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- [00:00]
A
Yo, welcome back. Canal Street Dreams. Very esteemed guests. We don't. We don't always get the most esteemed guests. We love our guests. But this is actually an esteemed guest. He wrote the most trafficked, most read article of all time in New York magazine, the Uninhabitable Earth. He's also my editor from New York magazine, David Wallace Wells. David, welcome to the show, brother.
- [00:23]
B
Thank you, man. Good to be here.
- [00:24]
A
Yes. But you were saying, where did we meet?
- [00:27]
B
It was a. It was like a food market at Seward park. Where you were run with Bauhaus.
- [00:32]
A
Yes, yes, yes. The Hester Food market.
- [00:34]
B
Right?
- [00:35]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [00:36]
B
And I mean, we just had like a couple bao, but. Yeah, but that was like, well before we even connected as writer and editor.
- [00:43]
A
Wow.
- [00:43]
B
That must have been like, I don't know, when was that? 2012, something like that. 2014.
- [00:48]
A
It might have even been 2000. And like, I think that was 2010. Crazy, because I was selling kimchi cold noodles over there with like, a Ron Sisters, and they were selling gluten free baked goods. They were like pioneers of, like, gluten free. It was either gluten free or vegan baked goods. And it was like his sister's with me over there. It was awesome. That was a fun. That was a fun food fest with the Hester Food market.
- [01:13]
B
Yeah. I mean, it's a great neighborhood.
- [01:15]
A
Yeah. You still live down here?
- [01:16]
B
Yeah, down all the way on Grant Street. Like on the big co ops. Yeah.
- [01:19]
A
Nice, nice. And then we were talking. Your wife had the gallery. What was the name of the gallery?
- [01:23]
B
Invisible Exports.
- [01:24]
A
That's right.
- [01:25]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [01:25]
A
And I lived two doors down from Invisible Exports on 20 Orchard street peak. Peak Art Galleries on Orchard. And they had the show gallery Girls. Did you. Did you watch the show?
- [01:37]
C
Absolutely, yeah. Any, like, reality TV show that came out, Bravo at that time? Yeah, I was locked in.
- [01:44]
B
Bravo is still, like, thriving. Every other TV channel is dying, but.
- [01:48]
C
Bravo is like, I just watched the Salt Lake City Real Housewives, like, reunion episode one, and Andy was just like multiple celebrities. Like, Julia Roberts is, like, doing commentary on this show. And I was like, that's crazy. Like, this is where we're at. Like, Bravo really is. Just.
- [02:04]
B
Just think about how embarrassed Julia Roberts from, like, 1985 would be to see herself now.
- [02:09]
C
I don't think so. Like, I think it's just such a. Like, just the housewives in general. I truly think that it is just much more than you could give it credit for. Like, we see these women go through so much in their lives.
- [02:26]
B
It's like the equivalent of the mc, but like, for a different kind of a brand.
- [02:30]
C
I really think it's like when he talks about streetwear with his homies. That's how me and my girls talk about, like, early seasons of Real Housewives of New York. I'm like 2008, like, Bethenny Frankel selling muffins in an empty grocery store. Like, you cannot tell me that I'm not watching a case study on, like, the American Housewife woman leave the home and ascend and aspire to new things. And like, it's just. It truly is to me at least. Like, I find a lot of.
- [02:57]
B
It's like the inner life of the. Yeah, Yeah.
- [02:59]
C
I mean, it's my. My. It's my intellectual drama.
- [03:03]
A
It's incredible.
- [03:04]
B
Yeah. What's your favorite?
- [03:05]
A
Well, it's the Real Housewives of New York. Season two, I think.
- [03:09]
C
No, we're.
- [03:09]
A
Which one is the one?
- [03:10]
C
It's season seven.
- [03:11]
A
Season seven.
- [03:12]
C
It's around 2013.
- [03:14]
A
Yeah.
- [03:15]
C
New York City. A lot of good stuff going on.
- [03:17]
B
So that's still all the, like, the OG cast members.
- [03:19]
C
Not OG but it's like the prime.
- [03:22]
B
Uhhuh.
- [03:22]
C
So we have. We have some new cast members. We have somebody who came back. It's just like that was the prime of. Of that franchise. It's never been as good as it.
- [03:33]
A
It's funny because they always try to do the downtown reality show, like Housewives, but downtown, like Gallery Girls or the Dime Square One or like K Town Cowboys.
- [03:41]
B
Yeah.
- [03:42]
A
And the issue is, I think when you try to do it with downtown people, downtown people, like, protect their image more. They care.
- [03:48]
B
Yeah.
- [03:49]
A
The Real Housewives, when it works. The seasons I've seen that are good is people are just mask off, going bananas. Like, they do not give a fuck about what anyone thinks. I'm like, that is entertaining. Like, if you go on reality and you care what people think, it's going to be terrible.
- [04:02]
B
I don't think anybody has got their mask on anymore, though. I don't know. I feel like people are all. They're just. Yeah.
- [04:09]
C
I think people care so much.
- [04:11]
A
I think we're all, like, looking at people's masks. Like, I think very few people have the mask off.
- [04:15]
C
Yeah.
- [04:16]
B
Interesting.
- [04:16]
A
There's. I think they're better masks.
- [04:18]
C
Yes. No, I think the. The. The mask is. I want you to think that I am not wearing a mask. Like, it's a very curated. Like, I sometimes think. Think that's the intention behind it is like, I want you to Think I.
- [04:31]
B
Guess I gotta watch these a little bit closer.
- [04:33]
C
Yeah. Now, I mean, I think it's hard because everyone's so aware of, like, you know, we're all being surveilled in some way or other.
- [04:41]
B
I mean, there are cameras, like, right here.
- [04:43]
A
Yeah, there's cameras.
- [04:43]
C
And even in your private life, you're, like, walking down the street. Like, I was. I was at. What is the Meadow Lane.
- [04:49]
B
Yeah.
- [04:50]
C
The Tribeca grocer. I was there with my homegirl, and we're, like, eating the chicken tenders outside. I had my son with us and really, like, look over, and I'm like, oh, we're in the back of that girl's TikTok. Like, fully. Just, like, deep throating a chicken tender. And I was like, I don't want to be back. I don't want to do that.
