David Wallace-Wells on the 'New Climate Reality'

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Charles McBride: I am a climate doomer. Since about 2019, I have believed that there's little to nothing that we can do to actually reverse climate change on a global scale. Frankly, this has led to a lot of depression and anxiety.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, did that sound like you? It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Time now for our climate story of the week. If that did sound like you, you might be suffering from what some people call, climate doomism. Or as a BBC climate correspondent called it, "The idea that we are past the point of being able to do anything at all about global warming and it's highly likely that mankind will become extinct."

It seems like we're all expecting some sort of climate apocalypse on the horizon and there's not much we can do about it. Despite the fact, I should say, that there's good reason for the prevalence of these kinds of thoughts with the extreme weather events that we've all been seeing. The emaciated polar bears, the bleached coral reefs, the regular warnings from climate scientists have alarming forecasts of our future. What if science is now telling us it's bad, but it's not too late?

Predictions have changed and climate apocalypse no longer seems like the most likely outcome. If we're not all going to die, what do we do? With us now is David Wallace-Wells. Maybe you know his book from 2019, called The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. He's a New York Times magazine writer now and he's got a new piece called Beyond Catastrophe: A New Climate Reality Is Coming Into View. David, thanks for coming on. Welcome back to WNYC.

David Wallace-Wells: My pleasure, great to be with you.

Brian Lehrer: I should say after reading a lot of your article, that what you lay out is still pretty bad. It's just not armageddon, right?

David Wallace-Wells: I think there's two stories happening at once, it's hard but if it's possible to hold both of them in your head at once, together they give the full picture. On the one hand, we're at 1.2, 1.3 degrees of warming today. Doesn't sound like much, but it actually already puts us outside the window of temperatures that enclose all of human history.

Brian Lehrer: That Celsius, it's a little more than Fahrenheit degrees, but not that much more.

David Wallace-Wells: Right. Exactly. Almost certainly we're going to get too close to and probably above 2 degrees Celsius of warming. Something on the order of 50% more than we have today, maybe twice as much as we have today. That threshold 2 degrees, scientists have long described as catastrophic or dangerous warming.

That is practically speaking inevitable today or something close to it is inevitable today. That's the bad news. Things are going to get worse before they stabilize. There's a lot of good news too. I think over the last few years not made its mark on the public in a way that it probably should have. The good news is this, 5 years ago, 10 years ago, climate scientists would have told you that a business-as-usual future would bring us 4 degrees, 5 degrees of warming.

That's three or four times as much warming as we have today. Because of progress in a lot of different areas, that is now really been revised somewhat dramatically downward. So for 1.2, 1.3 degrees today, expectations are this century we're going to be seeing somewhere between 2 and 3 as opposed to between 4 and 5. We've cut something like half of our expected temperature rise this century. We've cut it in half. That's an incredible amount of progress, especially given how quickly it's happened.

Brian Lehrer: One of the reasons or a couple of reasons, looking at your article that you say the progress has been made or astonishing declines in the price of renewables and a truly global political mobilization. Can you talk about each of those to whatever degree that you think they're happening?

David Wallace-Wells: Absolutely. I think the renewable story is very straightforward and it's astonishing. The price of solar power has fallen by something like 85% or 90% over the last decade. The price of wind power, both offshore and onshore has fallen by between 60% and 80%. The price of battery technology, which is critical in making these renewable technologies scalable because it allows you to store power for when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing, has fallen at a similar scale.

You're seeing an unbelievable collapse in the cost of green technology. At the same time, the dirty energy has not gotten any cheaper. As a result, new renewables are cheaper than dirty energy, just about everywhere in the world. One study I looked at estimated that 90% of the world now lives in places where renewable energy is cheaper than dirty energy.

The International Energy Agency has called solar power, the cheapest electricity in history.

Anyone making any kind of long-term plans at the government level, but also even at the corporate level or even to the extent that we're making decisions like this on a personal level, can see the trend lines very clearly. We will be better off the more quickly we move towards this new, clean power. Even totally putting aside the climate impacts, which are enormous.

There's that transformation of the energy marketplace, which has really, really made the logic of a green transition undeniable at every level for every decision-maker.

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Brian Lehrer: Go ahead. Sorry, if you want to finish the thought, go ahead.

David Wallace-Wells: There's also been, over the same time period, an incredible generational political awakening. There have been climate activists for decades. Of course, climate movement is not a new thing, but the new energy brought particularly by Greta Thunberg, and the climate strikers, sunrise in the US, extinction rebellion in the UK, over the last five years, has been truly astonishing. Millions of people marching in the streets and producing much more concern at the social-public level, much more anxiety.

