This week, Bryony is back, this time to talk to David Wallace-Wells. David is an American journalist and author who often writes about climate change. His 2017 article "The Uninhabitable Earth" for New York Magazine was the publication's most-read article in history. David then turned the article into a book of the same name, which was chosen as Book of the Year, 2019, by The Sunday Times, The Spectator and New Statesman. He has a BA in History from Brown University.
This week, Bryony is back, this time to talk to David Wallace-Wells. David is an American journalist and author who often writes about climate change. His 2017 article "The Uninhabitable Earth" for New York Magazine was the publication's most-read article in history. David then turned the article into a book of the same name, which was chosen as Book of the Year, 2019, by The Sunday Times, The Spectator and New Statesman.
He has a BA in History from Brown University.
Links
Read David's original 2017 article here: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html
Read the 2020 Nature Article on RCP 8.5 here: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00177-3
Read Jim Hansen's recent paper on climate sensitivity: https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/3/1/kgad008/7335889
View Bryony's favourite Sankey diagram showing US energy inputs and outputs: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/
Bryony Worthington
Hello, I'm Brony Worthington and this is Cleaning Up. My guest this week is journalist and author, David Wallace-Wells. In 2017, David exploded onto the climate scene after he wrote an article exploring worst-case climate scenarios for New York Magazine. The article quickly gained a massive readership and lots of feedback, but sadly, not all of it positive. A detailed annotated version was subsequently published, providing full factual references and some corrections. He then went on to publish The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, which rapidly became a bestseller. I wanted to ask David what led to his interest in climate change how he's feeling about it now, and about his current work. Please join me in welcoming him to Cleaning Up.
Michael Liebreich
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Over the holidays, we moved the Cleaning Up newsletter to Substack where you can find it on mlcleaning up.substack.com, that's mlcleaning up.substack.com. And don't forget there are over 170 hours of conversations with extraordinary climate leaders on cleaningup.live, that's cleaningup.live. One more thing before we get going. I'm also in the process of launching a brand new Substack called The Thoughts of Chairman Michael. The aim is to create a single hub, bringing together all my written, audio and video output. You'll find everything from links to my conference speeches, and Bloomberg NEF columns, exclusive thought pieces on the transition and miscellaneous blogs on stuff I found interesting. I'll be posting new content regularly. So make sure you subscribe, search for The Thoughts of Chairman Michael on Substack. Or if you can spell my name, go to mliebreich.substack.com, that's mliebreich.substack.com. See you there.
Cleaning Up is brought to you by our lead supporter, Capricorn Investment Group, the Liebreich Foundation and the Gilardini Foundation.
BW
David, welcome to Cleaning Up. It's a real pleasure to have you. And I wonder if we could kick things off just with the obvious question. Who are you, and what do you do?
David Wallace-Wells
Thanks. It's great to be here. I'm a big fan of the podcast. I'm really thrilled and humbled to be here as a guest and talking to you especially. I mean, author and a journalist, I write often about climate change. I wrote a big book, in 2019, called The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, and that was based on an article I'd written in New York Magazine in 2017, serving worst case scenarios for climate change, which had the same title. And now I work at the New York Times where I write some about climate, some about the pandemic and some just about our messy future and how we live in it.
BW
Wonderful. And it's fair to say that you kind of broke into the climate scene, really, as a result of that article in the New York Magazine. And it was one of the most-read articles that the magazine had ever published right at the time?
DWW
Yeah, those records get broken every year because audiences grow, but it was, for a few years- it got a bunch of million readers and for a few years was the sort of- the top article of all time, it got surpassed when Michael Wolff published the excerpt about Donald Trump's war room, but you know, that happens.
BW
Yeah, definitely. Um, what was like- talk to me about what led you to write this article, because it was written in particular- the reason it broke through, I think, is because you took a particular angle. What was it, in the run up to it, that made you- sort of compelled you into writing this piece?
DWW
Yeah, I'm not somebody who spent my whole life focused on climate change, I really just was a general-interest journalist who was interested in the future and was talking to a lot of folks, reading a lot of academic work, and started to see, probably around 2015 or 2016, quite a lot of alarming science about the state of the climate system, and where we were headed. And it felt to me, reading that science, that there were some quite dizzyingly dark possibilities that, you know, were not likely to happen, were not guaranteed to happen, but were possible. And it felt to me, looking around at the landscape, the media landscape, the cultural landscape, that that sort of range of possibilities, the worst case range of possibilities, which may be unlikely, but are so consequential that we probably need to pay attention that even if they are pretty unlikely, was not a big part of the way that the average non-climate-engaged person really thought about global warming. And not just in the severity but in the scope of the story. You know, people like you and me, living in big metropolitan cities, may not have thought that climate change was something that would affect them in their lives and the lives of those that they loved, but the more that I understood about, especially at some really scary climate warming outcomes, what it would mean for agriculture, what it would mean for economic growth, what it would mean for inequality, conflict and all the way down the line, it seemed that we're not just mistaken by avoiding or looking away from worst case possibilities, we were also mistaken in how much we had compartmentalised the threat, to allow ourselves the ability to think about the future, you know, in our own lives sort of unmolested, on damaged by, like climate impacts. And what I set out to do in the story was to try to break both of those delusional bubbles, and to some degree, grab the reader by the by the collar and really take them on a tour of what was possible, partly as a way just of sharing the science and hoping that other people like me will be brought along and moved as I was out of fear, among other things, but partly just to sketch the grandness of the story that we were all living through, collectively on planet Earth in the 21st century, and to give people who, you know, like me had thought about climate change a little bit, but weren't preoccupied with it, a sort of reason to see many more parts of their lives and many more parts of their dreams for the future, as tied up in the same story, which was an incredibly consequential one that had some relatively soft outcomes, but also some quite bleak and dark outcomes, and to kind of give the impression, I hoped, that it was up to us to navigate that landscape of possibilities and try to get as close to the relatively soft landings as we possibly could.
BW
And there was quite a strong response, right, not only just did it gain a large readership, but you got quite- you got feedback, right, from different communities. And do you want to talk a little bit about some of the feedback and how you dealt with it? Like, how did it feel?
