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- [00:00]
David Wallace-Wells
The following podcast contains explicit language.
- [00:13]
Felix Salmon
Hello and welcome to the Uninhabitable Earth edition of Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the what century? Millennium. Poor Emily is Emily, how would you characterize this episode on the scale from like one to happy?
- [00:34]
Emily Peck
It's like one to Apocalypse. I think I'm at Apocalypse right now.
- [00:37]
Felix Salmon
We're at Apocalypse. We have. I am Felix Salmon of Axios. Emily Peck of the Huffington Post is also here.
- [00:44]
Emily Peck
Hello.
- [00:45]
Felix Salmon
Hello. And Anna Shymansky.
- [00:47]
David Wallace-Wells
Hello.
- [00:47]
Felix Salmon
And most importantly, we have David Wallace Wells of New York magazine.
- [00:51]
David Wallace-Wells
Thank you.
- [00:52]
Felix Salmon
And you have written hi.
- [00:54]
David Wallace-Wells
I should say hi.
- [00:55]
Felix Salmon
I guess you should say hi. And you should say. And you've written like the, the one text that everyone needs to read to understand the catastrophe that awaits us.
- [01:04]
David Wallace-Wells
It is called the Uninhabitable Earth Life After Warming.
- [01:07]
Felix Salmon
And we are going to be talking a lot about the book. We are going to be talking a lot about the Green New Deal and whether it can prevent the catastrophes that you outline in the book. And we are also going to be talking about immigration and refugees and whether you can solve the refugee crisis with immigration policies. All of that and more is coming up on Slate Money. David Wallace Wells, you have a best selling book which is scaring the fuck out of everyone who's reading it and even some people who aren't. What is it called and should we be terrified?
- [01:45]
David Wallace-Wells
It's called the Uninhabitable Life After Warming. And the short answer is yeah. The climate future that we're heading into together is really scary. It's not inevitable. We are the main drivers of the climate future. It's not going to happen if we take the action that we need to. But there's really little reason in recent history for hope that we will take that action. And if we don't, we'll end up at some really terrifying outcomes. So end of the century, if we stay on the course we're on, we'll have warmed by about 4 degrees Celsius above pre industrial baseline. That would mean $600 trillion in global climate damages. That's twice as much wealth as exists in the world today. It would mean six climate driven natural disasters could hit a single community at once, could mean hundreds of millions or even as much as, as, even as many as a billion climate refugees, twice as much war, grain yields that were half as bountiful as they are today to feed probably 50% more people. And the list goes on and on. There's basically no feature of modern life that will be unaffected by these forces, I think no matter where you are on the planet. And almost all of those features of modern life that we take for granted will be, I think, deformed by them.
- [02:55]
Felix Salmon
And this is just people are using 2100 because it' like a nice round number. But these kind of effects, they've already started happening and it doesn't stop in 2100, just gets worse and worse and worse as far as the eye can see.
- [03:08]
David Wallace-Wells
Yeah, we basically don't read about what's going to happen after 2100, but the climatologists sometimes refer to it as the century of hell because it's likely to be even considerably worse if we don't change course. But as I said, one thing that's really important to keep in mind is when you take a tour of these climate horrors, there are also a reflection of just how much power we have over the climate. So if we get to 4 degrees, it will be because of what we do from here on out. The main input is always going to be human action, how much carbon we put into the atmosphere. And even if we do get to 4 degrees or 5 degrees or 8 degrees, which will be really hellish, it'll still be the case that we can avert future warming by averting future emissions. But again, as I say, given the recent past, there's little reason for hope on that.
- [03:50]
Felix Salmon
Although carbon stays in the atmosphere for a long time, you can't just like, halt it.
- [03:54]
Emily Peck
But one of the things you write in the book, and I think I've heard you say a bunch, is that, like, since Al Gore's movie came out, you'll say the stat, but it's like much of the climate change we're dealing with right now is because of what happened after that. Like, it's only in the past decade that we've.
- [04:09]
Felix Salmon
Yeah, this isn't, this isn't really, you know, the evil that we have committed since 1875 or whatever. It's really the evil.
- [04:17]
David Wallace-Wells
It's in all of our lifetimes. Yeah, it's not quite since his movie. It's since his. He wrote his first book, which was a campaign book, when he was sort of running for president in 1988. But yeah, half of all of the emissions that we put into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuel have come in the last 30 years. And that's since the UN established its big climate change panel, the IPCC. And that means that we've done more damage to the climate knowingly than we managed in ignorance, which is a huge indictment of the last 30 years and should give us pause, you know, if we're trying to be hopeful about the next 30.