In part, that's also because of the new extreme weather that we've been seeing. That's all shaken up or trickled up to the most powerful people in the world or our politicians, our prime ministers and presidents, and our CEOs and corporate executives. All of whom, now talk about climate change as a top-shelf political priority, which is very much not how they were talking about it. Even as recently as the signing of the Paris Accords just six years ago.

We're seeing both at the market level and at the level of public discourse and political discourse a total transformation in the way that we prioritize climate action. It hasn't led yet to rapid enough change that we can say we're going to stay at a safe level of warming. I think that's practically speaking past out of reach, but it does mean that some of these apocalyptic futures that we used to imagine, I've written at some length about, look much, much less likely today.

As I said at the beginning, both of those things are true. We can no longer dream of a climate normal, that's gone. The world will be different, but we may not have to suffer the nightmares of a climate apocalypse that may have been worrying us over the last few years either.

Brian Lehrer: For people who don't know your body of work, this is really interesting coming from you because you did publish the book in 2019, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. Do you need a new addition [laughs] or have things gotten better more quickly than you anticipated even three years ago?

David Wallace-Wells: I would say very much so. Things have gotten better much quickly than I thought was possible. I think that's true for many people in the field who are much more hopeful than they have ever been in their careers. The energy transition is happening much more quickly than we thought. The movement of politicians is really significant. 5, 10 years ago, if you would ask people who are concerned about the environment, what they thought the prospects were, that the world would really take climate change seriously, most of them would have, in private moments, at least confessed to some great fear that, we wouldn't.

We're now still not moving fast enough, but we are moving. It's no longer really accurate to say that nothing is being done only that not enough is being done. As for how that relates to my book, the book was about a range of temperatures from 2 degrees to 4 degrees. It includes this likely future. It seems very likely that we're going to end up on the smoother side of that range. On the more manageable side of that range, rather than the less manageable, more disruptive side of that range.

What that means is pretty complicated. It means different things to different parts of the world. I think one of the great tragedies and real moral injustice is here, is that if we imagine that the world is going to land at, say somewhere between 2 and 2.5 degrees of warming, which is what personally I would expect. That's a level of warming that presumably the rich nations of the world will suffer through, will struggle through, but they will manage.

There will be disruption and pain here, but it will be at a level that we can deal with. It will be a level of warming that people in the global south in the developing world will have a much, much harder time responding to, because they don't have the resources to build resilience against new climate disasters. Because the impacts themselves are going to be much more intense around the equatorial parts of the planet. I think, unfortunately, if you had said to a politically cynical person 20, 30 years ago, okay, what's the climate end gain here? They might have mapped that precise future.

The Global North is going to take action quickly enough to prevent the worst impacts from arriving in the global north, but probably not quickly enough to prevent the worst impacts from arriving in the global south. That means, I think in addition to everything else, this new reality, this new future kicks up. It does raise some really important questions beyond the science of climate change in the zone of the politics of a beyond climate.

What do we do once the world has settled out, once there is significantly more suffering in the global south, how do we respond to that? How do we organize our global society to deal with it in ways that are one hopes more humane rather than less humane? Although there are obviously significant risks that we would take the opposite course and as we've done so many times in the past, simply turn away from the suffering in the global south.

I think those questions are going to become more and more central to the way that we talk about climate change going forward, beginning with the major Climate Conference starting next week in Egypt. Where a lot of these climate justice issues will be front and center under the banner of what's called loss and damage which is to say, will the rich nations of the world who have produced the lion's share of global emissions give money and give support to the poor countries of the world to allow them to defend themselves against the climate impacts that those emissions have produced?

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take a few phone calls here on our climate story of the week for David Wallace-Wells, whose book you may know from 2019, The Uninhabitable Earth Life: After Warming, and whose recent New York Times magazine article you may have read Beyond Catastrophe. A New Climate Reality is coming into View 212-433-WNYC 212-433-9692 or tweet a question @BrianLehrer. Let's take a phone call. John in Connecticut, you're on WNYC with David Wallace-Wells. Hi, John.

John: Hi. Thanks for taking my calls. I've been in the industry in the tri-state area solar electric installations for decades now, and one of the biggest impediments we see is the regulated utilities putting impediments in the way of interconnecting to the grid. Whether it's network upgrades, transformer upgrades, or they just say, ''Oh, the local grid can't take the solar, or something like this.