- [05:06]
B
It's crazy. Like, from my childhood, I. You know, I would worry about the surveillance state being built by the state, but the surveillance state is being built by us, ourselves. We're all thinking about that in Minneapolis. It's like I'm watching, like, the cops are filming, the protesters are filming, the people getting harassed or filming. It's, like, mutual somehow.
- [05:24]
C
A stray dog is filming. You're like, how do you get a phone?
- [05:26]
A
Straight up, Spider man meme.
- [05:28]
B
Film.
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A
Just like, everybody's filming every day.
- [05:31]
B
And everybody thinks that by filming, they're like, they've got the upper hand. But everybody's filming.
- [05:35]
C
Yeah.
- [05:36]
A
But I'm going to indulge myself and ask you, because I've always been curious, how is it that you, like, ended up at New York Mag? And then the biggest leap to me was going from, like, editing and things like that to writing the uninhabitable Earth article. Like, I didn't expect it, and it was incredible.
- [05:50]
B
Yeah, I mean, I'm just, you know, I was working in journalism, always trying to be a writer, thinking about the news, thinking about the future, doing work with other people, which was great. I mean, I actually really miss working there. But also felt like I was often throwing out ideas and ideas meetings that we didn't really have anybody to tackle just because the kind of place we were. And at a certain point, the people I was working with were like, you should just be writing some of these stories. And in particular, that story came about. I mean, this is kind of inside baseball. Maybe not all that interesting, but after the 2016 election, I was, like, kind of in a dark spot for a number of reasons. My dad had just died. The politics of the country were Like a wreck. And I was just, you know, in a little bit of a hole wanting to do something a little bit different. And I saw this, like, open listing for a position that the New York Times was creating, like to launch a new climate section. And I was like, I know a little bit about climate. So I started thinking about what that could be. I applied for the job, I went through this whole process, talked to them for months and months, and I ended up not getting the job. I was like the runner up candidate. But I had spent like six months thinking about how we should or could tell the story of climate change differently and felt like, well, let me just like throw that into a word doc and like, send it to my editors. And that was the piece that ended up coming out in 2017, which was basically like, what's the worst that could happen?
- [07:14]
A
Yeah.
- [07:15]
B
And why are we not thinking about that really scary end of the spectrum and telling ourselves that, you know, we're definitely going to be sort of middle of the road outcomes or better, maybe we should be a little bit more worried about the surprises that could be in store for us. And yeah, as you said, it was like a huge phenomenon, which made me think, made me realize that there were a lot more people who had similar intuitions that I did, who felt like, you know, they had some sense of climate change is serious. Climate change is a big deal, but maybe it could be a much bigger deal than like, you know, most media is telling us. And I ended up getting pulled into all of these arguments and debates with climate scientists, with climate activists, with politicians about whether it was appropriate to use fear, whether we should be scared of this future, what the science really said. And I came out of that just feeling like, wow, this is the story of the 21st century. It touches every aspect of the future of our lives. Our politics are where we live, what we want for each other and for ourselves. And that there was just so much more to say and do and think about those issues than I'd even written in that original piece. Because there are political dimensions, there are philosophical dimensions, there are, you know, how it relates to economics and culture. And it felt to me at the time that, you know, I had done this one piece, I'd done this sort of like raising the alarm, talking about really scary stuff. But I also then wanted to write about what it's going to mean for us to live on a world that's totally transformed. And that doesn't mean that, you know, everybody's gonna die or like, you know, all the cities on the coast are gonna disappear. But it does mean that, you know, much more is gonna change than almost any of us really at like an intuitive animal level, really expect.
- [09:02]
A
Well, what's really interesting is people did come at you for like, oh, you're painting a far too pessimistic view of what the world will look like. But one of the reasons I hit you up to come on the show is I was like, yo, David, that picture you painted in 2017 is actually not bleak enough, considering where we're at now, is my opinion, because I remember when you wrote it, I believe people were saying, like, we have 50 years to like clean it up and get right. And I think that year calculation in many experts minds is now like five to 10 years.
- [09:38]
B
I mean, it depends what future you're aiming for. But yeah, if I would, I would like to pull back even further.
- [09:43]
A
Yeah.
- [09:43]
B
In 2000, when the US voted more for like a climate alarmist Al Gore than it did for George W. Bush.
- [09:52]
A
I'm going to say this too. One thing is I felt the two most impactful cultural things I've ever seen about climate change were Al Gore's doc and your article. I just gotta. I think so.
- [10:02]
B
Thank you. So he was like, you know, he was running for president. He had written a couple books about climate change. He had campaigned on it. He was running for president in 2000. He won more votes than George W. Bush did. He didn't win the election, but he won more votes than George W. Bush did. And if we had started decarbonizing and undertaking the green transition then in the year 2000, to keep ourselves below the temperature level that we set in 2015 we wanted to avoid. This is getting a little technical, but like below, you know, the Paris Agreement said we're going to Definitely stay below 2 degrees. We want to try to stay close to 1.5 degrees of warming. And to hit those targets starting in 2000, we would have had to slow our carbon emissions so little that we would have had 125 years to do it. We would have had to only reduce them by like a percent a year. And then. And where we are now, it's like we may have already lost the chance to avoid those warming levels. So those 25 years of inaction have meant that we've squandered the whole opportunity to secure the kind of future that 20, 25 years ago, or even five or 10 years ago, we were saying was the livable one. And we're now in the future that we described in the past. Like a few years ago as unlivable. Now, that's not to say it's actually going to be literally unlivable. There's a lot that we can do to make it more manageable, et cetera. But it does serve as a reminder that we looked at the science not that long ago. We said, here's the dividing line between what's acceptable and what's not. And we are already racing past that finish line. And that's really scary. So what that means for the future, it's a human question. It's not just a scientific question. It's like, how much adaptation are we going to do? Are we going to design better crops that can grow in heat better than the ones that did in the past? Are we going to build a seawall around Lower Manhattan? Are we going to all that kind of stuff? Are we going to start air conditioning the hajj, all this kind of things, that a couple thousand people died at the Hajj last year from heat. And, you know, we don't know how that's going to go. We don't know how we're going to handle mass migration. Our record in the last few years suggests pretty poorly, and that means that we're in for a world of disruption at the hands of climate. Even at a time when, if you look around at the headlines of newspapers or that, like, you know, social media, people seem to be worrying about it less, talking about it less than five or six years ago. And that's like, on some level, the dynamic that worries me most is that we freaked out about this thing when we were looking at it ahead of us. And then when we had to really reckon with what it was gonna mean for us and live in that future, we were like, all right, we're just gonna forget about it and act like nothing's happening. And I think that's kind of a recipe for disaster.