- [04:48]
Anna Shymansky
And I think it's also important in terms of, like, especially in relation to your book, because I think sometimes there's criticism of, like, oh, there's alarmism. But I feel like, clearly speaking in probabilities and lots of statistics doesn't move people. We've seen that it doesn't move people. People tend to be moved by fear. And I feel like it's perfectly reasonable to say this is probably the scariest thing humanity has ever faced. We should probably be scared of it.
- [05:12]
David Wallace-Wells
Yeah, I think the science is terrifying. You don't need hyperbole, you don't need alarmism. Just a serious, straightforward look at what scientists are projecting for the next few decades is enough to terrify anyone. And I think because all of us have those biases that you're talking about that push us away from considering really scary scenarios and make us want to believe that the future will continue to be stable and rosy, I think that's even more reason to take seriously the science, because we need to fight those impulses and, you know, make plans based on what the scientists are projecting. Now, I don't know that every single. Obviously, every single projection that is in my book probably won't come to pass. Science revises itself sometimes in a more optimistic direction. Although I would say I've been, you know, working in this material really deeply for a couple years. I can probably count the number of papers that have made me more optimistic about the future on my two hands, and the number of papers that have made me revise my expectations in the other direction, towards a more bleak picture. I mean, they number in the thousands.
- [06:08]
Felix Salmon
So I just want to, like, talk about this bleakness because there's a couple of things you said which kind of jump out at me. You said that, like, the amount of wealth that would be, like, wiped out is greater than the amount of wealth that there is right now in the world. You said that, like, the population of the world will be 50% larger than it is right now. And both of those things say to me, well, yeah, those are both really. You know, you can look at that in a sort of horrifying way, which you do. And the idea that you'd have billions of climate refugees is terrifying. But on the other hand, is the base case still that we are going to get a lot richer, because the only way that you can wipe out twice as much wealth is as exists as if we create, like, More than twice as much wealth as we already have.
- [06:53]
David Wallace-Wells
Yeah, I think the, the, the best economics on it suggests that the world, the global economy will be considerably larger than it is today, but that it will be between 20, if we don't change course, between 20 and 30% smaller than it would be without the effects of climate change. So it depends on how you're making a judgment. If you're projecting out from 2100, in parts of the world at least, people will be considerably richer. Although if we get to four degrees at, at the end of the century, the best economics research suggests that there will be parts of the world where the prospect of future economic growth has been completely wiped out. Basically the whole equatorial band of the world would have no potential for economic growth going forward. But that's not to say that globally we wouldn't still be, we wouldn't still have a bigger problem.
- [07:38]
Felix Salmon
And to be clear, you're still, you're still talking about the first derivative here. You're saying in the equatorial regions it's not that their economy would go to zero, but it would just stop growing.
- [07:47]
David Wallace-Wells
Basically, and there would be no hope of future growth. It wasn't. Yeah. So that their sort of best year would be 0% growth. Now again, that's all speculative and it's, you know, quite those, who knows how those projections will come to pass. But the revolution in economic thinking on this issue, it's happening very fast. Just 15 years ago with the Stern report about climate change, the estimates were actually quite small of what the economic impacts would be. And all of the new research that has been done over the last decade are making those estimates larger and larger and larger.
- [08:16]
Felix Salmon
And one of the key questions in these, all of these reports is the question of basically how much weight should we give to future unborn people who are going to be richer than us on many projections. But do we want to make them even richer still at the cost of whatever action we need to take today? Or am I misunderstanding that?
- [08:41]
David Wallace-Wells
Yeah, I think that the discount rate is an important big question. And I think also it's important to say that already these models, putting aside the question of discount rate, sort of radically undercount the suffering of those people in the global South. Because if you're measuring everything in dollars and cents, a flooded Bangladesh means a lot less than a flooded Miami Beach. The real estate is just less expensive and it adds up less. So we're already under counting a lot of suffering. And the question of how much we count present day suffering versus present day prosperity versus future Suffering is a big open question and different people have different approaches to that.
- [09:17]
Emily Peck
It seems like we're, I mean, one of the things that struck me over and over with your book was just realizing the climate has already warmed, still warming right now, and we're dealing with consequences right now. Like when you hear about the IPCC report and people talk about this still, even talking the scary stuff, they say 2100. And to me, like my very human lizard brain is like, okay, well in 2100 I'll definitely be dead. My kids will probably be dead. So it's fine. But it's not like it's going to be fine until 2100. It's like things will just get worse and worse and worse.
- [09:46]
Felix Salmon
It's not telling us, like what were you telling us about wildfires, like even today being much worse than they were.
