The Big Q&A With David Wallace-Wells
David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth, takes questions from George Takei about our climate future.
My guest today for the Big Q&A is renowned author and climate expert, David Wallace-Wells. Much of what we hear about regarding climate change is depressing and frightening. The world is warming, our ice caps melting. There are record heat waves, wildfires, and rising waters. Coupled with that are widespread inaction and failed promises by industry, missed goals by governments.
But in this interview with one of the leading experts in the field I found a great deal of hope, too, amid the dire outlook for our planet. I hope you enjoy the discussion and learn as much as I did. — George
Many of us have read your book, “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming” and came away very troubled. That book was published over four years ago. What are your feelings today about the state of our world and our changing climate, and what message or warning would you emphasize for readers now?
In general, I think the future looks quite a bit brighter than it did then. Thanks to several incredible and in many ways unpredictable developments — a new global protest movement, embodied by Greta Thunberg but much larger than her; a rapid decline in the price of renewable technology, such that the price of solar power has fallen by about 90 percent; a worldwide cultural shift of concern, with climate denial basically nowhere on the world stage and nearly every world leader expressing at least some level of concern for warming; and some better modeling about the energy future, predicting much lower use of coal in particular — we have cut our expected level of warming this century about in half in just five years.
That is pretty astonishing progress, and it should give us even more hope about the kinds of things which don't seem possible today but might, actually, five years from now, or ten, or twenty.
Unfortunately, it still hasn't been enough to even stop the growth of emissions, or stall warming. Five years ago, the world's scientists warned us that the difference between 1.5 degrees of warming above pre-industrial averages and 2.0 degrees marked a world of difference—that reaching the higher level would produce an additional 150 million premature deaths from air pollution involving the burning of fossil fuel; that flooding events that used to happen once a century would happen every year and in some cases multiple times each year; and that across large parts of South Asia and the Middle East it could get so hot that it wouldn't be possible to walk around outside for stretches of the year without risking heatstroke or even heat death.
Now, because of how long we've taken to get started, that level of warming looks almost certain. Perhaps we could stay just below 2 degrees, but almost certainly it would be by just a small margin. And so in addition to embarking on a rapid decarbonization plan, we're also going to have to be adjusting and adapting to the world remade by that warming and all its impacts. And that’s what I'd choose to really emphasize now, that both the level of warming and how livable we make that planet is up to what we do now: our decisions, our investments, our political choices. Climate change isn't the whole of our destiny, only the natural landscape on which our future will be built. Our job is to build the best world there that we can.
It seems we are in a doom cycle of hearing warnings from scientists, getting the world together to agree on targets, but then failing utterly to meet those targets, with the scientists returning to warn us that things are worse. What in your view is the main reason we are failing, and how can we get out of this cycle and address the crisis more effectively?
For me, the short answer is that however they talk, the actual priorities of those in power are not the priorities of climate scientists or those of us who really care about the health and future of the planet and its ecosystems. The fossil fuel industry has also played a villainous role, too, downplaying risks they knew about for decades and still now plowing billions of dollars into new developments they know — we all know — put all of our climate goals in danger. But I also think there is some discomfort with change at the local and individual level, too—people like their big cars, they like to fly, they like to consume, and they like to eat well. In a world where we've reached net zero, none of those things need to be abandoned, since they all will have invisible carbon footprints. But the fight to get to net-zero looks to many people like an enormous shift in the way we live and that seems uncomfortable—or worse.
But the answer to that dilemma is also embedded within it. A decade or two ago, it was the overwhelming conventional wisdom among climate economists and modelers that, while cutting emissions might be a moral necessity, it would also be an economic burden. It would be hard, and expensive, in other words, to actually transition. But now, in part because of those rapid drops in the cost of renewable energy, the overwhelming consensus is the opposite: that the world will be richer the faster it decarbonizes, with many more jobs to boot. According to some estimates, 90 or 95 percent of the world now lives in places where new renewable energy is cheaper than dirty energy, and in many places, it is now cheaper to build a new solar array or wind farm than to keep running an old coal or gas plant. The International Energy Agency just estimated that accelerating global decarbonization to breakneck speeds would save the world $12 trillion compared to the path we are on. And because the pollution effects of fossil fuels are so large — 350,000 Americans and 10 million people around the world dying globally from air pollution produced by the burning of those dirty fuels — the entire decarbonization of the American energy grid could be totally paid for just through the public health benefits of cleaner air.
That logic is astonishing—and a reversal of long-held conventional wisdom. And many more people should appreciate it.