They require studies, they slow things down with bureaucratic red tape and applications and fees, et cetera, et cetera.'' I just don't and then I hear politicians and New York State has been wonderful with the money that they've provided in terms of tax incentives and direct rebates. Then I just see that that they think, okay, it's done. Then the nightmare of trying to interconnect to the grid and working with the utilities is just a huge impediment.

I'd love to have somebody, the press look into it because it really is completely anathema to what we're hearing out in the world with how important climate change is and switching to renewables. Then when you're in it and you're trying to literally do it every day and you have willing customers, the impediment is then the bureaucracy of the utilities. I don't know if you can speak to that.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. David, are you into it at that level of engineering and bureaucracy?

David Wallace-Wells: I would pull back even from the particular question and just say, this is a challenge to remake almost every aspect of modern society. We know a lot about electricity power generation that's front and center. Probably transportation with cars and EVs as the second way that we think about this challenge. It also involves all of our built infrastructure. It also involves all of our heavy industry.

It involves our agriculture, it involves our building. Almost every feature of modern life produces a carbon footprint right now. In order to even stabilize the planet's temperatures, we need to get all of those carbon footprints to zero to stabilize those temperatures at a relatively manageable level requires that we do that just over the course of the next several decades. That is an unbelievably large challenge.

It means that there's huge amounts of disruption involved in that project. Whenever that happens, incumbent institutions and organizations are going to drag their feet much more slowly than the people who want faster change. We see that with the public utilities. We see that with our politics. We see that almost everywhere where a green transition is unfolding.

I think the public utilities are the first and obvious obstacles here because the greening of our power system is some of the lowest-hanging fruit. The thing that we're readiest to do as the caller was suggesting. My friend Lia Stokes is a political scientist has written a great book about the public utilities and how much they've impeded climate progress. I think that those dynamics are beginning to shift as many of these obstacles are beginning to dissipate in our culture and our society.

They're very far from dissipating fast enough to allow a really rapid green transition. That's unfortunate because every sliver of a degree of warming that we add to the planet's temperature means considerably more global suffering. At the moment, I think the caller's absolutely right that we have many of the systems in place to unleash really dramatic change. Yet we also have some forces in key places that are slowing that down and that's not just frustrating. It amounts to a moral crime because of the ultimate implications of that additional warming.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, I should give credit where credit is due. For the TikTok clip that we played at the beginning of the segment, it was TikToker Charles McBride with that statement, I'm a climate doomer, and expanding on it. To that point, I think we have a story from Rachel in Nyack. Rachel, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Rachel: Hi. I'm a mother of three girls and two of my daughters on the bookends are very seriously talking about not having children because of their worry about climate and what will future generation, what will happen to their children and their children's children. What are they coming into this world for when we're just destroying the planet? Now listening to what you're saying, I wonder what-- I've been trying to be supportive of them, but should they have more hope and say, ''Yes, it's fine, bring kids into this world.'' There are a lot of other horrible things going on too.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Are you willing to take on this role, David? Giving Rachel some ammunition to convince her kids that it's okay to have their kids?

David Wallace-Wells: I have two young kids of my own. I've made some choices around these dilemmas myself. I wouldn't want to presume to instruct anyone on such choices which are incredibly personal. What I would say in the big picture is that, yes, climate transformations are already here. They will intensify, they will be quite brutal in parts of the world. They will change the way that almost everyone on the planet lives.

If we stay on the course that we are currently on which is to say, heading for warming of between 2 and 3 degrees while all of that is true, while there will be dramatic additional human suffering and ecological damage as a result of these changes. We'll still be pulling up short of something like human extinction or civilizational collapse. Exactly how you feel about that future depends a lot on the way that you think about the arc of history and how you assess relative progress versus relative setbacks.

I do think that 30, 40, 50 years from now while the planet will be full of much more dramatic climate impacts than the ones that we see today, it'll also be full of people and they will be living lives that they consider normal. That is to some degree an indictment of how our incredible capacity for normalization that we would be able to normalize such transformations. On some level, it's also a comfort for those of us who are making plans that we hope extend that far into the future. Just today, about 10 million people a year are dying from the effects of air pollution and that's probably more than we'll ever die in any year from the effects of climate change and yet, we're all here navigating this world.

We're not paying enough attention to air pollution. As I said, it's another indictment but we are still navigating this world with that amount of suffering, with that amount of environmental damage. Considering it as normal, and indeed, roughly speaking unacceptable way of life. I think that gives some perspective to people who are truly fearful of the future.

Some things will actually be getting better. We will be zero-out our carbon emissions, we won't be killing nearly as many people from air pollution, for instance, and overall, there will be dramatic damage. Viewed from the vantage of today, it's almost unimaginable but viewed from the vantage of 30, 40, 50 years from now, it's probably just going to look like the world as it is, as it always has, in the past. Through many periods of history when there's been some mix of human flourishing and human suffering and human progress and human setbacks.