- [09:53]
David Wallace-Wells
Yeah. So last year was a record setting California wildfire season. 1.8 million acres burned. The previous year was the previous record. That kind of thing never happened before. It used to be that records were set once every generation at the fastest, and now they're being set every year. There are legitimate scientific estimates that for every cells degree Celsius of warming, wildfires could get four times worse. Which means if we end up at the end of the century at 4 degrees, they could be 64 times worse than they are today. I think those estimates are a little high considering California only has 100 million acres. And I don't think we're going to see all of it burn every year. But the fact that there is serious science suggesting that is conceivably possible gives you a sense of just how different the world will be made by the forces of climate going forward. And to your point, I think, you know, it's also the case that when we project deeply into the future, it'll be different in ways outside of how climate changes things. So we can imagine not just oh, how old I'll be, how old my children will be, but also we could imagine, oh, there'll be different kinds of technologies, we'll have new political solutions. And I think that all of those distant dreams allow us to slip back and continue living in complacent ways today. And you're totally right, the timeline is just much too short for that. It's like here, I mean, already, yeah, already we're seeing extreme weather that is completely devastating. To take one example I write about a little bit in the book, you know, you hear a bit about these. The term 500 year storm, it gets, you know, gets talked about A lot. Every time there's a major hurricane, this is a storm that you'd expect to hit once in the entire history of Europeans presence in America, once. From the time that they landed in 1492 to the present day, basically once. And Hurricane Harvey was the third 500 year storm hitting Houston in three years. That is just like a completely different meteorological universe that we're living in. And there is debate among climate scientists, oh, is this heart, can we say that this hurricane is caused by climate change or that one is caused by climate change? And they're so careful to say, well, climate change is only one factor. But for me, if climate change is making a Category 5 hurricane 30% more likely, then the fact that we're seeing so many more of them is obviously a reflection of climate change and just how much responsibility we apportion to it. That's like a really academic question to me. But the wildfires and the hurricanes I think are really good illustrations of what you're talking about. Talking about, which is the system is not binary, it's not a question of being okay. And then suddenly we're fucked. You know, at some distant point we're totally screwed. Every tiny tick upward of temperature is going to make things worse. And every tick upward that we can avoid will allow us to avert some suffering if we choose to avoid that tick upward.
- [12:36]
Emily Peck
When you were talking about economic growth, another thing that you talk about that really struck me is that we're here because of economic growth, economic growth cause this fossil fuels.
- [12:46]
Felix Salmon
So yeah, that's one of the huge questions that I've been sort of struggling with since reading your book is there's this whole concept of economic growth, this idea that we've had in the past hundred years or so that that's what economies do, is they grow. That never used to be the fact before the Industrial revolution. And we have now internalize that as a perfectly normal and natural thing. And we think, oh yeah, that's what.
- [13:14]
David Wallace-Wells
It'S like a law of the universe.
- [13:16]
Felix Salmon
Yeah, it's like, well, if you live in a capitalist society, then you grow. That's what capitalism does. And then I guess the question which you raise is, is it actually not capitalism, it's just burning fossil fuels in a way that screws us all in the long term.
- [13:33]
David Wallace-Wells
Well, there is a really strong correlation there. I mean, if the history of economic growth really starts with the Industrial revolution, you have to ask what is really happening? And there are serious scholars who suggest that at least the lion's share of economic of that History is the result of simply adding the energy, which is to say, the value that was stored in the earth in the form of coal and oil, bring it into the economic system that had otherwise been basically static and, you know, reaping the rewards. I don't think that that is entirely that. I don't think that explains the entire history of economic growth. But I also don't think you can tell the story of the Industrial revolution without talking about the dependence on fossil fuels. And the entrepreneurial elements, the cultural elements, I think, are a smaller part of the story than we would have said or would like to admit.
- [14:24]
Felix Salmon
And one of the things which is important to remember is it's not just energy, it's also agriculture. That the Harbor Bosch process, which fixes nitrogen in the soil and basically creates the green revolution, is based on, you know, extracting carbon is based from natural gas and that kind of thing. You can't do any of it. A planet cannot support billions, like, you know, 7 billion people without the green revolution. You can't have the green revolution without. Without fossil fuels.
- [14:50]
Anna Shymansky
Right. I mean, and obviously economic growth is related to inexpensive sources of fuel that, you know, obviously. But just I do think it's important to see that carbon intensity has actually declined. If you're looking at the. How much carbon you need in order to grow has declined significantly. And I also.
- [15:11]
David Wallace-Wells
Even over the last few years, I would say yes.