- [12:42]
A
Yeah. And it is a pattern in this country right now. Like, if you look at the way people handled climate change and saying, hey, we need to stay below the 2 degrees, right. I feel like the same thing was happening with inflation in, like, 2021, where the Fed was like, hey, we need to, you know, raise the rates. Inflation needs to come down now. Everyone's like, cut the rates, cut the rates. Just, you know, let the economy run. And I'm like, you are going to get insane inflation and the entire economy is going to break if you just drop the rates right now. And I think we're constantly making decisions, whether it's with the environment or with the Fed to, like, benefit business right now. And I'm just like, do these, the people who are paying these politicians to make these decisions, do they even want to live on this planet? Do they have a plan to, like, get out of here? Because I'm like, this affects all of us. Like, you break this thing, we all die. It's not just poor people die. I mean, they die first. Poor people are going to die first.
- [13:40]
B
But yeah, I mean, I think on some level, the Palisades fires, you know, the, the Eden fire in Altadena, these are like really powerful illustrations because they are exactly what people would have said 10 years ago would wake up the American public. They'd be like, these are rich people, they're really well connected. A lot of them are famous. Like, they have public profiles. This is a glamorous part of the world's cultural capital and it's gonna like, be incinerated in one night, casting toxic air across the entire city for months at a time. That's the kind of disaster that we would have thought would have really woken people up. Like, you look at Katrina and you can think, okay, that was a human humanitarian disaster. But it mostly affected poor people, it mostly affected black people. If you have a cynical view of the American public, you think, okay, they have a way of writing that out of the, you know, out of their conscience. But if it happens in LA and like, it's all these, like, celebrities who are having their homes destroyed, there's no way we're going to be able to ignore that. And yet we kind of are.
- [14:39]
A
Yeah, we had a, we had, we had a house in the Hollywood Hills and that fire was all around the Hollywood sign. Like it was. If the helicopters didn't get the water from the reservoir at the exact time they did, I think the sign burns down. You know, like, we all saw it on television. It was completely insane. And for us, it, it was a wake up call. Like, we left.
- [15:01]
B
Yeah.
- [15:01]
A
And, you know, we, we try to do what we can, but I think that the climate thing, it's just so far above the normal individual. Like, we all recycle. We try to, like, make good choices with our spending, but it's like AI or even like Dubai. The carbon footprint for some of these things is insane. Like, how do you reconcile that? Like, what, what can we do besides, like, I guess the research for the new crops and things like that? But what about the decisions people are making that expend so much of our resources?
- [15:34]
B
I mean, I think the obvious answers are the obvious ones, right? It's like, if you have a car, it would be better if it was an ev. Now that can be more expensive. So if you can afford it, that's a good idea. If you can't, maybe try to afford it down the line. If you travel, you can fly less or you can buy carbon offsets, which are kind of dubious, but they're also cheap, they don't add all that much to it. And you can eat less red meat, which is a really bad source of methane emissions in particular. Um, but also deforestation, which is really bad. But in general, I think that, like, even those measures are mostly important because they signal to the people around you and to your local leaders and to your national leaders that you care. And it's sort of like a way of sort of organizing future action rather than being consequential on their own. Like, I don't think that if you're an American in 2026, you need to feel an overwhelming ocean of climate guilt because you're driving a gas powered vehicle. Like, the truth is like, we live in a world in which it's hard to make that decision. It's not up to you or me or you to like, you know, you know, it's like, we can't go and buy a Chinese EV that's like $8,000 and a really good car because the political and cultural environment in which we live have made that impossible.
- [16:53]
A
Those cars are really good.
- [16:54]
B
I saw news the other day. There was one that was like, it's got 1800 horsepower. It goes zero to 60 in two seconds. It's like. And yeah, I mean, everybody who goes to the auto shows where the new Chinese CVs are like, holy shit, they're way ahead of us. And so cheap, so cheap, so cheap. And I mean, on some level, I feel like, you know, Joe Biden put all of this energy into the, the inflation Reduction act as a climate bill. And I applauded that at the time. It ended up mostly getting undone by Trump. But even, like, putting that aside, I think maybe it would have just been better if we had like lifted the tariffs against Chinese EVs. Like, maybe we would have been in a better place climate wise if we had forgotten about trying to build up a new clean energy industrial infrastructure, which is what the IRA was trying to do, and just let Americans buy the really good cheap shit from China. And you're seeing that actually in other parts of the world that we used to think were never going to go green. In Pakistan or two years ago, they had all these blackouts, because when Russia invaded Ukraine, Europe started buying all this coal that was meant to be sent to other parts of the world. So they were literally like boats that were supposed to go to Pakistan that got rerouted to Europe, and they ended up with energy shortages and blackouts. And totally independent of government action. People in Pakistan were just like, I'm going to buy these cheap solar panels from China, put them on my roof as an act of resilience. And in a single year, the country doubled the effective size of its electric grid because so many people were doing that and made themselves much more energy, resilient, much cheaper energy. Not because, like, the government in Pakistan introduced a new policy because so many people took it on themselves to do that. You see the same thing in Nepal. 76% of, of cars sold in Nepal are EVs now. And all across sub Saharan Africa, you're having this huge solar uptake. In particular, because these are countries that are like, you know, we import all of our energy, we're poor. Why would we want to pay some other country who doesn't have our best interests at heart to get energy when we can just like one time installation, throw this thing on our roof or throw this thing on this open land and have like, energy abundance forever? So you're seeing those dynamics in other parts of the world where geopolitics aren't interfering. Unfortunately, in the US we had so much focus on competition with China that we didn't let ourselves even, you know, benefit from like, the technological innovations that they've made.
- [19:13]
A
Yeah, and my, my question, I guess, is, I mean, you're not a CEO or an engineer, but why can't America build solar panels that cheap? I mean, I feel like we've had solar panel technology forever. We can't figure it out.
- [19:25]
B
No, I mean, we, yeah, we invented solar panels. It's like an American tech. Like Jimmy Carter put solar panels in the White house in the 70s.
