Various World Leaders (e.g., Barack Obama, Mark Carney) (2:41)

Was the best possible shot to save.

Marc Maron (2:44)

The one planet we've got.

Jamie Poisson (2:45)

What exactly did the Paris Agreement set out to do?

David Wallace-Wells (2:48)

Well, the short version is that it set out to save the world from catastrophic warming. It committed all of those nations, every country in the UN, to limiting global temperature rise to less than 2 degrees Celsius above the pre industrial average and to try to get it as close to 1.5 degrees above the pre industrial average as was possible. Now, if you've heard about those temperature limits, you've probably heard that there's a really big difference between them. The UN published a big report in 2018 sketching out exactly that difference, how much of a different world it would be at 1.5 degrees versus 2 degrees. And probably a lot of what you may have heard whenever that was, seven years ago now that may have given you a sense of the apocalyptic future for the planet actually came out of that report. Which is to say the difference, 2 degrees, was so much worse than 1.5 that when you read about it in your newspaper, listened to news about it on the radio, or watched a TV news report about it, it made it seem like those gaps were really enormous and that it was absolutely critical that we stay as close to 1.5 as possible and avoid that 2 degree future. Now we are 10 years later and we've actually already had a couple of years north of 1.5 degrees. We haven't passed it in a long term average, but on a year by year basis we're already above 1.5. And it seems almost impossible for us to avoid 2 degrees. Which means in this period of time, this 10 year period, there's, there was at first a huge awakening of climate protest and climate politics, but we're still kind of racing past the, the targets that we set for ourselves 10 years ago. And I think as a result have to have to judge that agreement as at least in some profound ways, some important ways, a failure.

Jamie Poisson (4:45)

I know it was, it's supposed to be legally binding, the agreement. Right. But in reality, how enforceable has that been?

David Wallace-Wells (4:54)

Yeah, I mean, it depends on what you mean by legally binding. It is a, it is a document that all these countries signed on to like a treaty, like any other, but there was no enforcement mechanism built into it. And there was no talk even at the time of building up any enforcement mechanism. You've heard sometimes in the years since conversations, you know, some world leaders floating the possibility of, you know, something like climate sanctions being imposed on countries that were laggards. But that was never a part of the agreement. And probably the fact that it wasn't a part of the agreement was one reason it got passed in the first place.

Jamie Poisson (5:35)

Going back a decade, I know You've written about how world leaders widely embrace the school at the time, and one of the reasons was this perception of climate activism as a generational uprising. Greta Thunberg became the face of this.

Greta Thunberg (5:52)

You say you love your children above all else, and yet you're stealing their future in front of their very eyes. Until you start focusing on what needs to be done rather than it's what is politically possible, there is no hope.

Jamie Poisson (6:10)

How did this idea of addressing climate change for the sake of our children and our grandchildren proliferate as the ultimate reason for why we should do something about climate change?

David Wallace-Wells (6:22)

Well, I think there were a lot of factors, but I think it's also undeniable. If you think back to the 2019, 2020 period, when Greta was becoming a global icon, and you also had Extinction rebellion in the uk.

Donald Trump (6:38)

Oh, my God, that's a lot of kids.

David Wallace-Wells (6:42)

And you had Fridays for future. And all of these climate strikes, all of these climate protests across America.

Jamie Poisson (6:48)

We have to change the world and around the world.

David Wallace-Wells (6:51)

When do you want it? No.

Jamie Poisson (6:53)

Millions walked out of classrooms today demanding action on the climate.

Greta Thunberg (6:57)

Climate change is real.

Jamie Poisson (6:59)

All following the lead of a shy sense Swedish teenager. She started a movement when she stopped going to school on Fridays.

Greta Thunberg (7:05)

Our house is on fire. And we should get angry that we.

David Wallace-Wells (7:10)

Were observing something that had not really been seen before. The environmental movement had had peaks of global engagement. There was one right after the kind of first climate conference in 1992. There was another in the period of An Inconvenient Truth in Hurricane Katrina. If you look at the 10 hottest years ever measured, they've all occurred in.

Various World Leaders (e.g., Barack Obama, Mark Carney) (7:32)

The last 14 years.

David Wallace-Wells (7:33)

And the hottest of all was 2005. But we were seeing another really big one, much larger in scale, much more global in scale, in 2019 and 2020. But I think even more than the sort of scale and intensity of those protests, even more remarkable than that, was that the world's powerful, most powerful people seemed to be embracing that same protest energy. They were the ones who were inviting Greta to Davos into the un. They were the ones who were inviting climate protesters to all of these, you know, to the UN General Assembly. And they themselves, when they got up and spoke about these issues, would often talk about it in explicitly existential terms. They would defend the existential language of the protesters rather than sort of try to contextualize or diminish it.

