Joe Rogan Experience #1259 — David Wallace-Wells Transcript

Transcript

0:00 four three two one But, you know, there are scientific estimates that say that they're going to get, Yeah, no, there's a lot of preventative stuff you can do. did a lot of controlled burning. that means that more tinder gets built over time. kind of contain it yeah as best they can yeah and minimize property damage yeah but you know it's the top of the hill it was crazy i've never seen anything like it in my life that was the worst one i've ever seen but i think that was just because of placement

3:51 but like my inner emotional perspective on the world a major metropolis here um and we're not safe we're certainly not totally safe um and that's It was hitting Bel Air. And he goes, there's not going to be anything we can do about it. He goes, if the right wind catches and a fire starts at the top of Los Angeles, it'll just go straight through L.A.

5:29 they hit the world's poorest first. And like the wildfires are, they work in the reverse because scorched it to the ground like that's what it looks like now yeah it's so crazy well it's really Yeah. this thing moves back and forth over time and it has forever i mean if you think about like the And that just means more and more flooding. Oh, yeah. But, yeah, if it gets hotter, they're fucked, too.

8:57 broken that threshold like there have been temperature records set every year but um last Are you terrified? I'm like a relatively well-off person who lives in America in, you know, at 1.1 degrees celsius right now I think there's basically no way that we avoid two degrees of warming, That's twice as much wealth as exists in the world today. category of modern life can be affected by this and um there aren't that many that could be hit

12:17 And that's the, you know, it's not just, it's not just a temperature. nineties kid. I grew up end of history thinking the world was going to get better. The world was So I'm a journalist. scientists talk about this two degree threshold as like the threshold of catastrophe. And I think to talk about their scariest findings. And so, I was terrified by the science. I looked at it and I was like,

15:20 but aren't seeing it in the way people are writing about the story. So I decided, you know, there's more to say. places are going to be hit harder than others india is going to be hit by like 29 of all global between two and four degrees, what will it mean at the personal level? little bit um yeah i've seen those before. They don't exist at anything like the scale they need to.

18:18 There are other complications. from the burning of fossil fuels has come in 30 years the last 30 years that's since al gore published his first book on warming it's since the un established their climate change What happens 50 years from now, 100 years from now, people will be dealing with the shit that we're fucking up today. We will be engineering problems for them to be solving

21:10 about. There are things about climate that we can't control, but at least at this point, here. And that seems to me to be why people are so willing to dismiss it so flippantly because in front of them right now about the future of the world in those terms, like what it will be at two degrees, at three degrees, world. Every single one makes it harder to see climate. There's this, he's actually an English professor named Timothy Morton who wrote a book about climate.

24:05 going to come true, will come true exactly as they predict it. Obviously, that's not how science a 300 page book with them you realize that like there's a huge margin for error and it would you know that the planet can't sustain that and he's often pointed to as this sort of like prophet modified crops before like the you know before the name it was like um is he the golden rice guy yeah okay yeah

27:11 have just as much land just as much grain crops as we have now but the food we get from it we'd Maybe he'll figure out a way through that. There was a drought that produced it. considerably warmer, that's going to have real dramatic effects on everything. Air pollution, holy shit, how could we possibly, that's unconscionable. But already, 9 million people are dying every year from air pollution.

30:22 You know, like I said, that's an impact that's twice as big as the great depression and it would be permanent um 600 trillion dollars in in climate damages twice as this is nonsense science this has been disproven there's a few people like that but it's a What? I don't think that's true. seriously are they being taken other than this um the idea of building these machines extract

33:39 sky would get red oh jesus there are all of these aesthetic effects too which nobody talks about so the sun would absorb less sunlight i mean the earth would absorb less on sunlight which would enough sulfur that it was actually only two degrees warmer, then if we just, for instance, Wouldn't it smell horror? brings me to methane that's another issue as well right yeah cows producing methane gas