The headlines are filled with the very kinds of climate disasters long predicted. Flooding. Massive wildfires. Record-breaking heat. Yet humanity seems catastrophically slow to react, even though the pandemic showed that we can make drastic changes in response to a crisis. What explains this tragic difference in response?
Normalization. The pandemic tells a very clear story. At first, worrying about thousands of deaths, the entire world shut down—billions of people staying home from school and work and suspending their social and romantic lives in order to protect themselves and one another. That was an astonishing response. But over time, we redefined what was an acceptable normal, so that when the country passed 100,000 deaths it blanketed the front page of the New York Times, but when we passed 200,000 or 800,000 or 1.2 million it didn't. And while I have enormous respect for Operation Warp Speed and the rapid development of vaccines — which were designed over a single weekend in January 2020 — I also look back at how slow rollout was for the global south, and how many people there remain unvaccinated, and I worry about what that "vaccine apartheid" means for our climate future.
When it comes to climate, we seem to move even faster to normalize. The disaster in Lahaina, Maui was the deadliest American fire in a century, yet it has passed almost entirely from the news. When catastrophically intense rains destroyed a dam in Libya, it was the deadliest flooding disaster anywhere in the world this century, and yet we've mostly stopped talking about it, too. The world is a busy and difficult place, and there is always a lot to think about and focus on, as the last few weeks have shown us. But we seem unfortunately quick to turn even world-historical disasters into background noise these days, so that even when we do note them we also just move on.
The average person, myself included, often feels powerless in the face of a problem as big as climate change. We try to do our part by conserving energy, reducing our footprint and staying informed. If there was one thing the average person could do here in the U.S. to actually help fix the problem, one way to maximize impact, what would that be?
For me, the solutions are largely political, which means voting and protesting. You could buy an electric car if you can afford one, or stop flying and eating red meat — and those are the three things which have the biggest impact on the carbon footprints of most Americans. But we are a country of 330 million on a planet of 8 billion, and the biggest levers of change have to do with redesigning our systems so that there are clean and green choices available for all of us (and so the burden of making an impact falls on us collectively rather than on us as atomized individuals or consumers).
There are deep divisions in our society and our politics that are exacerbating the crisis, from climate denialism to political entrenchment and capture by the fossil fuel industry. What have you seen that has been effective in helping to bridge the divide or break the logjam in our politics?
Polling on this can be dispiriting, and there are signs that at the level of rhetoric, at least climate change may be growing more polarizing rather than less. But when I look at the level of policy actions, I see an awful lot of hope.
This past year, when Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act, it was by far the biggest investment in decarbonization the country had ever made — and it turns out that, because of how the bill was structured, it will probably double in size when all is said and done. When the midterms followed, Republicans simply ignored it—a huge contrast to the way that Obamacare had mobilized the Tea Party and helped produce the red wave of 2010. And much of the investment of the I.R.A. is going to red districts, with a predictable local effect.
This past spring, conservative state legislators in Texas tried to kneecap the renewable industry there, which has grown so fast in recent years that it is already the country's largest renewable market. But the effort was stopped by other Republicans, who pointed out that dragging down clean energy would drive up Texans' energy bills and make their grid more susceptible to the deadly blackouts they've seen in recent years. And though I don't think you're going to see the Republican party become a great climate champion anytime soon, I think the winds of change all point in that direction—clean energy making partisan resistance much less significant than it once was.
One danger to our current crisis is a sense of doom and nihilism, especially among younger people, that there is no way out of our predicament. Is there anything that you have seen that gives you reason to hope that we can avoid our fate, that Earth will somehow remain “The Habitable Earth” in the future?
Absolutely. As I wrote in a long magazine article last year, we are in a phase where the window of climate futures is narrowing—the best-case outcomes we might've hoped for a few years ago are now impossible, but we appear certain to avoid the worst-case outcomes, too. We can choose to look at those facts in different ways, and in fact, I see them in different ways at different times. Sometimes, I'm amazed at the progress we've made; others horrified at how slowly we're moving; at others, I marvel at the majesty of the world and the changes it is undergoing; and at other times I focus on how to contextualize those changes against a backdrop of human agency and adaptation. But while we've lost the chance to preserve the climate of our grandparents, and indeed the climate that has prevailed for all of human history, the rest is up to us. And, belatedly but thankfully, we are beginning to move.
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Maybe Reagan should have left up then President Carter's solar panels on the White House !! Thanks for the Q&A Uncle George !!
............and now we have Wars which doesn't help.
A lot of ordinary people are doing their best. Cut down on water use (most important for me) grow more trees.
Yes if one can Hybrid/electric cars, they should be made cheaper especially in the US.
In France we have stopped short flights, now you need to take the electric trains.
Why is it that the US is not building superfast trains like many of the Country's in the World?