DWW
Yeah, I mean, I think in part because it was such a phenomenon, there was a lot of commentary and indeed, some criticism, particularly from climate scientists and climate advocates who pretty immediately argued that I had, to some degree, overstated or overhyped the science that I was basing the story on. And then, sort of secondarily, that even a good-faith project of this kind, even when that was absolutely responsible about worst case, science was still irresponsible, because talking about worst case scenarios was scary. And that would lead people not to be engaged, but to fall into fatalism. So you know, we responded, I think, quite well as a journalistic effort, you know, the thing had been fact-checked very carefully. And we went through and we published an annotated version that same week, and in which we showed all the academic articles or interviews where each sentence had been drawn from, and it literally was basically like a footnote for every sentence. And some of those were papers that scientists in the field may look at and say, "those are extreme findings, that's not exactly what we would endorse as a median projection for agricultural yields at four degrees or whatever." But it still, I think, somewhat put to bed the criticism that the piece itself had been based on bad science. I showed all the work, I showed all the scientists I had spoken to, it sort of moved the conversation then to that second stage, where we were talking about whether it was a) responsible or b) effective, from an advocacy point of view, to be talking in these terms and trafficking in this kind of alarmism. And I had feelings about that as I wrote the piece, as someone who had sort of woken up to climate change out of fear, I thought, "surely there are many more people like me? Maybe they're not the majority, maybe they're not even a large plurality, but they're going to be some people like that." But I felt, in having conversations in the aftermath, even more strongly that while this is not necessarily the only way to tell the story of climate change, there are many people for whom it works. It hooks them, it engages them, it motivates them, and I think we've seen that play out very much in the years since not just because of my article, but because of all of the different kinds of more strident urgent climate rhetoric that have come out around the world. Maybe most exemplary is Greta Thunberg, but Extinction Rebellion, Sunrise Movement in the US, climate strikes globally. All of these are engaged in a kind of, I would say, alarmist rhetoric, I think some of the founders may disagree, but that has resulted in a whole new age of global climate engagement. And I think that those two things are very clearly connected, that, you know, fear is a motivating force. We know that from history, we know that from the history of activism, again, it doesn't have to be the only thing that- the only way that people prematurely, I think meant, if not alienating, then at least leaving on the sideline a lot of potential allies who might have been otherwise engaged by that work. And the fact that more people are speaking in these terms, and have been, I think has been ultimately quite productive for the climate cause. I think it's one reason why we're in a somewhat better place now than we were when I wrote the article. Although that story is a very complicated one, which I imagine we'll get into to some degree, it is now, you know, I would say clear that the world is moving in the right direction on climate, which is not something I would have said in 2017, not something I said all that regularly in 2019. The question is much more, "are we moving fast enough? Are we doing enough?" Not, "are we doing anything at all?" But I think the fact that the climate- the planet has moved, the world has moved in that direction is, among other things, a tribute to the power of a more alarmist climate message.
BW
Do you think- one of the problems, of course, with climate is that it's playing out over a long time period, like it's not an immediate threat, it's not something that's facing us here and now, all the time, although the frequency of events is increasing, it's still- it is something that plays out over a century or more, in terms of its full impact. And that means that you're into a game of predicting the future, which is really difficult, right? It's fundamentally hard, and there are certain trends you can look back on and you can analyse and you can extrapolate from, but my worry with climate is that there are some very seriously under-discussed holes in our knowledge, which mean that we don't really, when it comes to projecting into the future, a little bit of uncertainty today, you know, compounds into a huge range of potential outcomes over time. And so it is a game of "which future do you want to tell?" And is there a right or wrong answer to that question? I mean, you came down on the side of, "I'm going to tell the scary future, because I think it will be motivating," but there's nothing to say that there's inherently- you know, you can find data to support a very hopeful, optimistic view or a more apocalyptic view. And I guess neither is right or wrong. It's just- it's the scale of the potentiality, the different outcomes that people have got to grasp, right, that none of us is certain. And that's a very hard message.
DWW
Yeah, I think on some level, the appeal of apocalyptic thinking, not just when it comes to climate, but more generally, in our culture is about this uncertainty, that on some level, we prefer actually to imagine an apocalyptic future, rather than one that we simply don't know how to process or understand. And I think that's certainly been true with climate narratives where, you know, people often do find themselves telling quite grim, bleak stories. I've done that too, of course. And I think you're absolutely right, that the narrative storytelling challenges here are immense, because the story is uncertain, yes, but also unbelievably complex. And when, you know- you want to have a straightforward story, anytime you're engaging in political mobilisation, you want to have a straightforward story. And climate change is just- it's not a straightforward story so much as a mess of a million stories crashing up against each other. On net, we basically know the direction of change in most areas, we know that in most places of the world, most things are going to be getting a bit worse to a lot worse, depending on how we want to measure them. But exactly how those things interact is very much an open question. And I think, you know, looking back on the writing that I did in 2017, and even into the book in 2019, one of the things that I don't think [I] wrestled with enough was how just how big a part of that narrative, ultimately, human response and human adaptation really is. And I do think that's just, you know, another large uncertainty that we layer over all of our uncertain climate science is, "what are we going to do about it? How are we going to try to design lives to live in this/that disruption? And how successful would be in doing that?" I think for all those reasons, this is just- it's a mind bending, dizzying kaleidoscopic story that is quite hard to tell in any one way. And for me, that was a reason to not be afraid of telling it the way that I saw it, because I thought that my perspective was one of many, alongside many others, and that probably, between all of these different stories, we'd hash out something like a conventional view, and that all of us, even if we accepted that story, would be surprised by the way that it actually played out in the future. And I think that's the world that we're living in now, seeing more and more climate events, seeing warming much more dramatically on the global temperature- global thermometers, and starting to see, not just thinking about the climate projections, but actually seeing how those impacts are playing out in the world. Are the rainfall changes having effects that we thought they did? How is it shaking out through insurance markets? I mean, there are millions of questions like this. But it reminds us that, you know, in some of the climate science is just the first big question that we're being asked, and then we have many more human questions that we need to answer as well.
BW
Yeah. And, I mean, there was at least three layers of kind of uncertainty that got conflated in some of the feedback, I think that maybe you received, and one is just the nature of climate science being a very complex system, as you say, and full of nonlinearities and unexpected feedbacks, both positive and negative, that are super hard to model. And the models are necessarily a simplified version of reality, and, you know, often have huge gaps in them. So there's that kind of foundational uncertainty. Then there's the kind of modelling forward of our current economic model, our energy systems, which perhaps, you know, we should- I'd love to come get into that a little bit more detail, because there, I think there were some valid criticisms about unrealistic emissions projections, which were just never going to be reality, and a lot of the criticism was kind of ended up focusing on that. And then there's the third one, which is just this messy human response that is really, really hard to model. It encompasses everything from how we respond to populism and conflict and migration and all these messy human constructs and economic impacts, which, you know, super hard to do. So- I guess you got attacked on different levels. But the one that, you know, I know that- and this brings out, you know, certainly Michael, who's Cleaning Up's- the podcast founder, I mean, he was very vocally talking about some of these emissions forecast, right, that were totally unrealistic. And almost concurrently with your article, people were starting to question like, "is the IPCC getting this right? Are some of these scenarios for future emissions realistic? Are we really going to have a six-fold increase in coal-burn?" And there were- so that on that level, there was quite a lot of concurrent criticism, wasn't there, about, "some of these scenarios just not feasible?"