- [15:13]
Anna Shymansky
I mean, and so I think the idea that you can't have growth without burning fossil fuels, I kind of don't necessarily think that's entirely accurate. And I think hope, if not. Well, and I. Because I think also if you look at, like, what could have happened, you know, in the 60s when nuclear. Nuclear problems get. Sally. George W. Bush technology was more affordable. If we had went down that path a bit more, it's completely conceivable that we would have had as much or more growth without the problems we're having now.
- [15:41]
David Wallace-Wells
Yeah, I think, I think that's absolutely right. And I think things have changed over the last decade kind of dramatically with the cost of renewable energy falling so dramatically, you know, faster than even its strongest advocates probably would have predicted 10 years ago, 15 years ago. And that means that in much of the world, renewables are now cheaper than dirty energy. And that makes the future. That opens up a lot of future possibilities that would have seemed really complicated just a decade ago, for instance, you know, if you take seriously the idea, which I do, obviously, that we've. We've basically brought the planet from relatively stable climate to the brink of catastrophe in the space of 30 years. That story is largely the story of the industrialization development of China and other parts of the developing world. And you know, that story has been a huge humanitarian success. We have much less poverty, global poverty, much less infant mortality, much higher educational attainments. We've created a global middle class that wasn't really there before, but it was mostly done because of the industrialization of those nations. And that meant that going forward, you might have expected that in order for the remaining poor to become to attain global middle class ness would require similar reliance on fossil fuels. And I think that because of the energy revolutions that we've seen over the last decade or two, and we'll see going forward that that needn't be the trade off that we make, that we might be able to, you know, continue to really draw down global poverty without continuing to depend on fossil fuels to do it. And that's great. It means we don't have to ask the Global south to stay poor in order for the rest of us to survive. But it also requires a real transformation of those energy infrastructures and our energy infrastructures, and that we do it very, very quickly, which is problematic because infrastructure takes a long time to build and.
- [17:25]
Anna Shymansky
China has built a lot of infrastruct quickly.
- [17:27]
David Wallace-Wells
Yes, no, I think.
- [17:28]
Felix Salmon
Let's, let's. This is, this is the perfect segue. This is the perfect segue to the Green New Deal, which, I mean, as to your point, Anna, the Chinese are showing that you can build a huge amount of infrastructure very quickly. It's pretty obvious that we don't have a massive fiscal constraint on how much we can spend. There's a lot of talk right now, especially in the Democratic Party, about a Green New Deal. And so I guess my question for you, David, is like, is this the solution that you. Is this the solution? Is this the way that we need to go in order to avert the crisis that you're writing about?
- [18:09]
David Wallace-Wells
You mean massive infrastructure spending?
- [18:10]
Felix Salmon
Or like, I mean, I guess the Green New Deal is much bigger than just infrastructure spending.
- [18:14]
David Wallace-Wells
You mean the Green New Deal? Yeah, I mean, I think the Green New Deal is. It's basically a statement of principles and goals. It's not a piece of policy that could be put into action immediately. And most of the questions about exactly how it would attain the goals that it sets out are left to be determined. So we'll see what it evolves into. I think the thing that's really exciting about it is that it's a piece of American Climate legislation that puts the science first, that basically quotes at length the UN's recommendations and says essentially, let's try to find a policy politics and then a policy that can help us achieve those goals. That's never been done before. We've always defined our climate policy through what we considered politically possible rather than scientifically necessary. And I think that's a huge step forward. It also has the second agenda of essentially creating a new set of social democratic values and embedding them in the, you know, the sort of bureaucracy of American government. And I'm basically for those two. There's some dispute about whether this is the most, the best strategic approach to climate change, whether there's some risk of joining these two agendas together. But I think if you look at the polling, actually it's like the social Democratic stuff that pulls better than the climate stuff. So, you know, I. And since I basically support, you know, the values that it espouses there too, I think it's. It's a exciting path forward. But as I say, huge questions remain about exactly what it would entail. And to the extent that these two agendas have divergent goals, which I think mostly they're aligned, but there are going to be some situations where we're going to have to choose are we more interested in a job guarantee or are we more interested in cutting our emissions? Then we'll see which one wins out. I don't yet know which will, which one will, but I think in general, it's a huge sign of progress on this issue that a party, the Democratic Party, that a few years ago considered cap and trade a radical proposal, is now in a situation where all of the major presidential candidates have signed onto a mobilization of the scale of World War II. That's really what it calls for, because that's what the UN calls for. That is a dramatic change, and I think we'll see how it plays out. But for the moment, I would say it's exciting that at least there is that movement.
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Felix Salmon
And do you think that the Democratic Party, more broadly and specifically Congressional Democrats, are bought into it to the same degree that the presidential candidate, Sir?