I think one of the ways of thinking about what I talked about in the pieces, this new range of climate futures is that it pulls us out of the realm of mythology, and returns us in thinking about climate to the plane of history. That doesn't mean that everything's going to be okay. It doesn't mean that there's going to be no climate damage. It just means that the contours of contestation are familiar to us from the past. We need to fight to protect the people who are most vulnerable rather than just throwing up our arms and thinking all was lost in the world.

Brian Lehrer: The sources in your deeply reported article in the Times magazine are primarily climate scientists, serious people who take global warming very seriously, are furious at climate deniers but are looking at the details of all the research and what's going into the climate right now and how the models that they've been warning us because of, how those models have started to change.

It's not like you're interviewing Ron DeSantis, or somebody but are you concerned that the effect of your peace might be to make people too complacent? Then the effects on the global South, this horrible disparity that you were describing will exist, even with the new models, is going to wind up being even worse?

David Wallace-Wells: I am worried about that but I do think that the main job, the first job is to describe the reality as it is emerging and seen by the people who understand it best. Secondary effects in terms of how it changes public opinion, how it changes mobilization around climate, those are secondary considerations. The first thing is to tell the emerging story as it appears today. I think it's really important and significant, especially for people who are fighting to change the arc of climate, that we actually have already made significant progress.

You hear a lot from people who aren't so engaged, who say things like nothing's being done, no one's paying attention. It is true that not enough is being done. Not enough attention is being paid but that's not the same thing as saying nothing is changing or nothing is happening, quite a lot is happening. There were more investments in renewable energy last year than in dirty energy. I want to get that dirty energy number to zero, but the fact that it's being surpassed by renewable investment is a significant milestone.

Five years ago, it was conventional wisdom that we were heading for a world of 4 or 5 degrees of warming. The fact that now just five years later, we're heading for a world of 2 or 3 is really significant progress. It's even more significant. When you think about the way that people were talking about this issue 15 or 20 years ago. I was just listening to an interview with the late James Lovelock, the independent scientist who helped come up with the Gaia theory of the planet as an interconnected single system.

This was from about 15 years ago, and he was saying he expected 7 degrees of warming. We're talking about quite significant revisions downward of our estimates. At the same time, emerging climate science now tells us more about lower levels of warming. What it tells us is that lower levels of warming are still grim, in fact, grimmer than we believe, not that long ago. At the same time that we're bringing our expected temperature levels down, we're also revising our expectations for each of those levels in a somewhat bleaker direction and that's bad news.

To talk about the secondary implications for our political mobilization and our public concern for these issues, I do think that we fall into a binary trap when we think about these issues. Any note of optimism can give people a sense that everything's going to be fine. It's very important to understand that everything is not fine already. [chuckles] As I mentioned earlier, we are outside the envelope of temperatures that enclose all of human history, which means everything we've ever known as a civilization as the result of climate conditions that we've already left behind.

There's nothing like this that has been experienced so long as humans have ever been on this planet. Things are going to get worse from here. Significantly worse from here but it's also misleading to say that the full story is told by that narrative of worsening and intensifying suffering. That isn't the whole story. It is a significant part of the story but it is not the whole story. Part of the story is also the end game looks less dark than it used to.

As I said, it's complex, how we conceptualize that, how we process it emotionally, it's challenging and yet, if we want to have an honest reckoning with the future that we're building, we have to take both of those stories seriously not just one or the other. My hope in this piece, and in a lot of the writing I've done over the last few years has been to try to push both of those narratives, not just one, but I certainly understand that in any individual brain, including mine, typically one predominates and then the other and not both at the same time.

I hope that we can develop a more sophisticated, nuanced picture of a future that is defined by climate change but not necessarily overwhelmed by it at the level of sight, say civilization, or extinction. That's a challenging psychological hurdle too which we're all going to have to be getting over because that is the future we're going to be living in. We're going to have to figure out how to live in it and how to think about it rather than just treating it as an abstraction that heals neatly to one narrative or the other either optimism or pessimism.

Brian Lehrer: David Wallace-Wells, author of the book The Uninhabitable: Earth Life After Warming, and the very recent New York Times magazine article, Beyond Catastrophe, A New Climate Reality Is Coming Into View. That's our climate story of the week here on The Brian Lehrer Show. David, thank you so much for joining us.

David Wallace-Wells: My pleasure. Thanks again.

 

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