- [19:31]
A
I mean, since the 90s, people knock on your door, hey, would you like to put solar panels here? I was like, all right. You know, like, cool.
- [19:37]
B
Yeah. I mean, I think there are like, there are a lot of answers to that question, including, you know, a lot of the solar industry in China was built under pretty ugly labor conditions. There are people who are being subjected to pretty exploitative work environments. But I think it's also just the case that they're just pouring much more investment into R and D and development, and they are doing so in a really, really competitive environment. So they have all of these companies who are competing. And the result of that competition is that the prices just get lower and lower and lower. And in the US we're just obsessed with profits. And so everybody's chasing profits and it's a different dynamic. Actually, one of the things that a lot of people on the climate left have started to worry about is that, you know, for a long time people were like, oh, going green is going to be too expensive, Nobody's going to want to do it. And now it may be that it's so cheap that nobody can make a profit off it, which is a whole different set of problems. But you know, I would say in general, like, we may, we may be pretty bleak about green energy in the US because of the President and everything that he's doing and you know, the kind of ugliness of the right wing on a lot of this shit. But last year, 2024, 96% or in 2024, 96% of all new energy capacity in the US was green. 96%. And there was a little bit of a drop last year in 2025 when Trump came in, and now it was to like 92.5%. So like, if this is a competition between building dirty energy and building clean energy, we are building like 10 to 20 times as much clean energy as we are dirty energy. And that's true globally too. So we can be pretty dark about, like, why aren't we moving faster? I feel that anger too. But like, when you look at the raw numbers, to the extent that we are now building the energy future, the one that's going to sustain us 10, 20, 30 years from now, we're just not doing fossil, we're doing clean energy. And the question is like, how soon, how fast do we do that and how soon can we use it as a reason to draw down the use of the dirty stuff? Because right now we're still running the old systems.
- [21:47]
A
We're still running the old systems. And I do think something you said is true about like, I think there were American businessmen, investors that were hesitant to get into green energy because our system is so set up to make a ton of money on fossil fuels. You know, like that apparatus was there. And again, parallel thinking, it's like when streaming came out, you know, the companies were like, ah, we still got tv, we still got cable, we still got theaters. They knew how to make money that way and they didn't want to kind of like pivot to this thing that wasn't profitable yet, but and got blown out of the water. Eventually they got Blown out of the water. And I think that has been what's gone on.
- [22:26]
B
Although the streamers now suffer too, right? I mean, yeah, like, so that was, on some level, that was like. For me, that was like an example of, like, almost like a VC economic model where you have all of this subsidy coming in that nobody actually needs to justify what they're doing in terms of profit. And then when they do, five years later, everybody's like, actually, Uber's gonna be, like, three times as expensive now. And, like, you know, we're all going to close down our streaming operations or stop green lighting new shows. And, like, there's something ugly about that system too. But let me just pull back for a second because, like, you know, we can. When you talk about climate, it's really easy to get drawn into, like, the weeds of where we are, like, what the difference is in 2020 versus 2025, and, like, what the politics are and all that stuff. And I just think, like, really important to keep in mind that this is a really big system that we have been disturbing for, you know, more than a century. And what's happening now is really consequential, but it is on the margins of the damage that we have done over the past decades. And whatever happens now, we are still going to be dealing with the hangover consequences of what's happened in decades past. And that change that we've built is huge. The amount of carbon that we've put into the atmosphere weighs more than everything humans have ever built on the surface of the Earth.
- [23:47]
A
Wow.
- [23:48]
B
It weighs more than the total mass of every living thing on Earth. It weighs more than those two things combined.
- [23:56]
A
Just our emissions. The carbon emissions?
- [23:59]
B
Yeah, like the. In the atmosphere.
- [24:01]
A
That's insane.
- [24:02]
B
So. And it is going to take literally thousands of years for that to dissipate into the atmosphere. In some cases, if you want to get it all the way to zero, you're talking about millions of years. So we have built both the largest and the most lasting monument to human civilization up in the atmosphere. And it is a blanket that is heating the planet. It's heating the planet faster than the planet has ever warmed up in all of planetary history, including a bunch of episodes in which something like 50, 60 or more percent of all life on Earth died because of the climate changes. We're. We're changing things 10 times faster or more than that. The last time there was as much carbon in the atmosphere as there is right now. Right now, there were palm trees in the Arctic and sea level was, like, 50 meters higher. Now, we don't really know if our climate system is exactly analogous to the one that those changes happened under. And probably even if it is, it would take many thousands of years to bring about those kinds of changes, which means humans would have a long time to adapt. But that's the scale of the change that we have already locked in. And, you know, whether that means we end up landing at 2 degrees or 2 and a half degrees or 3 degrees, each of those marks a pretty different level of human suffering. But I also think it's really important to keep in mind just what we've done so far, which is to say we've brought humans entirely outside of the range of temperatures that enclose all of human history. So human civilization is the result of climate conditions which we've already left behind. And we're running an experiment. We're like, how much damage is this going to do to the planet, and how much is that damage going to do to human civilization and flourishing? And I don't think the answer is it's going to destroy it. But I also don't think the answer is it's all going to be totally fine. It's going to be somewhere in the middle, and we don't know. And that's scary. But we should take that also. We should take that uncertainty not as a reason to dismiss what's happening, but to worry about it.
- [26:00]
A
Do you think world leaders are taking it seriously or seriously enough? I know when Obama came, there was like the Paris Agreement. Then Joe Biden came and he had his environmental package. It's gotten rolled back a lot. How do you feel about, like, the job world leaders are doing to deal with this?