36:36 that's the reason that those nine million people are dying every year from air pollution so if we than carbon whoa yeah it's really intense um but there are also these like small scale studies that atmosphere we don't know the proportion that it will be released as carbon dioxide versus methane, the effect could even be more dramatic than that reoriented around climate change so that

39:42 on cognitive performance are really dramatic can lower cognitive performance by like 10 to 15 I know what you mean. And the effect on premature birth and low birth weight in the areas where they instituted these new easy Not quite as affordable as they need to be, but the new Teslas are like $35,000, I think. every time you fly from new york to london and back you melt nine three square meters of ice

42:22 and if you're a person like me who flies like every other weekend. It's. Now, the plus side is it's way better to get hotter than it is to get colder, right? No. Is that not true? Wow. planet is dependent on climate conditions yeah like we'll figure a way to like have a civilization, much more unstable. be totally overwhelming and catastrophic now the al gore film is uh something that scared a lot of

46:27 for 25 years is that we were told it was slow. We were told it was going to be coming maybe at the scale of centuries, something we'd have to worry about for our grandchildren. scientists predicted even a decade or two ago. And so, I think the first inconvenient truth progress um why is that because we just if we're like rather than saying oh let's retire

48:47 those are carbon footprints that are growing china's now almost twice as big a carbon footprint Highways across Africa, across Asia are being built by Chinese workers in an effort to build a new imperial infrastructure for themselves. how the economy will work, than the US poured in the entire 20th century. And within the U.S., market forces are doing a lot of, are making a lot of progress for us.

51:45 solar and wind they've done a lot with air pollution so beijing used to be really awful What's the majority of the footprint? farms well you could also do you know you could imagine lab-grown meat having a much smaller that anytime soon. I mean, maybe 10 years from now we'll get there. But that's, you know, those technologies have been called magical, magical thinking by like

55:25 Totally. though they have wildfires over there there's something about the california fires that they're no white people in America. So, that means we're talking about a storm that would come once as beginning to be more alarmed about it. And I think alarm is really useful. There are people Spring about pesticides. It was called hyperbolic alarmist. It led to the creation of the EPA.

58:36 and even saying those words make me uncomfortable because i like it's hard it's hard for me to Yeah. I think it made landfall And if we started right now, we wouldn't be able to finish in time And even a few years after that, neighborhood and you know it's still yeah really well yeah yeah so because that was like the gaudy Right. You know, there are projections that like $30 billion of New Jersey real estate could be underwater by 2030?

1:02:00 I mean, they could build a seawall. And I think, you know, we think of sea level as really a thing I mean, not the whole city. Yeah. oh yeah, This is just a running little thing. the case right the the i mean they're still, they find these artifacts and things in the middle of the ocean Alberta? is somewhere in scandinavia really because um you know i talked about the impacts of economic growth

1:04:29 Well, Scandinavia is nice, but Canada is like our neighbors. Yeah. shit it's 22 degrees 55.4 um and so for every degree north of that you lose about a percentage why there's been so much economic productivity you know, they're such a complicated figure And they have such a fuck Angela Merkel does the same, Every country in the world is incentivized to behave badly

1:07:23 It's global. Trees are basically coal in the sense that they are stored carbon. Yeah. jesus christ yeah and this is just to pump up brazil's economy yeah well he has a kind If we could do that, it doesn't seem all that crazy to me that, say, 30 years from now, an empowered imperial China looking at someone like Bolsonaro in Brazil would just be like, no, you can't do that.

1:10:29 huge sort of viral phenomenon but it produced also some scientific criticism and um you know talking seriously about just how big a deal this is in a way that they might not have been just a Yeah. Partisanship has like totally taken over our minds such that the fact that we have 73% of Americans who believe global warming is real and happening. i mean that's you know that's more support than there is for just about anything um so i'm like

1:13:55 on climate. That hasn't yet totally taken over the perspective of our policymakers globally, But all of the new research says, like, let's get started right now. you know government leaders who look around and say if the economic picture is going to be better than they looked five years ago, and that'll be huge. i mean they've like put out really aggressive um disinformation and denial you ever see the movie

1:16:58 but they knew shit about how the planet was going to change we wouldn't have had to take such aggressive action if we had started early. We would have had to just be doing moderate kind of So there was a time when like the kind of like, you don't have to change anything, think, well, what is the sickness here? Is it the Republican Party and their climate denial?