DWW
That's not exactly the story that I would tell about those dynamics. Absolutely, there were energy modellers, people with particular expertise in energy research, who had questions about whether the highest-end emission scenarios, namely RCP 8.5, were plausible, whether they'd ever been plausible, whether they were still plausible, you know, going through the 2010s, whether it made sense for us to be basing our climate science on those trajectories or not. But I think, you know, to describe those questions as mainstream or really visible, as early as 2017, I think, is to somewhat mistake the history. My understanding- you know, I wrote about this issue, "is RCP 8.5, you know, plausible?" in December of 2019. And, you know, at the time, the big Nature article that had addressed that issue hadn't even come out yet it, came out in January, the next month. So the conversation was a little bit in the air. There were some blog posts being pushed around, there were some podcasts, you know, certainly certain people were talking about it. But to the extent that the climate community has since then discarded RCP 8.5, as at least a description of a business's usual future, which I think they have, it really is since then, it wasn't concurrent. And if I had, you know, done six months more of research and really gotten into the energy basis for all of this climate science, I may have gotten to some people who were raising questions, but at the level of the major, you know, major scientific publications at the level of, you know, the major scientific communicators, I think it was still a bit of an underground phenomenon that burst through over the year-or-two following. And, in fact, the Nature article about the plausibility of RCP 8.5 of the authors there is Zeke Hausfather, and he, as recently as 2018 in a scientific paper published, you know, described RCP 8.5 as "business-as-usual". So, I think what you're really talking about is a period, you know, sort of starting in late 2018 through late 2019 where the questions being raised in the energy community finally broke into the climate science community. The question is- the interesting question here is less to me about, you know, "when did we know what and when should we have known better?" and more about, "how much of our understanding of the climate future and its possible risks comes from a story that was never plausible in the first place and made its way into climate science somewhat by accident?" And I do think that there's a real concern there. I think that if you take RCP 8.5 out of the picture, most of the climate science that was done in 2010 looks quite a bit less scary. Most of the science that scared me into action came off of that emissions scenario. Although I would note, and this is getting quite into the weeds, but I hope that the Cleaning Up listeners know all the shorthand: I do think it's important to note many climate scientists will tell you, "okay, the emissions story in RCP 8.5 is not plausible, but that doesn't mean that we're not going to get to a forcing situation or a warming level that's described by that scenario." So, you know, ultimately, RCP 8.5 projects something like 4 to 4.5 degrees C of warming this century. It's quite possible that we could get to that level of warming, even if we don't have emissions anything like those that are described in RCP 8.5. So, I think in addition to saying we should be somewhat correcting our narrative about where we're heading, I think it's also important not to throw, you know, all of our babies out with the bathwater here and say that nothing that describes a level of warming at say 4 degrees should be taken seriously. It still seems to me to be a plausible, high-end possibility that we need to be- we need to be thinking about at least to some degree.
BW
Yeah. I mean, I hear you about the sort of, you know, kind of not assuming that everyone was talking about RCP 8.5 being a terrible scenario. There were a few- there was, I think, at least one paper out in early 2017, but as you say, it would have only been picked up, I suspect, by those who are really into the weeds of energy systems modelling, and who were rightly pointing out some of the flaws in the integrated assessment models that are used within the climate discourse. And so it was certainly not mainstream. It's not a criticism that you hadn't picked up on this, but I think it- I suppose what it points to, though, is that there are these layers of complexity. And your point at the end is that you can still have a pretty, you know, now very optimistic view of how the energy system is shifting, certainly a six-fold increase in coal burners globally is just not going to happen, given where we are with the the economics of clean energy, but you can still be very seriously worried about the nonlinear nature of the climate risk and the sensitivities of the climate to the perturbations that that we're, you know, we're kicking the climate hard, and every year we kick it even harder. And so worries about sensitivity of that experiment are still valid, right? And I guess that's still something we have to grapple with.
DWW
Yeah, Jim Hansen published a big paper earlier this year that many people debated and talked about that involves some of these questions, and he came up with - and his team came up with - a very high estimate for climate sensitivity, which most people describe to me as being sort of on the boundary of plausible, maybe just not plausible but maybe just inside the range of plausible. And that to me is quite concerning, if we think that there's a relatively small but serious chance that climate sensitivity could not be two and a half degrees, that we wouldn't get, you know, we wouldn't get that level of warming from a doubling of CO2, but something like four or five, that really changes the way that we think about even the good stories that we've been seeing in the, you know, on decarbonisation over the last few years, because it means that even really quite rapid green transition doesn't end up changing the ultimate warming level that we'd be expecting to see later this century. And I don't mean to endorse that paper or that climate sensitivity finding, it's just a return to what you said at the top, which is, so much of this is governed by uncertainty. And we have to keep that in mind almost as a first principle, and thinking about wherever we're going to end up. And, you know, that goes for both people on the optimistic end of the spectrum and the pessimistic end of the spectrum. The truth is, the future is a, you know, is dark. We see it only- we only see a few feet into the future, we only see a few years into the future. We don't see even those years all that clearly. And whenever we find ourselves telling big dramatic stories, we should, you know, try to remind ourselves that the main thing we know about the future is that we don't know the future.
BW
Absolutely. And then there are these periods where empirical scientists- you can kind of sense the fear in their- in their eyes or in their writing because anomalies happen which don't seem to correlate with what they're expecting. And to this year's ocean temperature anomalies- that feels to me like a really big reminder that all of this is completely uncertain. And it's an experiment. We're in uncharted territory. So when you- when you see a year like this where the gap between what the last readings were and this year's readings are so extraordinary, and everyone's scratching their heads to understand why, that does- that makes me worry that we're into a nonlinear response, which means that, you know, all bets are off slightly.
DWW
Yeah, and I mean, a lot of even quite sober minded scientists looking at the this year's temperature records will say, "we can't really explain why they're so high, we can't really explain why the temperatures are so high." We know a lot of the factors, we know El Nino is probably contributing somewhat, you know, that obviously, there's an underlying global warming trend, we know there's, you know, water in the atmosphere from a supervolcano, we maybe there's some Saharan dust effect, maybe there's some, you know, albedo changes based on the reduction of sulphur emissions. But even when you add up our best, or even high-end estimates of what that gets us, mostly, we don't get all the way to the temperature level we've seen, which, you know, puts scientists in a strange position because we don't want to be, you know, scientists and science communicators, science storytellers, we don't want to be describing even the present that we're living in now as like, unknowable or mysterious. We're not trying to fear monger, but the truth is that we don't have all that good a handle on even the climate that we have today and 2023, 2024. So yeah, projecting that out into the future gets gets even messier.
BW
I guess though, to return to the optimistic part of this, you know, tripartite problem we're dealing with in terms of physical risk, the response of the energy system, and then human responses and political responses, that bit in the middle of how we energetically power our lives, that has got an optimistic story within it, right, that can be- even if we accept that there are so many uncertainties, and those uncertainties seem to be getting more unexplained and the empirical evidence that's being shown seems to be deviating from models. But we still have this optimistic view, which is over the last 20, 30 years, enough change has happened that gives us a vision of a kind of fossil-free future, a future in which we could have abundant clean energy, which will give us the best chance we have of adapting and mitigating and speeding up, because we'll just have energy systems that are not causing, you know, they're not contributing any more to the problem, and they're actually helping us cope with what we need to deal with.