- [26:20]
B
I would say that, you know, there was this incredible surge of concern coming out of the late 2000 and tens that kind of peaked around 2019, 2020. And there were a lot of things that went into that, like the, you know, the Paris accords, which is 2015, is one part of it. There was a big scientific report that the UN put out in 2018 that was about the difference between 1.5 degrees and 2 degrees, and was saying, like, this half degree really, really matters. Like, we really need to keep it close to 1.5, not 2. And there was a lot of climate activism. Greta Thunberg's like, the most visible example. But all around the world, people in impoverished countries, queer people, minors, politically repressive states, nevertheless turning out and protesting in ways that really raise the alarm. And the powers that be responded to that. If you look at what happened in 2020, 2021, you had these climate conferences where every single person, every single political leader the world over got up on stage and described climate as an existential threat, as the challenge of our time. You had corporate CEOs, you know, not just like, you know, lefty ones, but like the CEO of BlackRock is like, you know, writing about how sustainability needs to be like the new framing of all their investment policies. You have huge numbers of corporate ESG policies enacted and you have this sort of like, yeah, global governing class consensus that like this is really important. It's really important because it threatens us. But it's also really important because if we move fast, we can build a cleaner, healthier, more just economic and political system. And for all those reasons, like we need to get going really fast. And that was like the global consensus view of like the Davos fear of the UN world of like every politician in 2020, 2021 that they may have said, okay, Greta's a little extreme. They may have said about me, like, okay, you're like, what you want is a little extreme. But they were all on board for moving real fast. And then kind of history intervened. There was the pandemic, which destroyed protest culture for a while. I think we could talk about this separately. But it made people, I think a lot more selfish and self interested, destroyed a spirit of solidarity that had been growing for a long period of time. We had Russia invading Ukraine that changed, that created an energy crisis. We had inflation, you know, all of these things like kind of crowded up the mind space, not just of leaders, but like everyday people. And as a result, you know, we're now climate is like much farther down on the, on the rhetorical pecking order and I think has basically been kicked out of our political discourse. Like when you talk about in America, maybe most visibly, like even lefty Democrats aren't talking about green energy in terms of the climate consequences. They're talking about in terms of affordability, which is, you know, I think a pretty good pitch. Like the cheapest energy we can build now is green energy. But even so, it's like a sign of something that's changed. And then when you look abroad, even in climate conscious places, like European leaders aren't leaning into climate in the same way China, which is in certain ways both the biggest villain in the world and the biggest hero on climate. They're not really talking about their green energy build out in terms of climate. They're talking about it in terms of energy security and clean air, all the lives they can save in Beijing from the, you know, the pollution that they've cut and all that stuff. And so I think in the big picture level, like, we. Our politics has retreated from climate or climate has been extracted from it. That said, you know, I wrote a big piece about this in the fall, which was right around the time of the. The UN General assembly and the COP and the climate. The UN Climate Conference. And I heard from a lot of people who are like, it doesn't really matter, actually that our politics have retreated from climate because the investment forces and the business forces are so strong globally that we're having this transition that's faster than we ever anticipated or hoped, even though no political leaders are engaged in it anymore. And I think that that's also true.
- [30:14]
A
I agree. I think the business forces are always stronger than the political forces. I think the political forces are here to serve the business interest. You see it, it's not a conspiracy. I don't have a tinfoil hat on with that. But it's nice to know, though, that the business interests are aligned with green energy, because sometimes when I see what's going on with like, Venezuela and Iran and Nigeria, I'm like, wait, we're still going to fight people over fossil fuel? You know, like, all three of those countries produce tons of oil.
- [30:42]
B
I mean, I don't even know how to think about the Venezuela logic. It's like, is it about oil maybe? It's like, I think it's also just like a show of force. Like they just want to do something and intimidate somebody. Yeah.
- [30:55]
A
It's a coincidence, though, that all three places he's gone into in the last four weeks are oil. They're oil stakes.
- [31:02]
B
Yeah. Although, you know, we bombed seven countries last year. I mean, I was just writing a thing about, you know, Minnesota, and I just casually mentioned, as an Aside, like, in 2025, there were 130American drone strikes on Somalia. Like, we don't even, like, we don't talk about that.
- [31:17]
C
Yeah.
- [31:17]
B
Shit is still going on all around the world. Donald Trump likes to like, he likes the assassination model of, like, doing some quick strike and then retreating before he has any responsibility for the damage he's causing. And I think Venezuela is as much that as it is oil. Although, you know, when he talks about it, he talks about oil a lot. But I think one other part of the story is really important, which is that, you know, we think about Obama as this great, you know, climate spokesperson. He was the president under which Paris took place when he won the nomination in 2008. He actually said in his acceptance speech, this is the moment when we're going to look back and say that the seas slowed their rise and the planet began to heal. And he thought about making his first term about climate action before like the economy totally fell apart. But at the end of his term, he also changed the laws about our exports of natural gas and oil Such that in 2015, when we signed the Paris agreement, America was not exporting any natural gas or oil at all. And now we are the world's largest exporter of both and the world's largest producer of both, which means we have become, over the course of this period, 2015 to 2025, literally a petro state. And we are in a different place than so many other countries in the world on that metric. So there are a lot of ways of thinking about the rivalry with China. And I don't want to say that this is the only way to do it, but one way to do it is to say we are the world's largest petro state and they are the world's largest green electro state and we're making bets about the future and we're going to see which one wins out.
- [32:58]
A
I mean, if I'm, I am a gambling man, I would bet on the green energy. Right? Like, but that's the moves, like they keep opening places up in America to drill as well. And I'm just like, why are we doubling down on this old model that we know is not only going lose but going to kill everybody?
- [33:17]
B
It's a good question, man.
- [33:19]
A
I mean, I remember when Obama was running, he was like stumping for ethanol. You remember that? He was like up on ethanol, I think it was called Ethanol 85 and turning corn into, you know, they still do that.
- [33:29]
B
Yeah, we use like half of the corn in this country to make biofuels, which aren't even efficient and like don't have emissions benefits.
- [33:35]
A
You know, I think they actually like hurt our emissions.
- [33:37]
B
Yeah.
- [33:37]
A
You know, so I remember reading it out, I was like, that is a really bad idea, this ethanol thing.
- [33:42]
B
Yeah.
- [33:42]
A
But you know, yeah, we are a petro state. It's one of the few things that actually makes money exporting. Now everything else is too expensive that we make.
- [33:50]
B
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's, it's also cultural. You know, we have a sense of like oil and gas are like these swaggering, macho American things. We think that, you know, climate stuff is like twee and you know, femme and like, we don't, we're not into that as Americans.
- [34:04]
A
Yeah, I mean, there's Daniel Day, those three wells. You know, I get it, I get it, I get it, brother.
- [34:09]
B
You know, but it's also like, you know, when I like walk down the street in New York, I'm like, you know, I grew up in the city and like I remember being on the street in New York and looking out on the street and being like as a kid being like I'm taller than all the cars and now I'm a grown up and I'm like, these cars are towering over me.