- [20:39]
David Wallace-Wells
I think probably not. But I also think that if the presidential campaign means a lot of talk about this, and the nominee, the ultimate nominee, is someone who has it at least as one of their central values, which I think is sort of inevitable, the party will come along. The Democratic Party was resistant to a massive health care bill in 2006, 2007, and yet when Obama decided to prioritize it, the party came along. It was a little difficult, but the party came along. I imagine the same will happen now.
- [21:04]
Felix Salmon
Didn't Obama say that his second priority was climate change?
- [21:07]
David Wallace-Wells
He actually, in the campaign he said it was his first priority, but after the crash, he, he sort of changed things up. And it's funny, you know, I'm, I'm a newcomer to this subject. I'm, you know, I'm a lifelong urbanite. As I write in the book. I don't really consider myself an environmentalist. I'm not a nature lover. And like a lot of people on the, on the kind of center left in 2008, I didn't find that calculus objectionable at all. I thought it made perfect sense to prioritize health care rather than climate. But the more that I've spent time with this subject, the more I see it as a really all encompassing story that will affect, really anything else you want to accomplish in politics will be affected by the forces of climate change. So I don't think it makes sense.
- [21:43]
Felix Salmon
To prioritize, including the health of the population.
- [21:45]
David Wallace-Wells
Absolutely. I think the public health part of the story has really been underutilized, actually in terms of climate messaging, because it's so, it feels so immediate, especially when you learn about small particulate pollution, which is not exactly an effect of climate change, but it's sort of caused by the same things as climate change, which is the burning of carbon. It's really horrifying. Small particulate Pollution already kills 9 million people a year globally. Mostly that's in the developing world, large chunk of it in India in particular. But 9 million people a year is as many people, you know, that's as many people as died in the Holocaust. That's an enormous amount of suffering, even in, you know, those communities in the US where things are not quite as dire. You can see the impacts on the development of children, on cognitive performance. You can see it on the rates of autism and adhd. It basically interferes with absolutely everything about the human body. And I think the more that people understand that, the more horrified they will be that we're breathing in this air as much as we are. And especially acute in the aftermath of wildfires in California. I mean, you see, you know, all of San Francisco, all of Los Angeles, for a few days at least, covering their mouths with surgical masks. I don't think any of us want to live in a future where those are the, you know, we're living in cities where that's required. But you know, again, if California is burning 64 times more land than it is now. That's probably going to be a sort of permanent feature of the American, of the Californian airscape. And that smoke is not trapped in California, it travels across the whole country.
- [23:08]
Emily Peck
I think it's smart of the Green New Deal to sort of merge economic policy and social welfare with a climate solution because politically on its own, a climate solution, I think people are always going to get kind of like that lizard brain fuzziness about thinking about the future and not going to latch onto it at all.
- [23:25]
Felix Salmon
Yeah, it's called hyperbolic discounting. Humans do it like during the Cold War we had this existential fear because we thought that literally the bombs could fall on us any day, it could be like today. Whereas there's no sort of existential fear like we could be wiped out today with climate. And then the minute something is even just a couple of years in the future, it's out of sight, out of mind.
- [23:46]
Emily Peck
Yeah. And so asking people to make any kind of like political sacrifice for something far out in the future is always gonna be really hard. But if you link it up with all these like great benefits like jobs bill, jobs guarantee, paid vacation, universal healthcare, like this is all great stuff that most people support. The majority of Americans support all that stuff. So.
- [24:05]
Anna Shymansky
Well that's. I guess this is the problem is that the majority of Americans don't. And I mean they actually, if you ask them in a paid sickly. Not if you put it on an election, if you put it on an actual thing that they have to vote on, they don't. And this is the problem. If you want. This is a very, very serious.
- [24:19]
Emily Peck
I'm going to stop you because for most of the sort of social welfare policies, when states have referendums on these things, they pass and if you do.
- [24:27]
Felix Salmon
Opinion polls, a majority of Republicans say they want things like universal health care. Does that mean that they will switch affiliation and vote for the Democrat? No, but it does mean that it does have broad popular support in both parties.
- [24:40]
Anna Shymansky
So I don't want to go back and forth and arguing and pulling different. But if we, this is serious and if it's something that we actually want to like if we actually want to combat climate change so we don't have this horrific future, we need serious policies. And I do think there are some problems with the Green New Deal. Having said that, I still think it is important that this is being talked about as central to the Democratic message. In an ideal world we would have the Republicans coming out with the more market based solutions and the Democrats having a more government Focused solution and we'd find medium ground. Of course, we don't have that because one of our parties is insane. But I guess I just think that if you're looking for what can actually move the needle, you know, we're going to need things like carbon taxes, we're going to need nuclear technology. And these are things that I'm, I find a lot of people who are supporting the Green New Deal are saying no. And I think we need serious policies. I'm not saying the elements of the Green New Deal that are focused on spending a lot of money to combat this are bad. I don't think they're bad because ultimately we're gonna have to spend it today, we're gonna have to spend a hell of a lot more in the future. So it's fine to spend it today, but we need serious policy.