DWW
Yeah, by the way, not killing 10 million or so people here because of air pollution, either.
BW
Yeah, exactly.
DWW
I think, you know, I think that if we had an infinite timeline here, it would be very exciting, the path that we're on, we know that, you know, green energy is moving quite rapidly, it's growing faster than really all but the most optimistic projections, thought was possible just a few years ago. And we have every indication that it's going to continue to grow: there's been more public support, some of them may be shifting in certain countries in the world, but in general we have something like market forces, political forces and cultural forces all very much moving in the right direction at the global level. And I think you see that in the data, you know, you have a bunch of years in a row where there's been more investment in green energy than dirty energy, you've got, you know, new new energy capacity being added as largely green now. But you know, we're still in this problem where we're dealing with this huge legacy system of dirty energy, and we're, you know, we haven't even yet begun to draw down that peak. All we're doing is basically eating up the new energy that we want every year using green energy to supply that energy demand. And we need to have a whole, whole lot more of it if we're going to start to actually retire the dirty stuff, which is what we're going to have to do to deal with the problem. So I think, when we talk about even the sort of optimistic side of the story, the energy transition, especially at the global level, we're still talking about optimistic within some pretty grim parameters, like we basically know that we're moving too slowly to hit our climate targets of 1.5 degrees. Getting to limit global temperature rise below 2 degrees is going to be tricky, maybe it's possible, but it's going to be quite tricky. And while we love seeing these graphs of like all the renewable additions going up, all the investment going up, but you know, everything looks quite exponential. The most important graphs here are of carbon in the atmosphere and of global emissions, and both of those don't tell a very optimistic story at all. It tells a story where things are getting pretty steadily worse, year-on-year, and what that means is that we're doing more damage to the planet's climate future every year than we've ever done in the entire history of humanity to this point. Now, we may be near the peak, we may be about to reverse that story, but I think in the public imagination, we talk about peak and we think about like reaching a peak is somehow like equivalent to getting to net-zero, but actually, it's the farthest point we will ever be at from net-zero is at that peak, and reducing emissions for a couple of years by a little bit only means that all we will have achieved is that we'll be doing as much damage as we did a few years before, not maybe the most we've ever done in the history of humanity, but the second most or the third most, and it's an awfully long way down from a peak of 50 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent every year, all the way down to zero, or very close to zero, which is where we need to be. So even in the context of an optimistic story, and I agree, it's often much more optimistic about this than I was a few years ago, even then, it's also important on a number of different levels, intellectual honesty, but also sort of the level of moral conscience, it's important to remember that, you know, we're still very far from having solved this problem, or even really turned the corner as tempted as we may all be to say that we have- or maybe even more than that, to declare victory.
BW
Yeah, and maybe, but maybe, I do think there's a new sophistication now in the discourse about this inevitable shift away from fossil fuels, which hasn't- it's really only crystallised, I think for me in the last couple of years, where people are talking about the need for both the eradication of the demand, you know, the substitution of fossil fuels with clean, but now a conversation about the supply side, like the fact that the industry would love us to believe that fossil fuels are here to stay, we're just going to clean them up a little bit around the edges and it's all business as usual. But there seems to be a really growing realisation that you're gonna have to cut with both sides of the scissors, you know, you're gonna have to take the demand down, but also bring in some societal or even legal constraints, which say, "we're going to have to bring down the supply in line with the demand," otherwise, that they'll find ways of creating new demand, you know, that's my fear that- and, you know, we've talked about how the US now has pivoted from being, you know, a country that never really bothered to export its fossil fuels to suddenly the one of the world's biggest exporters, and that's the worry I have is that, even as we meet all this wonderful, optimistic future of an electrified future with a lot less demand for fossil fuels, the fundamental economics of extracting them and selling them hasn't changed. And so everyone still pursues it.
DWW
Yeah, the profitability of selling oil and gas is just much larger than the profitability in most cases of selling renewables, which makes it an even harder challenge, or one that has to be addressed through political economy rather than just market forces. You know, the way that I think about this is through the lens of the United States, and in certain ways that's myopic, and narcissistic, in other ways, the US is, you know, the world's second largest emitter, historically, by far the largest, this is probably the representative story and consequential story to tell if you're going to tell a single story. And here, I mean, I think, you know, I think we're testing just how long we can live in that state of climate democracy, how long we can use it as a growing realisation. Understanding that we need to keep it in the ground, we need to do supply side restrictions, I think in certain corners, that is true, but it has not yet - and I don't think really threatens to - make a big impact at our national or even our state level politics anytime soon. The same month that the Obama administration, you know, helped shape the Paris Agreement, it also lifted a ban on exporting oil. So at the time that the US agreed to Paris, the US was exporting literally zero barrels of oil: it was illegal to do that, and we were exporting such a trivial amounts of natural gas, that you can effectively say we were doing none of that either. There was a little bit but it was there was basically none of it. Now, we are the world's largest exporter of both oil and gas. And that's not that long ago, we've gone from zero to number one, over the period of time that we have also told ourselves that we are taking seriously that climate project to decarbonize the planet in our own country. And we've somewhat squared that circle or sort of learn to live with that hypocrisy by functionally just exporting our production abroad. So, we're doing better on the renewable side of things domestically. There are a lot of states that are getting a majority of their power from renewable sources. Now, I think that's going to grow dramatically in the years ahead, and you know, at the same time, we're introducing a lot of efficiencies. We're starting to pick up the EV revolution. We're not where we should be but we're moving forward there. And yet, oil production in the US is expected, even given by this inflation Reduction Act, which is this big climate bill even given that is basically expected to continue on a plateau for several decades. And that's really quite concerning. Now, whether the global demand is there for that oil in 2045 is somewhat to be determined. It's not entirely within America's control. But to the extent the United States as a country is making a bet on where demand and supply are going to meet a couple of decades from now, and approving oil projects and making investments on that basis, the bet that they're making is really that we're going to be basically where we are globally 30 years from now. We're not going to be in a better place, we're not probably not going to be in a worse place, but we're not going to be in a better place. And I think on some level, that's, you know, it's obviously better to be at a globally stable position, only doing as much damage every year as we have more- as we've done recently, rather than more, but it'd be much better if we were moving in the right direction. And I worry a little bit that all of our self congratulation about the green transition is really patting ourselves on the back for simply stopping making the problem worse. And when I even say that it's a little misleading, because we are every year making the problem worse, even if the amount of carbon that we're adding to the atmosphere is the same, because carbon is cumulative. It goes up in there and into the atmosphere, and it stays there functionally, forever. And one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot, and it's been really quite mind bending to me over the last couple of years, is that we can actually measure the total weight of the carbon that we have put up into the atmosphere. It does hang there for centuries or millennia, depending on how you want to measure it. But you know, a very long time, and it weighs more than everything that we have ever built on planet Earth. So we have done more damage to the atmosphere, we've transformed our atmosphere through carbon emissions, more than we have transformed the planet itself. And we've actually done- it weighs more- the stuff that's hanging up there weighs more than all living matter on planet Earth. So we've built this incredibly large, damaging and lasting monument to industrial civilization in the atmosphere. It is a longer lasting and more substantial monument than anything we've managed on planet Earth in total. And it is going to be governing the way that we live on this planet forever after. So whenever we talk about, "things are getting better, we're moving in the right direction," I just think we've got this giant blanket up in the atmosphere that is not going away anytime soon. We can maybe subtract it with some negative emission stuff on the margins, but in the mass, it's going to be up there basically forever. And it is so large, it's almost inconceivable the size. So we're still dealing with that problem, and we are going to be dealing with that problem; in the math it implies for- probably for centuries.