- [34:25]
A
Yeah, yeah, I love Daniel Day Lewis, but honestly, I'm not mad drinking matcha with a friendship bracelet in an EV if it means my son gets to live and have kids himself too.
- [34:35]
B
And I think when you take some of the heavy handed climate language out of it, you still see America moving in the right direction. I mean, I mentioned like the overall installation numbers, but it's like in Texas, in the Dakotas, like these are green energy superpowers now. Like they're, they're, Texas produces more green energy than California does. And like you know, a few times in the last few years in the Texas state legislature, these, you know, fossil fuel people, these right wingers have like tried to kneecap the renewable build out and in all these various ways. And then like other Republicans who just happen to be a little more reasonable are like, you don't want to make energy more expensive, you don't want to make our state more vulnerable to blackouts. Like that's what green energy is doing. Like, we gotta, we can't cancel this. And then they won. And it's, you know, Texas is so they've gone to war with renewables and lost like three straight years in the Texas state legislature. So there's also a way in which like there's shit happening up here at the level of discourse and political debate and then there's stuff happening on the ground. And they're actually pretty different stories. And we can get confused being too focused on the highest level debate and not looking enough at what's really happening. Now with EVs, it's a little bit of a different story because everybody who's buying an EV is making a conscious choice about am I doing this for the environment or am I? And so we have much slower uptake of EVs. They're also more expensive in the US than they are elsewhere. But when it comes to the energy system, the electricity system, we're moving pretty rapidly there. And that's a sign that to your point, like if you are a Gambling man. These people are gambling men and they're gambling on a green future, you know.
- [36:08]
A
Yeah, the technology is there. Actually, to me, when I read about it and I see it in my life, there's not an issue with the green technology. It's been getting better. Like, we have identified all the corridors of America where like wind energy is optimal, we know where to get hydro energy, we know where to put the solar panels and do the shit and then we know how to like transfer and trade that energy. Now, like the system is quite good, but. But I think what it is that the elephant in the room is the oil business because the people that are making billions in the oil business for centuries don't want to let that go.
- [36:43]
B
And yeah, I mean, I think you can see that really clearly with what happened with the IRA. Like, Trump goes on the campaign trail in 2024 and he's like, to the oil and gas execs, he's like, you give me a billion dollars, I'll give you whatever you want. He literally says that. Right. But on the actual campaign, it wasn't like there was this huge public backlash against Biden's climate bill. You know, if you think back to what happened with Obamacare, there was like a huge right wing backlash to Obamacare. Like, people were outraged about it for like several political cycles.
- [37:08]
A
Now everybody wants it, right?
- [37:10]
B
Right, totally. No, yeah, totally. But even so, it's just like, oh, there was a real backlash. Like there was a genuine grassroots public backlash to Obamacare. People were freaked out and angry, especially on the right. The IRA didn't produce that. It wasn't like people were marching in 2024 being like, we got to cancel this bill. The only people who wanted to cancel were the fossil fuel execs who Trump, you know, basically handed the agenda to. And so I think it illustrates it like very neatly. Both the point that I was making a minute ago that like, actually the public is kind of like happy moving ahead here and that there are like some powers that be that are really standing in the way.
- [37:43]
A
Yeah, it's, the oil lobby is literally paying to delay the green agenda that everybody agrees on. Like, I don't run into that many people that are like, I don't believe in global warming anymore. I'm like, come on.
- [37:55]
B
Yeah, no, denial's dead. I mean, there's another form of it which is people are like, it's not going to be that big of a deal. Which we could also talk about.
- [38:01]
A
Yeah, I, I, you know, baby, I, I remember you read a book about A guy, there was a scientist saying that, like, the Earth just goes into cycles of like, the warming and the cooling. What was the name of that?
- [38:12]
C
Man, I wish I remembered the name of this book. I will remember it and then I'll have Chris put it in. I. Someone was, I was talking about climate with someone and they recommended this book just as like an interesting peek into what the opposite idea would be. And it was just this book about essentially like, we're all, we're inflating this idea, like this is a natural cycle, giving the points as to why it's a natural cycle. It's not what I believe. I was just kind of interested in like, okay, let me hear the other side because I'm interested in knowing all sides to everybody's argument. And I think I read this in like 2021. So it was around the time where there was a lot of like, far right rhetoric of climate change is fake. And like, who cares?
- [38:54]
B
I mean, those cycles are real.
- [38:55]
C
Yeah.
- [38:56]
B
You know, the planet warms and cools based on, you know, the sun's patterns in art. But you know, scientists know that.
- [39:02]
C
Yeah.
- [39:03]
A
And also, and we've manipulated it for sure.
- [39:06]
C
And also there's no denying that, like what you've said, we've created this carbon footprint. Now that is just, that's. That's not the natural cycle of the world. That's. That hasn't been happening for thousands of years.
- [39:16]
B
I mean, you see there's like Joe Rogan like, likes to pull up this. Which is funny. Like, he had me on the podcast, like in 2019, he was like much more of a. He was really worried about climate then. And actually when the LA fires happened, like, people kept circulating this thing he said to me about how LA was going to burn. But now he's like a skeptic, a denier. And he pulls up all of, you know, this temperature graph of like the entire history of the planet that shows that, like, we're actually not anywhere near the hottest that we've ever been, which is true. But also, like, if you isolate when humans evolved and what we've gotten used to, we're like way out of whack. So it's like, do you want to live in the land of the dinosaurs where, like, it was, you know, 120 degrees in New York? Like, I don't. That's gonna be hard.
- [39:56]
A
Yeah.
- [39:57]
B
And you can't just say, like, oh, there are these natural cycles. Yeah, there are natural cycles. But like, the, the changes that we're building are much larger and totally outweigh them.
- [40:06]
A
Yeah. And I remember the friend had given her the book and we were both like, this is odd. And since the LA fires, there's just been no, there's been no peep about like climate denial. Cause you're right, it needed to hit people that like have things and are big and loud on the Internet to be like, oh no, I see it now.
- [40:23]
B
Yeah.
- [40:24]
A
Like that was a climate thing, you know. And funny enough with, with Joe. My biggest argument with Joe was over universal basic income. Because around 2016, 17, I went on his show and I was telling him with AI and robotics coming, yeah, governments are going to need to secure a baseline amount of income for people. And he's like, well, you're just going to give lazy people money. And I was like, dude, for society to function and if you're gonna replace them with robots, yes, there needs to be a baseline living wage. Like I could see it. And also with company scaling, I was just, yeah, these companies are gonna push everybody down.