1:19:37 and there are now you know getting back to the villainy of the oil companies um there are now government is now obligated legally to do better on climate than they were doing on their own maximalist climate policy, because it's literally impossible to protect the made you the king of the world and they said you you can decide what we do what would what would

1:22:28 that's just an unbelievable resource. But it's slow moving. it's always homophobic or or uh or feminine yeah they're always going after you about your estrogen themselves yeah like you hit this little thing go doo doo and it just fucking steers it takes over It's weird. and responsible is like exactly we like cigarettes and whiskey yeah you mock someone eating a salad

1:25:34 I don't want to say I was pessimistic about electric cars. I was like okay now I get it But they're stupid they really are I don't understand why there aren't more people yeah really yeah really you don't no i read those text messages he sent to that chick i don't i But there's some pressing problems here, which could really benefit you know that money could really benefit

1:27:54 So the idea of building a colony there And yeah, well, it's a good place to practice because no one lives there. has to be done you know i mean this is uh the on the grandest of grand scales the the concept of uh Do you think it's sexier to go to space? We're trying to fuck space. is like peter teal talks about this there's this kind of unfulfilled sense of future that we all

1:30:41 Is that part of the benefit of having a dictator run things? Isn't it sort of just how you're always going to look at someone who lives in a hundred million dollar house and it's possible i think when you look at i mean not to Yeah. Well, he's got a trainer. Well, I guess. Do look pretty big Pretty great Yeah so he looks fit doing this sci-fi show and i went to this uh 2045 conference that they had in manhattan and it was

1:33:53 to some machines and not live in the real world anymore. And when I think about even my relationship i think in you know in ways that we don't yet appreciate or understand. and looking at positive aspects of mitigating the problem yeah and yeah new energy sources in terms of carbon so that for instance you walk down the aisle in the supermarket you see organic

1:36:40 there's some street cred to being carbon-free Yeah. I mean, I think in different parts of the world, people will relate differently to it. But then when you pull back, it really is just carbon it's like absolutely everything if you think about everything you do in terms of the carbon impact it has then you know the solutions suggest like talking about buying a Tesla or buying a Range Rover or whatever,

1:39:00 conversations like this are important i think your book's very important and i think you know Like the song from Mary Poppins. by a lot of people, are the most important impact you can have. that's just going to alienate so many people. that happened a couple of years ago where, um, you know, anthrax that was, had killed a reindeer in Russia in the early 20th century. The reindeer

1:41:30 The Spanish flu from 1918 that killed hundreds of millions of people is trapped in ice. some shit yeah well that's what i mean about this this story is's how you become like the Red Skull or some shit. We'll be reading about, you know, I mean, all this shit. is going to be emitted into the atmosphere as it melts well let me tell you the story so um

1:44:23 they monitor our moods. that cat parasite yeah than they are today. We can't really predict what those impacts will be, but in a world that's two degrees warmer than they are today we can't really really is you know i mean and part of the problem is people here, they're like, oh, relax. time to have at least some long-term capacity and i guess we do have some long-term planning

1:47:32 people do. You know, I thought climate change was real. I thought it was something that we need to the more I just realized this isn't about affecting some part of nature over there. that like when i imagine my daughter's life i'm not imagining a hellscape i'm imagining the life world. And if we get to really dramatic levels of warming, that suffering will be basically

1:50:22 god i need to drop everything i'm doing that leaves any sort of a carbon footprint. That's weird because they make the best cars. How is their diet better carbon-wise? Yeah. Yeah. everybody needs to do what you need to do as well you're being conscious of this need to change Tell people the name of your book one more time, please. I really appreciate it, man.