Various World Leaders (e.g., Barack Obama, Mark Carney) (8:22)

This is the challenge of our collective lifetimes.

Marc Maron (8:25)

I want you to stay angry.

David Wallace-Wells (8:26)

It's one minute to midnight on that doomsday clock, and we need to act.

Various World Leaders (e.g., Barack Obama, Mark Carney) (8:31)

Now, the science is clear. We must do more and faster.

David Wallace-Wells (8:37)

They often talked about these goals of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees as an absolute must do global political action, not one option or one cause among many, but a paramount cause that would undermine, if we failed to achieve it, undermine everything else we were trying to do. And there were a lot of reasons for that, too. The shift of global power in the direction of climate. But on some level, I think that was the most distinctive feature of this period that followed from the Paris Accords and flew into and ran into the pandemic. The protest energy was one really significant difference. But I think the attitude of the world's powerful towards climate change, towards elevating climate change, was on some level even more unusual. That truly had never happened before.

Jamie Poisson (9:21)

Yeah. In your piece, you also write about how this was a pre Brexit world and how we were politically at this kind of more opportune time with the war on terror far behind us. Right. Can you just elaborate on that a little bit more?

David Wallace-Wells (9:34)

Yeah. I think one of the things that reflecting on the Paris Agreement I think, brings you to is a real. At least brings me to is a real lamentation for an era of global politics that we have left behind and which was built on the promise of future collaboration, cooperation, mutual obligation, global solidarity. A future that seemed to promise much less poverty and possibly no poverty around the world, a much more integration of all the world's people, and a much more profound and deep sense that we were all in this together as 8 or 10 billion people on this one planet. It wasn't just the Paris Agreement. The UN had had this, the Millennium Development Goals, which it had passed in the year 2000. They were the smashing success. Extreme poverty had fallen like 70%. They followed that up with a whole new set of goals which were called the Sustainable Development Goals, which, as I alluded to a second ago, you know, tried to or hoped to bring about the end of extreme poverty globally, along with all of these other really ambitious measures for, you know, kind of equaling the global playing field. And 10 years later, we've made progress on almost none of those targets. And the geopolitical landscape that gave rise to them has been really, you know, damaged and deranged beyond recognition. You know, 2015, when the Paris Agreement was signed, people talked about a world that was run by what they called the G2, the group of two, the US and China, that this would be a partnership between the world's two great powers, tackling the world's great threats like Climate change. And now here we are ten years later in a kind of inarguable Cold War. There are many other aspects like this that you could look at in our geopolitics. We've had a resurgence of war, you know, with Ukraine, with Gaza, with a huge amount of unrest across the Sahel. We've had more, you know, more terrorism, even though people in places like the US don't often see it. Globally, that's. That's been the case. Hunger is on the rise. Famine is on the rise. We are in a period of backsliding and the basic, you know, kind of philosophical social commitment that seemed to undergird this moment of great optimism and produce the possibility of something like the Paris Agreement. It now feels to me, at least, you know, like a. Like a relic of the past, which we're not going to recover, really, anytime soon. Much to my own regret.

Jamie Poisson (12:22)

You know, I just. Earlier this summer, the International Court of Justice ruled that climate harm violates international law, which could allow countries to. To sue each other for climate damages. And doesn't. Doesn't that seem like a promising outcome from the Paris Agreement era? Or, I guess, do you see any promising outcomes from that era?

David Wallace-Wells (12:41)

Well, we'll see how it all plays out. I mean, I think in a. In a world in which the. The sort of basic geopolitical order is much more scattered and diminished, undermined on all of these fronts, you know, Trump is the most obvious assailant, but it's being picked apart, I think, in many, many ways. I don't really know what those kinds of findings portend. When I think about the way that, you know, the international community has consolidated a position on Israel's conduct in Gaza without real consequence for Israel on the world stage, I think that's probably a better model for how we'll be dealing with climate action or inaction going forward. There will be outrage. There will be venues to express that outrage. But whether it matters, whether there's meaningful political and legal pressure on those countries who are, you know, not fulfilling their obligations under the Paris Agreement or other climate treaties, I think is an open question. And my inclination is, at least for the time being, the consequences will be very small. But that's not to say that in general, we have to give up on climate action and accommodate ourselves to an impossibly degraded or even apocalyptic climate future. The truth is that as we've sort of retreated from climate politics and our geopolitics has sort of deprioritized climate action from where we thought we were heading five or ten years ago. Nevertheless, decarbonization green electricity renewables are expanding at an absolutely breathtaking pace all around the world. And that means that we may not be on a considerably worse path than we hope to be emissions wise, even though very few people in positions of power are prioritizing climate action, either on the mitigation side or the adaptation side, in the way that many people involved in the Paris agreement might have hoped in 2015. Instead, we're sort of handing a lot of that work to the private sector, private actors, and increasingly, I think, to sort of Chinese state planning. Whether we can count on that continuing and how, you know, how livable a future it brings us. It's another open question. But it's not to say that there's no movement on climate action at all. It's just that it's taking a different form without some of these commitments to mutual solidarity that we thought undergirded the whole project not that long ago. Foreign.