BW
Well, that- you know, that sobering sort of monument is invisible, right? That's part of its challenge that, whereas we can see, well, you know, we're very good at responding to local impacts, and actually to our detriment: so even even as we try and respond with clean energy, you know, the loss of local immunity or being able to see a wind farm or solar panel is enough to trigger a kind of like, "no, I don't want that here," whereas this invisible blanket that we've built is exactly that: completely invisible to most people, completely underappreciated in its size and scale. So we're, yeah, it's why it's a wicked problem.
DWW
I often think about it in terms of air pollution in general, which people have a much easier time conceptualising. And for a long time, I thought this was a profitable, effective strategy for climate campaigners to talk less about carbon dioxide and more about the particulate matter that is killing probably 10 million people a year and certainly millions of people every year, and damaging the health of probably billions more. But I wonder a little bit about that. I'm not I'm not sure that it is ultimately all that much more of an effective message. I think that we should be emphasising public health impacts, I think we should be emphasising the direct impact on local communities because it this local, but I also look at many places in the world where people have grown quite comfortable living with quite a lot of air pollution. And probably if they were checking, you know, some list of things they wanted done in their community, they'd say, "we want less of that," but whether it can mobilise and motivate political action sufficient to actually transform those dynamics I think is an open question. We've seen successes, especially in the US and Europe, China, to a lesser extent in recent years cleaning up this air, but you know, we're still- we still have a large, large burden that's produced by the same processes that are producing climate change, which is to say, the burning of fossil fuel.
BW
Yeah, I think on its own, it's very hard to see how air pollution would get people to vote in favour of lower levels of comfort. Like, you know, it seems to be that we're quite okay with the trade-off that this chronic issue of air pollution is kind of something I have to put up with because I want to able to drive to work and I want to be able to heat my home. But when the two- when there's an alternative on the table, which is just going to be better, then I think it can tip the scale, then I think you can see people leaning into electrified transport because they want to be able to have their kids play outside and not worry about the air pollution or, I suspect, as we play into electrifying into people's homes and how they cook and their stoves and- there, I think if it's- if it's just as cheap and easy to have an induction hob as it is to have the gas hob running, then I think, then our concerns about, "well, I want my home to be as safe as possible" can be perhaps prayed-in-aid and speed up the transition. But it's not going to be enough on its own to get the transition going. I think you have to have the alternatives that are available and affordable in order for those things to play out.
DWW
And we're seeing them in more and more parts of the world. But it's still slower going than someone who's got their eye on a sort of global temperature rise would like-
BW
Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. And just going back to the politics of this, then it is the case, I think that the US is- it's an arena, I mean, I'm living here now so I sort of have more of a ringside seat than I had. But it is a very different place, the US, to most of the rest of the world in the way that climate change is playing out politically, the polarisation is way greater than I think I've seen anywhere else. It's a minefield, a political minefield, and yet there have been some breakthroughs, right? I am really interested in your thoughts on like, does the IRA feel like a big shift, or is it- or are there so many caveats and compromises in it that it's hard to tell yet?
DWW
I think the impact on American clean energy, investment and infrastructure is monumental. I think that we are- we are having a global- a national manufacturing boom, there's an enormous amount of it directed towards clean energy and the employment numbers and manufacturing, all of that is quite astonishing, actually, how much could be achieved, just in the space of a couple of years from a single piece of legislation, this very smartly crafted legislation, designed to do exactly that. The ultimate impact on our carbon emissions I think will be positive. The question is whether it gets us there fast enough. The political context to me is actually quite fascinating, because, you know, 5 or 10 years ago, climate change was described in much the same terms, as you put it, almost universally in the US, we thought of this as like, it was a much harder challenge here, the Republican Party was almost uniquely evil on the global context with, you know, uniquely resistant to any compromise. I'm uniquely invested in the country's fossil fuels strength, and as a result, even a climate-conscious party, the Democrats, were much less likely to move the needle all that aggressively than some of their counterparts elsewhere in the world. And to some extent, that's still true. If you look at polling, you know, Republicans feel a certain way about climate and Democrats do a different way about climate. But when I think about the political context, the thing that I think about is that Joe Biden and the Democratic congress passed this monumental bill, it was much larger than anything that had ever been done on climate before in the US, it's of a roughly comparable size, maybe a little bit smaller, but at a roughly comparable size to Barack Obama's health care bill from 2009, 2010. And we've seen basically no political backlash to it at all. The midterms followed just a couple of months later, after that bill was passed. It passed on a narrow party line vote, no Republican votes, it was a budget reconciliation bill, which is like a kind of like, a tricky, you know, there are a lot of reasons why people would not like this bill passing in this particular way. Gas prices were basically at an all time high, inflation was going crazy, and we had a congressional campaign right then, and nobody made a big deal out of the IRA. It was not the headline argument being made by any Republican. I mean, on some level, it's striking that there were so few Democrats talking about it, too. But basically, it immediately became background noise to our political theatre. And I think that continues to some degree to this day; we just saw Donald Trump winning the Iowa caucuses, he didn't mention energy or climate or the IRA in his bill- in his speeches- victory speech after Iowa. And this is, I mean, you know, again, this is a stark, stark contrast to the way that the Republican Party and the American body politic responded to Obama's health care bill, which dominated politics, not just in the midterms that followed immediately, but in the presidential election that followed, and then the presidential election that followed that and went all the way through until John McCain put his thumb down and voted against repeal. At that point, I think it was something like eight years after the bill had passed. It had been a dominant feature of our political life for that entire time. And it's a hugely mobilising force on the right and the IRA has just not had that effect at all. Now, that's not to say that I think the right wing is all on board for the green transition: they have all these plans, they want to undo it if Donald Trump gets elected, it's going to be quite brutal attack not just on the IRA but the whole administrative state and all federal bureaucracy in general. So I don't want to sound too pollyannish about it, but just at the level of political rhetoric, it just isn't that, you know, Democrats push through- they bullied through this giant spending bill, the kind that used to reorient American politics for a decade, and it's had almost no effect on our political rhetoric. And I think that's a sign of a lot of things, but among them, that there's a sort of a basic understanding of the way the wind is blowing. And I think that it may- it may even be a stronger understanding in red states where we have much more- where like the renewable revolution is actually happening so that the places where you might have had a bigger backlash, that backlash is blunted more by the economic realities of the energy transition on the ground. And as a result, you know, climate campaigners may want climate to be a bigger part of the 2024 election. Personally, I would like it to be too, but I suspect it's actually going to be basically on the periphery and not something that either candidate talks about very much at all. And given where we were a few years ago with climate polarisation, I guess I have to count that as progress.