- [40:58]
B
Yeah.
- [40:58]
A
And like the minimum wage is not gonna be enough. You have to guarantee a standard of living. Unless you just want all out revolution around the world.
- [41:06]
B
Yeah.
- [41:07]
A
It's crazy. But it's funny when people deny. I'm 43 and I think you're this. We're the same age.
- [41:13]
B
Yeah.
- [41:13]
A
And it's just at this age you finally get to see like the cycles of 10 years where people deny something and then they like come back around hat in hand and it's just like over and over.
- [41:23]
B
Yeah. Or the opposite. They just refuse to see that they were wrong in the first place.
- [41:27]
A
Yeah. I feel like the oil people know they're wrong, but they're just like hanging on to their fortunes. And I'm just so curious to like be in the mind of one of those people because I'm like, how much is enough, man? Like, it seems like you've made enough on this thing.
- [41:40]
B
I mean, I think what they would say is that, you know, renewables are variable. So like there's a need for some, something to stabilize the system that like when the sun's not shining, the wind's not blowing, you know, we need something that's like baseload power and fossil fuels have a real function there. It's also the case that, like, we haven't yet really figured out how to operate heavy industry, like steel making, cement making efficiently with green energy because we need really high heat to do that. But you know, they're, they're also living in the past there because, you know, the We've had this crazy solar revolution where the price of solar power has fallen, you know, 90 plus percent. We're in the midst of a similar one with batteries which are making the variability problem much, much smaller. So that, you know, it's not to say that we yet have batteries that can, like go take solar power in the summer and carry it into the winter, but we can do a lot to even out the flow across the day. And in a place that's blessed with a lot of solar power, like Australia, this is sufficient that in Australia, they're now literally giving out electricity for free three hours a day. They're like, these three hours a day, you can use unlimited electricity.
- [42:46]
A
Australia.
- [42:47]
B
Yeah. Well, that's kind of the future that we're all heading towards, where it's not like, you know, it will be priced differently at different times of day because of like the inputs to the system. And a lot of Americans and anyone who's like, you know, experienced with the status quo, they're like, oh, that's a little uncomfortable if I have to, like, navigate that, you know, change over the course of the day. But of course, which is true. And we'll probably figure out ways to manage that better. If everybody has EVs and induction cookstoves that have batteries, you can actually draw power in to the system and then distribute it when you need it later on in the day. But even putting that aside, it's like we're just going to have different business models that grow up where it's like, if you're running an AI company and you're like, okay, these three hours a day, I can use absolutely unlimited free electricity. Maybe you just run your systems for those hours and not 24.
- [43:36]
A
Yeah, I mean, and we also already do it with doordash. Like doordash and Uber surge pricing. Like, it's, it's all.
- [43:42]
C
I was just thinking, like, three minutes after ten.
- [43:44]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [43:45]
C
Happy hour.
- [43:47]
A
You're like, happy hour. Free coasters and electricity.
- [43:50]
C
Yeah, no, I was just literally thinking three minutes after 10, you, like, text for free call.
- [43:55]
B
But even that is like, we do that all the time. But also it feels a little uncomfortable, right? To be like, yeah, like, I don't know, like, I don't know. It feels weird when there's, you know, surge pricing. Feels like it's somehow. It's like exploiting both the worker and the recipient at the same time. Even if it's like actually efficient and better for both parties, it feels uncomfortable still. Yes.
- [44:14]
C
I hate a surge price. If I see that surge price. I'm like, I know what this costs. I take this Uber at this time every day, and I know they're gouging me.
- [44:21]
B
Well, also, because you suspect, and you're probably right, that most of that additional cost is not going to the driver.
- [44:26]
C
Yeah.
- [44:27]
B
You know, absolutely.
- [44:28]
C
They just know your pattern.
- [44:29]
A
So my thing is just like, if we're going to introduce surge pricing across the board in this country, I'd also like to introduce siesta. You know, let's get like two hours siesta here. But. Okay, I got rapid fire questions for you.
- [44:42]
B
Let's do it.
- [44:42]
A
All right. Places to live when the climate crisis completely explodes in our face. All right, Upper Peninsula, Michigan or Wisconsin.
- [44:52]
B
I've never been to either of those places, but. But they both seem beautiful, but.
- [44:56]
A
Oh, no, no, no. I'll start this over. All right. This is just like when the climate crisis completely explodes.
- [45:02]
B
Yeah.
- [45:02]
A
Every. Everybody's scrambling. Where do you think will be the safest to live?
- [45:06]
B
I mean, what I would say. I'll give you an actual answer, but what I would say in the, in the bigger picture context is that I think we're going to be navigating this future and thinking that it's pretty normal. Like, you guys just, you know, you fled from L. A and you were like, wow, we're like running away from the fires and the smoke and that's going to continue happening. People are going to have those experiences. But, like, most people in most parts of the country are not feeling like climate change is at their door. And probably that'll still be the case in 2050. It's a much bigger problem in other parts of the world where, like, we have, where, you know, they're both already hotter and, like, have less resources to combat them. So in sub Saharan Africa, in South Asia, that's really where, like, the shit's going to hit the fan in America. I mean, I'm relatively happy in New York. This is like a concrete city. You know, we just rebuilt the park in front of my house to protect us from flooding. You know, like, probably there's going to be, you know, in our lifetime, a storm surge barrier across the harbor, even though it'll cost probably $100 billion because the value of the real estate here is so nice. So I'm not going to move from.
- [46:04]
A
Positive is it'll keep immigrants out too, though.
- [46:08]
C
Cancer.
- [46:09]
B
Win, win, win, win. I mean, you know, I think a lot of people who've looked at this in a sort of, like, microway do, like, focus on the upper Midwest and parts of Canada. But I gotta say, you know, in 2023, I was doing all this reporting in Canada about wildfire in Canada, and wildfires in Canada are out of control.
- [46:27]
A
I mean, the smoke came down in New York totally.