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Tom Power (16:10)

Okay, here's a few movies guess who is the common thread between them? Lost in Translation, Ghost World, the Prestige and like a million Mar movies. I'm talking about Scarlett Johansson, the highest grossing actor of all time. Scarlet's directorial debut, Eleanor the Great came to this year's Toronto International Film Festival and I talked to her all about loneliness, forgiveness and compassion. All themes in her new film. Find our chat on Q with Tom Power. Wherever you get your podcasts, including on.

Jamie Poisson (16:39)

YouTube, I'd love to ask you what you think this all means for a middle power like Canada, right? So when our Prime Minister Mark Carney was elected in the spring, one of the first things that he did was he got rid of the carbon tax.

Various World Leaders (e.g., Barack Obama, Mark Carney) (16:56)

We will be eliminating the Canada fuel charge, the consumer fuel charge immediately. This will make a difference to hard pressed Canadians, but it is part of A much bigger set of measures that this government is taking to ensure that we fight against climate change, that our country, companies are competitive, and the country moves forward. So it's my honor on behalf of my colleagues, to sign this order.

Jamie Poisson (17:24)

There has been a pause on an EV mandate the previous government put in. And the priorities of this current government have been focused on making Canada more prominent player on the world stage, on separating ourselves from the United States, growing our economy through big nation building projects, and looking to become, in his words, an energy superpower. Pipelines are being openly discussed again. While we don't know all the details for how those goals will be balanced with environmental protections and indigenous rights, there are real concerns right now that this government is putting not enough emphasis on the latter. Mexico, America's other neighbor, is doing similar stuff. Right? Claudia Scheinbaum, their president, a former climate scientist, has doubled down on this idea of energy sovereignty. She boasts about her country's oil and gas production. Are these countries backed into a corner here or do you think that they have another choice?

David Wallace-Wells (18:21)

I think that they have another choice. I mean, I would say, you know, in the case of Mark Carney in Canada, you know, it's especially striking given his past. He was, you know, a really loud and outspoken voice for alarm around climate change and its risks to the financial system when he was, you know, as a central banker, both, both in Canada and in England. And some of the speeches that he gave in 2015 were actually quite critical in getting the Paris Agreement over the finish line because it, it kind of, they kind of helped bring in the financial community to a position of great concern about climate action.

Various World Leaders (e.g., Barack Obama, Mark Carney) (18:58)

The combination of the weight of scientific evidence and the dynamics of the financial system suggest that in the fullness of time, climate change will threaten and financial resilience and longer term prosperity, while there's still time to act, the window is finite and it's closing.

David Wallace-Wells (19:17)

I think a lot of what he's done has been politically defensible. The carbon tax was not really working all that well. Some of these, you know, mandates about EVs may be better handled through the natural rhythms of market forces. Other things I have more objections to. I don't think we really want to be expanding production of oil and gas. And when I look around the world, I think I see a pretty clear picture that, you know, solar power and battery power and wind power are just running away with a competition for new energy supply. So last year, 93% of all new energy installations worldwide were renewables. That means that for every unit of bad Energy, the world is installing more than 10 of the good clean stuff. And that's just, you know, that's sort of how the world is voting across many different countries with many different energy needs at many different places on the development curve, you know, with many different market structures. Overwhelmingly, the, you know, the momentum is towards clean energy. Now on some level that makes the particular policy decisions of particular politicians a little less consequential because, you know, the, the direction of change is so clear. On the other hand, if we're in a situation as we are now, where we're basically using renewables to add to our total energy capacity as opposed to displacing our dirty energy sources, then we're not actually making any progress on emissions. And that's where I think the loss of climate politics globally, but maybe most vividly in the case of countries like Canada and Mexico, is really most profound in, you know, we can scale up, we are now in a position where we really can scale up our green energy supply so quickly that we can use it to bring down the amount of dirty energy we're using. But that's likely only going to happen if we make policy choices to bring it about. And if we just say, let's let the market, you know, decide for us, what the market is going to decide is that we're going to slap a lot of really cheap clean energy on top of existing dirty systems and at least for the next few years are not going to cut our emissions at all.

Jamie Poisson (21:36)

You mentioned China before, and I just wonder if you could talk to me a little bit more about the role that China is playing in all of this. You know, this is a country that I, as I understand it, has the market pretty cornered from the production of electric vehicle batteries and solar panels to the processing of rare earth minerals required to make them. And so like, where do they fit into this picture?