BW
Well, it feels like it's some- it's had the effect of speaking to something deeper than just climate which was, "what's the US' has role in the world, relative to other major economic blocs?" right, that, at least part of - I suspect - why it works is it's because it's about energy security. And this is actually enabling the US to become a net exporter of fossil fuels, because the less you use at home, the more you can use for exports, and it's sort of- it's about, you know, the US, relative to China or the US, relative to Russia, where, you know, would you rather- I probably actually would prefer to have the US be the largest supplier of fossil fuels, and not being totally reliant on Russia and Saudi Arabia, because the proportionate amount of the economy based on fossil fuels is still quite small. In volume terms, it's a huge amount, but the US is never going to be a solely dependent economy based on fossil fuels in the way that Russia is, or the way that Saudi Arabia is. So,for me, this kind of- this new, this new confidence, or this new energy independence that the US is discovering, I guess it plays out across parties in ways that are beneficial. If in the long run, we think the US is a better actor and can be more trusted to do the right thing when it's necessary to sort of wean us off this addiction over all, in good time, the US' newfound confidence is possibly a good thing.
DWW
You know, if I had- I mean, I'm an American, so I'd rather have US leading the way than Russia or China, for sure. I do think that- I do think that we often congratulate ourselves a little too hard. On some of these points, though, as Americans, I do think we talk a bit too much about China's villainy here. You know, there's basically no way that China will ever surpass America's, you know, sort of historical emissions. So the US will always be the number one driver of the climate crisis. And, you know, while China has been building up a lot of coal, much of it is going unused, and they're building so much more renewable capacity than everyone else in the world. They're rolling out EVs at a much faster rate, and, you know, I do- I don't want to be an apologist for the Xi regime, but I do think that there are a lot of things to envy about their response to the climate crisis, even given some of the dirty and uncomfortable things that they're doing, along the way, both with coal and forced labour and like- but, you know, I come back to issues of global justice, and I think here the US has been, you know, I think we've really humiliated ourselves. I mean, you know, this year at COP, big announcement on the first day about the formation of the loss-and-damage facility which had been so long talked about, the US committed to that loss and damage facility $17 million. I mean, literally, like, you know, on my favourite basketball team, there are three people who make more than that every single year, and the US as a country couldn't find a way to commit- they didn't have to commit $20 billion, they didn't have- you know, they couldn't find a way to commit- to pledge an amount of money that would seem even encouragingly meaningful to the people in the Global South who have been calling for it for a decade or more. And I think they're, you know, we really do need to move a bit faster and look at- yeah, sorry, go ahead.
BW
Well, no, I think that, you know, your previous statements are directly relevant to this, that the US is in the unenviable position of having been the largest polluter for so long and of having peaked at such a high level of per capita emissions, that no one can ever catch you. So, the minute you open up a conversation about loss and damage, there really is only one person who's going to be paying and it's- that does point towards the US, right, so, I guess they're in a bind, right? Either they admit to the full totality, or they have to try and hope somehow they can keep it in a box and not become a-
DWW
Well from a, I think, a diplomatic- from a diplomatic perspective, I think of this, as you know, sort of, you know, there's a potential for a kind of negotiated settlement or a kind of, you know, in what happens in- with a plea bargain, and the courts where it's like, "if we want to avoid discussion of actually how we tabulate our responsibility for climate damages, the best thing to do is to make an impressive offer of what we can do upfront. When we do nothing, we simply invite the scrutiny of just how large our footprint really is, and if we're, personally-" I think that's the moral response. I think it's also a strategic response: we don't want to get into a geopolitical tangle, 20 or 30 years from now, where people are presenting us with bills for $50 trillion, which is not implausible. You know, we want to head that off in the past, but we head that off in the past, not by saying, "we're not going to talk about loss and damage," we head that off in the past by saying, "we're going to be quite generous about loss and damage," and just not getting nearly as big in our numbers as some other people would like. And there would be critiques of that, maybe I would even critique that, but I think that someone in the position of Joe Biden or John Kerry, you know, there's a- there's a productive path there that doesn't involve ultimately, the kind of an insult that we gave to the loss-and-damage facility with that with that pledge at COP 28.
BW
Yeah. Do you think that, um, you know, turning to what the US has historically been pretty good at which is, you know, commercialising solutions, and then, well, I mean, at the moment, this is what's been so surprising is that China has just looked at what the US has done historically and is just using that playbook, right? You develop an edge in the technology, and then you sell it to the rest of the world, and the rest of world suddenly becomes your- you have a relationship with which you're buying influence and power over countries by investing in their countries, with the technologies that you choose to sell. And that's- that was the way of the West, you know, kind of before recent times, and I guess China's carried on. The US stepped away, and so, is the next phase that the US gains in confidence, gets back an edge in technologies that it knows it can mass produce, if it chooses to, you know, and then starts to step back out into the world, both with these solutions, like and stops being-
DWW
That's the playbook. You know, that's the- that's the gambit of not just the Inflation Reduction Act but of the whole kind of post-neoliberal revitalised industrial policy plan that the Biden administration has put forward. I think we don't yet know whether it will really be successful on the global stage. The price differentials are really quite significant between what America can do and what China can do, and I think there are some contexts in which that matters less and other contexts in which it matters more, but at the moment, you know, some large share of- listeners of this podcast know better than anybody, some large share of just about all of the production chains for almost all hopeful green technologies is dominated by China, and probably in some cases, you know, the US and other competitors can can make a dent there. Personally, I'm a little sceptical that 50 years from now, if the world has gotten all the way to net zero, that most of that technology will be supplied by the United States, I suspect that China will still have been the major player, but that could be proven wrong. I think we really don't know about a lot of the geopolitical aspects of these market dynamics, market forces, and how to play out of the next few decades. If there is a hot war of some kind over Taiwan or, you know- what will that do to China's relationship to the rest of the world? Very much unclear. And I think, you know, as we said at the beginning about climate science, you know, the dismal science, economics is also shrouded by a lot of uncertainty, and it's hard to project. You know, I just start from a position of: China has a lead over us that most Americans don't appreciate, and I think most Americans underestimate how difficult it will be to truly catch up, at least in all of those areas.