- [25:46]
Emily Peck
But I think what's interesting, if you think about like going back to the New Deal, right, That's a response to the ravages of industrialization and becoming like this hyper capitalist economy, right? You had to have social welfare to sort of ameliorate those effects. So you have a Green New Deal to ameliorate the effects. That economy has continued to ravage us with. It just makes, it instinctively makes sense. Like you can't just go and fight this very serious problem without giving people something else to sort of make it easier for them. Like, you can't go be like France and just do this carbon tax because look what happens.
- [26:21]
Anna Shymansky
Well, no, the point is you would.
- [26:22]
Emily Peck
Have to figure out a holistic solution to tackle a really hard problem, but not leave people like in a ditch while you do it.
- [26:29]
Anna Shymansky
Of course. And I think when you're talking about carbon taxes, because it would obviously be naturally very aggressive, you would have to counter that with something like either a dividend, which you hear about, or cuts in payroll taxes, which both of which can also mitigate the effects on growth and also make it less regressive. So there are serious policies and that have also been shown to have an impact. And I'm not.
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David Wallace-Wells
Well, there's no, no country with a carbon tax currently has their emissions declining, right?
- [26:56]
Anna Shymansky
But when Australia had one briefly, it also, their emissions were down and they got rid of it for political reasons, which. Fair enough. I'm just, I think that when you look at, you know, every recent Fed chair, when you look at Nobel Prize winners, they all say, look, how can we fight this? The number one thing you need is a carbon tax.
- [27:12]
David Wallace-Wells
So I think if we, I just think it's you know, I'm, my own perspective is like, this is a. It takes everything. So I'm, I support a carbon tax. I support nuclear investments in nuclear in addition to all the other stuff that, you know, my feeling is that. But the UN says that in order to meaningfully reduce carbon emissions globally, the tax would have to be perhaps as high as 50, $500 a tonne. Nowhere else in the world is there a tax that's 1/100th that large right now. So to get all the way there would require, I think, taxes so high that would, they would be effectively bans. And so it's not so important to me that we take one approach rather than the other. I do think that, you know, the market is powerful, it's produced innovation in the past, and I think we can unleash it to fight this too. But I also think if you look at the recent past, the market has helped produce an enormous revolution in green energy, driving those costs dramatically down. And yet globally, green energy is not a bigger part of the proportion of energy use total than it was 40 years ago. And so you have to wonder, can market forces alone do this?
- [28:15]
Anna Shymansky
Oh, no, And I agree with you. I mean, I don't think market forces alone can do it. I 100% agree, I think. But I also think that when you're looking at how to fight this, you're gonna need a combination of both things. And that. That's what I'm saying.
- [28:26]
Emily Peck
Yes.
- [28:27]
David Wallace-Wells
And I do think that the nuclear issue is important, but I also think that there are many people who feel like it's a, it's also a silver bullet that we can solve the entire problem with nuclear energy is only 30% of the global carbon footprint, and nuclear plants take at least a decade to build, which means if we're talking about a timeline of having emissions by 2030, which is what the UN says we need to do, new plants are not going to help that much. But I certainly think we shouldn't be taking old plants that are working offline, certainly.
- [28:53]
Felix Salmon
So we're going to have a Slate plus segment about another silver bullet, which is like aerosols, because I feel like this is something which is. We just had some news about. But before we get to that, I want to talk about immigration a bit because I feel like this is a huge part of when you play this story forward. We've already seen in Europe a wave of what can credibly be called climate refugees from Syria, basically changing the politics of an entire continent for the worse. The number of climate refugees is going to go up spectacularly, more or less, whatever we do or don't do in terms of carbon mitigation. And there are two ways that we can respond to that. If you look at recent history, it looks like we're going to respond to that with kind of xenophobia and nativism. Whereas it seems to me that the one thing that the American and the rich world can do in terms of, you know, helping to mitigate the effects of climate change is welcome many, many more of those climate refugees within their borders, because frankly, the global north is not going to be as badly affected as the global South. And I feel like the number of calls for open borders is going to increase as the humanitarian plight in the south gets worse and worse. But maybe I'm just crazy.