- [46:29]
B
And in 2023, so much Canadian land burned that you could fit half of the world's countries inside the burn scar in Canada. Not in total, but like. Like, half of the world's countries could fit inside. Inside the. Inside the scar. And this is like, you know, it's funny, this is a whole other tangent which we probably don't need to get into. But, like, when people talk about fire in the American west context, they're often talking about, you know, whether how much of this is driven by warming, how much of it is driven by forest management. Did we do stuff to make these forests more flammable over decades? Could we do more to make them less flammable in the decades ahead? Canada, they didn't do any of that stuff in, like, the remote Northern Territories, you know, they weren't suppressing fire because of Smokey the bear in the 1960s. They were just letting shit burn. So they have none of that that, like, Americans point to as our fault. It's all natural changes. And they are having completely crazy acceleration in wildfire, which is sweeping across the country, producing huge amounts of wildfire pollution and increasingly, like, breaching into and burning down towns, like happened in la. But in this case, it's like wildfires that are burning hundreds of thousands of acres eventually getting to a town and burning it down, leaping over lakes that are, like, miles across. Like, really crazy. Yeah, crazy disaster. So, you know, I used to say, like, you know, Canada seems nice, but now I'm like, I don't. I don't know if Canada seems so great anymore.
- [47:52]
A
Damn. I was. Because I researched all these places as the places that climate scientists feel like you could live in 2060.
- [47:58]
B
Yeah, right.
- [47:59]
C
Like Michigan is. I see Michigan, Upper Peninsula. Upper Peninsula, Michigan. Because we talk about this all the time. Because we, like, left LA because of a fire. And I always ask. I'm like, okay, first of all, I want to leave America, but if we're not leaving America, where are we going?
- [48:12]
A
Yes.
- [48:12]
C
And I think it's Michigan for me.
- [48:14]
A
So, yeah, I kind of. I would love. Can I ask you these as just, like, where you would go? 2060, safest, Upper Peninsula, Michigan or Wisconsin?
- [48:22]
B
I feel like maybe Wisconsin just because Upper Peninsula feels a little remote to me.
- [48:26]
A
Okay.
- [48:26]
B
But I will say, you know, the worst, most Destructive, most deadly fire in American history happened in Wisconsin in the late 19th century.
- [48:33]
A
Okay, we're going to go Wisconsin. Wisconsin or Minneapolis.
- [48:37]
B
I mean, I'm a city kid, so, like, if we're talking about, like, what are we talking about? Milwaukee versus Minneapolis.
- [48:42]
A
Yeah.
- [48:43]
B
Okay. I mean, I think Minneapolis is, like, a nicer town.
- [48:46]
A
Okay. Minneapolis or Vermont.
- [48:49]
B
I mean, you know, people used to talk about Vermont as a. As a climate paradise, but then they had, like, crazy. They've had crazy flooding the last couple of years. And, you know, in a future where we're at two and a half or three degrees, I've had a lot of climate scientists say, like, it'll be so hot in the Northeast that, you know, farming, which is like, a staple of that part of the country, will be unworkable. You'll have to, like, have your cows in the basement, like, in air conditioning.
- [49:11]
A
Rip Ben and Jerry's. I love you guys. Minneapolis or Toronto?
- [49:17]
B
Yeah, I probably go with Toronto. I like Toronto. But again, like, when I'm saying this, I'm actually. It's. It's illuminating because I'm actually thinking only secondarily about climate, and I actually think that's how many people are going to be thinking about these things.
- [49:29]
A
Yeah. But I have vetted these. These are places climate scientists are like, you will not die. Yeah, Toronto or Idaho.
- [49:37]
B
I mean, you know, I got to be in the city. I'm gonna live in Toronto.
- [49:41]
A
Toronto or Denmark? You got, like, you know, you got cities in Denmark.
- [49:44]
B
Yeah, I love. I love Copenhagen. I keep meaning to take my girls to the amusement park there. Have you guys been there?
- [49:51]
A
No.
- [49:52]
B
It was, like, kind of like the first amusement park. It's like if Coney island was in Central Park.
- [49:57]
C
Wow.
- [49:58]
B
Oh, it's really beautiful. But I haven't been there since I had kids, so I'll go with Copenhagen.
- [50:04]
A
Copenhagen or Iceland.
- [50:07]
B
I'll go with Copenhagen.
- [50:08]
A
Okay.
- [50:09]
B
Yeah.
- [50:09]
A
Copenhagen or Croatia.
- [50:12]
B
I mean, I love the Mediterranean, but gets a little hot in the summer a couple of years ago. My wife is from Sicily. We were. We go there a lot, and a couple years ago, we were there. It was, like, the hottest day that was ever recorded in Europe. It's like, 121 degrees.
- [50:27]
A
Stay in Copenhagen. Yeah, Copenhagen or Mongolia. Ulan Bator.
- [50:33]
B
Well, I mean, isn't it. Ulaanbaatar is, like, a huge oil and gas producer, so I feel like in the future, it's going to get pretty bleak there where that business does.
- [50:39]
A
But least densely populated country in the world. Climate scientists feel Mongolia will be safe.
- [50:45]
B
Okay. But I think I gotta stick with Copenhagen.
- [50:48]
A
Copenhagen. Copenhagen or New Zealand.
- [50:51]
B
I mean, with all those, like, billionaires in their bunkers in New Zealand, there's probably. There's probably going to be a lot of money protecting it. I've never been there, but I hear it's gorgeous.
- [50:59]
A
Have you seen Lord of the Rings?
- [51:00]
B
Yeah, that's what it is. Yeah. I think I still have to stick with Copenhagen. I mean, maybe I'm just enough of a 20th century American that I still have, like, this sort of insecure, envy, admiration of Europe, you know, I respect.
- [51:12]
A
Your choice because I was either going to go Copenhagen or New Zealand.
- [51:19]
C
Yeah.
- [51:20]
A
They felt the same for me, it was like Copenhagen or New Zealand. But I respect your choice. And I like. You're also choosing art culture.
- [51:27]
B
Yeah.
- [51:27]
A
Design, thoughtfulness. I like their politics over there. Like, great. Fantastic choice. Yeah, fantastic.
- [51:34]
B
So we'll move there together.
- [51:35]
A
Yeah.
- [51:36]
B
Yeah.
- [51:36]
A
I love it.
- [51:37]
C
I like it.
- [51:37]
A
I love it. Thank you for coming on the show, man.
- [51:39]
B
No, my pleasure.
- [51:40]
A
Yeah.
- [51:40]
B
Really good to hang out.
- [51:41]
A
Incredible.