BW
Yeah, it would be- it would be exciting to think about the US is industrial policy, embracing the kind of old-school international technologies of shipbuilding and reinventing aviation and thinking about long distance, electricity, transmission lines, all these kinds of old-style capital intensive projects that the US has a continental scale to play with, you know, all these markets are big enough to attract large amounts of capital. It's not like the UK where, you know, really it's so tiny, who cares. But you've got- you've got a canvas on which you can, you can see some really big changes. But I guess, I worry that the politics isn't quite there yet, and it is very hard to compete against the other narrative, which is, well, everything's digital. Now the future is all AI and, you know, noughts and ones, and that's how we've grown green over the last two decades, and we carry on doing more of the same and that difficult physical stuff, that absolutely needs attention, always kind of gets a second rung or third rung after financial products, digital platforms, then you get into physical energy. And it's like, the ugly sister of the three, because it's difficult and takes time, and people have to agree to do things and accept things into their backyards. And yeah, I hope we can get back to doing that.
DWW
Yeah, I mean, I don't want to sound too much like a pessimist about it: I think that America is off to the races here. It's just a question of, you know, whether we can lap the guys in first and I think that's going to be- it's going to be tough. It's interesting, though, when you talk about, you know, the new industrial policy and getting back to America's old ways: yeah, there are certain certain ways in which China has imitated the American playbook here. But we're also pretending that now that we're imitating the Chine playbook, and I think that there's a little bit of a conceptual disconnect there. When we talk about, you know, the Biden folks talk about new industrial policy: they're still really talking about tax incentives and some easing of regulations, shaping of market, de-risking, all that stuff. They're not talking about the kinds of industrial planning that goes on in China, they're not talking about that kind of like top-down, "we're going to do this" directive. There are market forces in China too, I don't want to oversimplify, but you know, what we're talking about as a- I would describe as a marginal revision to the preceding generations' consensus neoliberal view of how we direct the domestic economy. And I think that those revisions are laudable, they're valuable, they're worth doing, but I also I cringe a little bit when I hear them oversold as a new regime in American economic politics, because it feels to be much more in continuity with the things, not just that Donald Trump and Barack Obama did - and it's interesting, actually, the many continuities between the Trump perspective and Biden, like going back through Obama to Bush and even to Clinton, we're talking about a pretty coherent approach to shaping the domestic economy. And frankly, I'd like to see more hands-on intervention, less, which connects to the conceptions we were talking about earlier about, you know, the supply side and how they had to get a handle on it. One of the big questions raised by the IRA is like, how much of this can be done by just pure carrots and no sticks? And that is- that's one of the bets of the IRA, it's one of the bets of the Biden administration, in general: how much can you stand up an entirely new industrial economy, just by like cutting taxes to the companies who do it, and how much does it require a more aggressive approach to land use and zoning and permitting and not to mention a million other things that the government has been reluctant to get directly involved in to this moment?
BW
Do yout think- I just was reading this week about the moves on methane at a federal level, which did seem like quite a step away from just the characters only approach like the, the finding, and then the numbers of the sort of scale of the phones involved. They seemed they seemed pretty real. But I guess I'm always I always read these things with a view to like, Yeah, but how's that going to play out in, in the in the narrative when it starts to be weaponized. And there already you can see the narrative from the oil and gas sector as being its as an end and non or you need us and you need clean? And we're going to do both. And anything that stops us from doing the both is is anti American?
DWW
Yeah, I mean, we'll see how it all shakes out. The methane stuff was like the one exception to the all-carrot-no-sticks description of the IRA. It's also the case that most analysis suggests that we can clean up a lot of that relatively cheaply and it is incentivized in other ways. I'm hopeful. We'll see how it all shakes out. I think actually, the politics may be less thorny than you suggest on methane, but we'll see. What I worry more about is, you know, is about how many internal combustion engine cars we're going to be selling in 2035, and how we, you know, questions like that, which I think are quite open. Tax credits are gonna get you pretty far in overturning the fleet, but they're not going to get you to 100% immediately, and so we'll see, we'll see.
BW
And, of course, then we, you know, we've got this year where we've got elections in lots of places and those- the outcomes of those elections; do you- do you think that, um, do you think- as you said, climate hasn't so far featured too much, but there has been- there've been little rumblings like, you know, Trump has made it his mission to talk down electric vehicles, for example. Do you think that is borne out of- but like, will we see more of that, or do you think it'll retract into the shadows a little bit more?
DWW
I think it'll likely be a running but peripheral feature of the campaign that Donald Trump talks about- talks about the Green Revolution. I think it probably would have been a bigger deal if gas prices were still high and inflation was still high, he probably would have linked all of that to Biden's climate policy. But you know, as many folks relatively close to Biden made a point of pointing out recently, American oil production is at an all time high, and it simply isn't credible to describe Biden's energy policy as all green and hostile to the fossil fuel business. And I think that Biden will end up talking in those terms, too, which is a little bit strange. He's become, you know, in a certain sense, the kind of President presiding over this enormous climate bill. I think on the campaign trail he's much more likely to sound like someone who's an all-of-the-above politician than someone who's really pushing to decarbonize broadly. Wherever his heart is, wherever his you know- wherever he knows where the politics of a general election are, and he's probably likely to roll his eyes when Trump says anything about, you know, about his energy policy and the possible cost it may have imposed on the American consumer. And against all that whole backdrop, I do think, you know, this is not exactly a new piece of- a new story in 2023, but something has really fundamentally changed over the last five years is that globally-speaking, we have a much clearer sense that on a long term basis, that renewable energy is a cheaper alternative. The price declines are dramatic, they are going to continue. You know, there are questions about exactly what happens when we get to much larger shares of the energy mix with intermittency and how much that, you know- these are all things, listeners to this podcast know all about. But the basic fact that like, you know, clean energy is actually cheaper, in much of the world has really transformed a lot of these dynamics. So even independent of the fact that South Dakota is getting 97% of its power from renewable sources, or the Texas may be getting the majority of its electricity from renewable - Texas [!] - in 2025, even independent of that, anybody who's relatively informed about the green transition knows that this is no longer a cost burden that we will all be shouldering going forward in a- really in a way that will really damage our wellbeing as individuals and citizens and as a society. There are costs up front, but we can also think of it as a sort of an opportunity, and on the other side of it, we will be probably in many parts of the world - not all parts of the world - paying lower electricity bills then we are today. And I do think that that shift in conventional wisdom undergirds a lot of these other transformations we're talking about, where things that once might have seemed to be intractable partisan divides now look much more like, you know, things are not moving as fast as we might like, but they're still moving in the right direction without all that many obvious large obstacles in the way.