David Wallace-Wells (21:59)

I mean, on some level, the whole picture, I mean, it's, Yeah, I think 74% of wind and solar projects worldwide last year were Chinese. Most of that was within China, but they're doing a lot more actual build out of capacity across the developing world, in addition to supplying things like solar panels and batteries for installation by foreign companies elsewhere. And this means that for the first time we're seeing a really dramatic acceleration of green electricity in poorer parts of the world that we long assumed would need a kind of philanthropic support from places like the U.S. canada, Europe to get over that hump. Instead, China has managed to make this technology so cheap that even in a place like Pakistan, or across Sub Saharan Africa. It's cheap enough that people can buy those, those panels themselves, you know, if they're homeowners. And certainly at the scale of, you know, large scale utilities and state owned electricity companies can do an awful lot of green energy build out. That is, you know, that hopeful story in which the world is adding, you know, massively more green energy than most analysts thought was possible just a few years ago, doing so at a much cheaper rate than anybody expected just a few years ago. That hopeful story is being written almost entirely by China. And that means that there's another kind of profound reversal unfolding at the geopolitical level. Ten years ago, 15 years ago, the rich countries of the west would often tell themselves, okay, we're good people, we're worried about climate, but if we move quickly out of the goodness of our heart, how will that balance out the bad behavior of all of these developing countries, most dramatically China, who was building out coal power at a kind of obscene rate in the 2000s and early 2010s. And now we're in a very different place where China's still building out coal power plants, although they're not burning them, burning nearly as much coal as they used to. But they're also providing the world the tools that the rest of us need to decarbonize, making it possible for a country like the US or a country like Pakistan to make choices on their own about how quickly to move. And unfortunately, you know, a country like the US which is still the world's second largest emitter, is choosing to move much more slowly. And other countries, you know, across the world are taking it a faster path. But fundamentally, we're drawing from a Chinese toolkit. And that toolkit has been made available to us because of Chinese policy, which has been directed not narrowly at cutting carbon emissions, but more broadly at building out green energy technology because they believe it is the infrastructure of the future and that there is an advantage for them in cornering that market, which is what has happened not just because of how fast they've moved, but how slow the rest of us have moved.

Jamie Poisson (25:10)

Listening to you talk about this shift from trying to meet certain climate targets or conserving what's left of our rainforests and oceans because it's the right thing to do, to just seeing it all through a more economic, green focused lens really reminds me of something that climate activist David Suzuki said when we had him on the show recently. And I wonder if I could play you that clip and you could just react to it for me.

David Suzuki (25:36)

For Most of human existence, we knew we were embedded in nature and dependent on it. But now most of us live in big cities where our primary focus is on our jobs. We need a job to buy the things that we need. And so the economy assumes this high position. And nature, we think, oh, nature's out there in parks and so on. We never think. If we don't have air for three to four minutes, we're dead. If we have to breathe polluted air perpetually, we're sick. And yet we use air, this most important sacred gift from nature, as a garbage can. And we won't pay a cent. Damn it all. I will not pay a carbon tax to use air as a garbage can for our fossil fuel emissions.

Jamie Poisson (26:25)

David, any final thoughts there?

David Wallace-Wells (26:28)

First, I would just underscore and underline everything he said. I'm a lifelong admirer of his and you know, he, he put it probably more pointedly and more sharply than I might. I would just say there's another aspect to the same phenomenon, which is that again, if we pull back in time to 2015 and think about where we were politically and geopolitically around climate, then it was really important that we were talking about a global challenge and addressing that global challenge globally, that is, as part of the movement to produce the Paris Accord, which was not perfect by any stretch. Nevertheless, as part of that movement and as part of the agreement itself, there was a recognition of the obligation of someone like me, a relatively well off person in a very rich country in the global north, to those living much more difficult lives in much more climate ravaged places around the planet. And that something about that dynamic, that my life, as I understood it, my normal life, imposed a climate cost on people living far away from me and indeed in the relatively distant future, that was part of the motivating energy and perspective which gave rise to this agreement and everything that flowed from it. And while we're still moving at a relatively rapid pace to green our energy systems, I really fear like we've lost that core presumption, that core insight and that core promise which people like me 10 years ago were making to people elsewhere around the world, and which, whatever it would have achieved on climate terms, nevertheless pointed towards a more hopeful future in which our politics didn't need to be rivalrous and combative, and the powerful didn't need to behave sociopathically towards the least powerful, but in fact could reach out to them with open arms and offer a hand up. I really worry, especially in a climate ravaged world, if we're not extending those hands anymore, to those who are suffering, where they'll be left. And honestly, how we'll. How we'll be able to live with ourselves on the other end of the bargain.

Jamie Poisson (28:36)

David, thank you, as always. Thank you.

David Wallace-Wells (28:39)

Thank you so much. Great to talk.

Jamie Poisson (28:48)

All right, that's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.

David Wallace-Wells (29:04)

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