- [30:20]
Emily Peck
I think you're so optimistic. I mean, what we've been seeing for the past few years is, like you said, nativism. Close the borders, build the wall. I don't see how that switches around, although it sounds great.
- [30:29]
Anna Shymansky
I mean, I don't think. I mean, countries are going to have to have immigration systems. You're never going to have open borders. And if you try to have that, you're going to have enormous pushback and probably just fuel authoritarians. However, that doesn't mean that you don't allow people into the country. It means it's going to have to. You're going to have, even if we're able to make it, some of the effects of climate change, we're still going to have climate refugees. And we are going to, as every different country, is going to have to figure out how to deal with that in an organized way. Because if you don't, you're going to have what we're current, what we've currently been seeing, and it's not good.
- [31:03]
David Wallace-Wells
There is some social science that suggests that sort of the, the harshest response to new, an influx of newcomers happens when those, the number of those newcomers is small. And that once the, in any given community, when the new number of newcomers is larger, the community as a whole becomes more welcoming. You know, I think it is probably too optimistic to hope for that happening on a global scale. But I think in some countries, in some situations, it may be the case that we're passing through a period of like, kind of a brief period of, of populist, nativistic backlash, and that on the other side of that, those countries will be more welcoming, But I think globally is probably too much to hope for that, that, that it unfolds in that way. And you know, I think one reason that it's a little hopeful to hope for that is that we're already seeing our politics shaped by intuitions of growing resource scarcity. We're already seeing an increasingly zero sum view of politics, geopolitics. And it seems like so long ago that like any interaction with between nations was premised on like positive sum values. And I'm not sure that as the planet continues to warm and suffering continues to mount that we're likely to return to that old model. I think it's more likely to be the case that we lean more into zero sum. This.
- [32:16]
Anna Shymansky
Right. And also what we really should be doing now is also finding ways to make it so people aren't going to have to immigrate. Whether it's, you know, paying countries to not use coal, whether it's paying countries to keep their forest or to have more, whether, you know, it's figuring out ways to develop more drought resistant crops, all of these things, because ultimately a lot of people are refugees. They ultimately would rather just be where they are.
- [32:39]
Felix Salmon
Would rather be where they are. So I mean, this is, this is the question. You say that it's really hard to point to a specific hurricane and say that specific hurricane was caused by climate change. I think the same thing is true of like a specific refugee crisis. I think you can look at virtually all the refugee crises in the world and say like, you know, in aggregate, probably they are caused by climate change, but any specific one, it's hard to make that case. Well, what's is it, is there a similar.
- [33:05]
David Wallace-Wells
It's there exactly the same. Yeah. So they, you know, globally speaking, the estimates are that for every half degree of, we see a between a 10 and 20% increase in conflict. The similar dynamic applies to civil strife and disarray. And that means that in any given country, even in any given country going through an extreme weather event or drought, it's not, you can't take it to the bank that there'll be, you know, a civil war or conflict that will produce refugees. And you know, Syria went through a civil war in part because of a drought, but Lebanon went through the same drought and did not have a civil war. And that kind of dynamic will play out across the globe. But when you're dealing with a country of, I mean, a world of, you know, whatever, 180 countries in the world, and if global warming increases the likelihood of some kind of civil disarray by a couple of percentage points, that means that overall they're going to be, there's going to be considerably more conflict. And exactly how we deal with that, you know, in part, it's a case by case question. But if we do get to a point by mid century where many of the biggest cities in South Asia and the Middle east are lethally hot in summer, which is where we are on track for at about 2 degrees, that'll be the case. That say a city like Calcutta, which has like 12 million people in it, it will be, you won't be able to go outside during the summer without incurring risk of heat stroke and possibly death. We're talking about a refugee crisis that's so much bigger than anything that we've ever dealt with before. I mean, the UN says that its low end estimate is 200 million by 2050. Their high end estimate is 1 billion, which is as many people as live in north and South America combined. I think you have to take those estimates a little bit with a grain of salt. They're produced by people who are invested in raising alarm about the issue. But it, again, it gives you, even if you discount it by a factor of 10, we're still dealing with a huge, huge crisis. And you know, I'm not sure that we can continue to solve that problem or address that problem in a kind of case by case way. We'll settle these 10,000 immigrants here, we'll settle these 50,000 people here. It seems like it's sort of screaming out for a more global solution. And the