BW
Yeah, and I think the thing that's increasingly apparent, and it's something that one of my favourite Sankey diagrams, goes back to the 1980s, when the US DoD put out a pictoral example of what happens to fossil energy to useful work. And like two thirds of it escapes out of a chimney or as waste heat. And they knew that back then, right, you know, that this was a hugely profligate, very thermodynamically expensive system that we were running. And we were doing it because, you know, it was possible: there was tonnes of this stuff coming out of the ground and we- and we didn't need to pay attention. But the minute you start to pay attention, it's such a wasteful system. And it's so inherently inefficient, that this new kind of manufactured energy where things are coming off a production line in a factory fast, and they're iterating quickly and they're improving, and the fundamental science is finding new breakthroughs: that system is just fundamentally more efficient, and so therefore, fundamentally cheaper really, when it comes to the end-consumer, not really caring and they just want to get work down and go from A to B or have a warm home or cook their dinner. If there's a different way of doing that that's thermodynamically more efficient and cheaper, that's just gonna- that's just going to be- that is- that is just gonna be the way the world goes. That electrification process will save us up to two-thirds of the primary energy we think we're having to replace. We just don't need to replace
DWW
That's an amazing fact, right: we lose that much of it, and totally don't need to. So if we are putting as much into the system as we are today, we can have three times as much- I mean, on the end user side of things: remarkable.
BW
Yeah, and I think that growing realisation that this is something that is beneficial on all fronts is what gives me hope. But so- let's just round off then, and like, if you were talking to your 2017 self, when you were starting off on this, on the- on being stimulated by what you were reading, coming out of the climate science, would you have done anything differently? Are you pleased with- this was your entry into this world, and it kind of catapulted you in a certain direction. What would you say to yourself, knowing what you know today?
DWW
I probably would have advised me to- advise myself to be even more explicit than- what I was doing in that original article was providing a tour of worst case scenarios, and I probably would have told myself to pay more attention to what distinguishes median outcomes from worst-case scenarios, and not just on the climate science side of things, but on the- on the energy inputs and on the adaptation side of the ledger, as well, I would have said that it's absolutely true that climate is the meta-narrative of the century, it is reshaping the climate and is reshaping all of our lives. Exactly how dramatically it is reshaping those lives remains up to us, and it's up to us in several different ways on several different levels, and we shouldn't imagine that just because, you know, the data points from a particular set of climate science add up in particular way, in a neat way, and neat but grim way, that that means that where we're at- that's where we'll head, or that's where we'll end up. The future is going to be messy, and we shouldn't delude ourselves by telling- by thinking that we can, you know, plot a narrative through it all. But you know, I- In saying that, I don't want to give the impression that looking back on the work that I did, you know, in that piece in that book, was, you know, was fundamentally irresponsible. I think part of what it reflects is, you know, going through the process of becoming a much more prominent person talking about these issues, and at the time, when I started out, I was really on the fringes, I thought, "here's a perspective that I have, I know others share, but it's not getting the oxygen that it needs," and I thought it was a perfectly legitimate thing for someone in that position to do to give oxygen to that. Because I got so much attention for it, I then found myself having to give a more total account and offer a more total story that incorporated many more caveats, and much more, you know, much more expertise than I had, you know, had folded into this at first work. And the result of that is a more nuanced picture the same time the world has gotten more nuanced. We're no longer ignoring climate change, we're actually moving on it, we're actually making those investments, all of these things are happening all at once. And it's really hard to disentangle that history and say, "in 2017, it would have been a better story to tell A, B, or C as opposed to X, Y, or Z." I think that the story I've told them is really important and useful and I'm proud to have done it. It just happens not to be the way- exactly the way I see the world today, but that in itself is a kind of an encouraging and profound reminder that the world changes really quickly and people change really quickly and our politics changes really quickly. And that's encouraging. If we have cut in half our expected warming in just about five years, which is really what we did - we went from about four and a half degrees to about two and a half degrees in terms of baseline expected warming - if that happened, then that means that we can do a lot more from where we're standing now. It doesn't necessarily mean we can get below 1.5 degrees, it doesn't even necessarily mean that we can get below 2, but I think it reminds us that things that we think are permanent trajectories, permanent features of our culture in our economy, are much more changeable, and in the right circumstances can change much more quickly than many of us looking out at the world and thinking of ourselves as passive observers can really acknowledge or admit. And that should be an encouraging, mobilising message. It is also the message of the climate strikers and climate protesters who looked out and did not fall into despair, despite the fact that then facts, many of them, were quite grim. They said, "this is a story that we are still writing, we are still humans on this earth who are responsible for writing that story, and we're going to do everything we can to make sure it comes out more like the one we want to live than the one that we fear we may live. And as a result, we're not out of the woods, you haven't solved the problem, we're not going to avoid 1.5 degrees of warming, we're going to endure quite a lot of climate suffering as a result. But nevertheless, the world is probably going to be much more stable, much more comfortabl and much more just than it would have been if we hadn't taken that action. And I think that should, you know, encourage, excite, mobilise and, to some degree, shame us into action today.
BW
Yeah. And fundamentally, whether it's fear or hope, or a combination of the two, it's just propelling us into making a different future, right, that you can- you can do it for different motivations, but the number of people whose engagement into this question is now going to be somewhat personal, like you are going to experience the heatwave, you may experience the water shortages, the wildfires- these are all impacts that are writing their own headlines. They don't need journalists to go finding out the stories, they're just writing themselves, nd it will motivate people into a fear response. But then for every person that motivates in that way, there's also going to be someone who just sees the whole problem as a wicked problem they want to solve and is massively motivated by the the thrill of finding a new way of doing something that doesn't have all the downsides that we do today. And does it matter? I mean, I feel like, I feel like the one thing I would- I'm pleased that you didn't do is to start from a self-censoring perspective and say, "oh, no one's done like this before so I probably shouldn't do it like this," you know, I feel like: in a world of uncertainty, we should try as many different things as possible to see which do break through. And yours did break through, and it broke through to the extent that certainly the- when I- my foray into philanthropy: that was entirely stimulated by your book, and the people who set up the foundation I worked for, had read your book, and they hadn't read anything else on climate, they just picked up your book. And there was, you know, something about the way it landed, the way it was positioned, the way it was written that made it very accessible, reached an audience that other things had not reached. So I'm glad that you took that completely unfiltered on a fresh approach, and we've been on this journey since where your there's been a tempering, maybe, of how you would express things, but fundamentally, you're right to say- who can say that fear isn't the best motivator? Certainly it has, over time, proven to be a big one.
DWW
Absolutely.
BW
Thank you for the time today, and I think that's a wrap.
DWW
Thanks so much.
BW
So that was David Wallace-Wells. As usual, we'll add relevant links in the show notes, including David's original article, the papers discussing the RCP - or representative concentration pathway - 8.5, we discussed, Professor Jim Hansen's paper, and of course, my favourite Sankey diagram. Thank you for listening. That was Cleaning Up.
ML
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