are relocating relocate.

And that can mean, you know, job training and temporary housing.

It can be in any number of things.

But I think ultimately it means just adopting a posture of empathy not everyone feels those impulses all the time.

We're not all perfect beings.

But, you know, to try to remind ourselves if we feel thoughts or impulses that are somewhat more negative or hostile to try to, you know, put ourselves in their shoes and respond as we would like to be responded to if we were on the other side.

I would like to thank our guest today, David Wallace-Wells, for sharing his concerns, his insights and his hopes.

The uninhabitable earth.

Oh, does it have to be that way?

The answer might be up to us.

Until next time, I'm Jasmin Singer, thank you for making these Environmental Connections.