problem there is, you know, our global networks, our institutions that used to organize our cooperation between nations are really fracturing and there's much less collective investment in those institutions and in those values. And I don't know that I see a successor system coming down the pike that could organize that activity more thoughtfully or more thoroughly. Although I also think it's quite possible that we will see a new kind of a system emerge. In the aftermath of World War II, we saw a liberal international order built on the principle of human rights and peace and prosperity. And even though those values were not honored in every particular, in many cases they were used as an alibi for continued kind of suffering and you know, cash grab, money grab. It was still like the stated goal of the liberal international order to protect human rights. So much so that we've had a bunch of wars that were basically fought in that, in that name. And I think we could end up with a new order that is oriented around carbon and climate change in the decades ahead, operating on a similar model where, for instance, you know, MBS in Saudi Arabia has already said that he needs his economy, this of that country to be entirely off oil by 2050. He would like it to be mostly off oil by 2030. I think that shows that he understands that 30 years from now a country won't be able to continue producing oil, selling oil, burning oil in the way that Saudi Arabia does now, and still expect a seat at the table of nations. I think he understands that the geopolitics around this issue are changing so fast that if Saudi Arabia wants to be, you know, a member of the global community, it will have to give up oil. I think that's probably wise. I think it probably will evolve in that direction. And if you imagine someone like Jair Bolsonaro coming to power 30, 40, 50 years from now, threatening to deforest the entire Amazon, I don't even think it's entirely inconceivable that that could lead to some kind of military action by. By other nations. It seems like pulled from sci fi novels, but again, we've seen wars fought in the name of human rights a lot. And if you had made that projection to someone in 1910 or 1915, they would have laughed at you. So the world can change, and I think it will change in this direction. The question is whether it is changed by climate in a way that makes us more responsive to those in need, more empathic to those who are suffering or less. And I think that's very much an open question, which the recent history of our politics suggests may not have a happy answer.
- [37:20]
Felix Salmon
But if you want a particularly dystopian view of what's gonna happen and you aren't completely just throwing yourself off a brick wall after reading David's book, you can then go off and read John Lanchester's new novel, which is even probably darker. But it's also very good and I can highly recommend it. I think it's actually time to have a numbers round because. Emily.
- [37:45]
Emily Peck
I'm about to start crying.
- [37:46]
Felix Salmon
She's about to start crying. And we can't have that because it's very bad audio.
- [37:50]
Emily Peck
It's a cheerful number. Okay, it's $2,990. That is the price of the Max Mara fire coat, which you might remember was the coat that Nancy Pelosi wore at her famous meeting with Donald Trump. And yesterday Max Mara announced that they were bringing it back. So anyone can have the fire coat and be like Nancy Pelosi and, you know, be all sass all the time.
- [38:11]
Felix Salmon
That's right.
- [38:12]
Emily Peck
$2,990.
- [38:15]
Felix Salmon
So 3,000.
- [38:16]
Anna Shymansky
Yes.
- [38:17]
Felix Salmon
With tax. I'm going to drop in a quick climate number here, which is 45%, which is the drop in minutes that the TV news devoted to climate change. Between 2017 and 2018 it dropped to 142 minutes in all of 2018 was how much attention they paid to climate change.
- [38:40]
Emily Peck
Now to go up because David's out.
- [38:41]
Felix Salmon
There on the stage of which 46 of those 1421 program where meet the prayers. But yeah, thank you David for being on TV because you are single handedly bringing that number back up again.
- [38:54]
Anna Shymansky
So I also have a climate number. It was kind of positive. Ish. So it's 1890 because that a year? Yes, because. Yes, because the UK their emissions are now below the levels that they were in 1890. They're still way far away from their target. So I'm not saying this is amazing, but it was the only positive thing I saw this week.
- [39:14]
Felix Salmon
So. Okay, David, do you have a number.
- [39:17]
David Wallace-Wells
I can come up with? 1.
- [39:18]
Felix Salmon
Come up with 1.
- [39:19]
David Wallace-Wells
$5 trillion is the highest estimate that I've seen, but it's a good, good high estimate, not crazy hyperbolic estimate for the amount of global subsidies being paid to the fossil fuel business every year. $5 trillion.
- [39:32]
Emily Peck
That solves the problem. We just take that money away and.
- [39:34]
David Wallace-Wells
Use it, invest it in R and D and carbon capture and yeah, it's all over.
- [39:39]
Felix Salmon
Perfect.
- [39:39]
Emily Peck
Very helpful.
- [39:40]
Felix Salmon
David Wallace Wells, thank you very much for coming on to Slate Money to talk all things green economy with us. Thank you, Jasmine, Molly, for producing this and future episodes of Slate Money. Do tune in on Tuesday as well where we have the next episode of Slate Money Travel. Do keep the emails coming on slatemoneyleep.com and we are going to have a slate plus segment about geoengineering and aerosols and stuff. We will talk to you next week on Slate Money.