New York Times Columnist David Wallace-Wells: In Conversation on EvC

𝘿𝙖𝙫𝙞𝙙 & 𝙀𝙙 𝙘𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙬𝙞𝙩𝙝 𝙗𝙚𝙨𝙩-𝙨𝙚𝙡𝙡𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙨𝙘𝙞𝙚𝙣𝙘𝙚 𝙬𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙚𝙧 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙚𝙨𝙨𝙖𝙮𝙞𝙨𝙩 𝘿𝙖𝙫𝙞𝙙 𝙒𝙖𝙡𝙡𝙖𝙘𝙚-𝙒𝙚𝙡𝙡𝙨. It's a wide-ranging discussion covering everything from the potential fallout of the US election, shifting global interests and priorities, climate activism, China's role in climate and green energy technology, and as usual - listener questions for our guest. 

• (01:27) US election fallout
• (09:33) Where do we sit globally on climate?
• (11:59) State of climate activism?
• (20:07) Communicating climate risk without alarm
• (29:09) Air pollution
• (35:22) Listener questions
• (46:37) China's green tech dominance
• (49:34) Who should we be reading?

Detailed show notes available here

About Our Guest:
David Wallace-Wells is currently a columnist and staff writer at The New York Times, where he writes a weekly newsletter on climate change, technology, the future of the planet and how we live on it. He was previously the Deputy Editor at New York Magazine, where he also wrote a column on climate change, including the cover story, “The Uninhabitable Earth,” which was expanded into a New York Times bestselling book with the same title.

About Your Hosts:
David Keith is Professor and Founding Faculty Director, Climate Systems Engineering Initiative at the University of Chicago. He is the founder of Carbon Engineering and was formerly a professor at Harvard University and the University of Calgary. He splits his time between Canmore and Chicago.

Sara Hastings-Simon studies energy transitions at the intersection of policy, business, and technology. She’s a policy wonk, a physicist turned management consultant, and a professor at the University of Calgary and Director of the Master of Science in Sustainable Energy Development.

Ed Whittingham is a clean energy policy/finance professional specializing in renewable electricity generation and transmission, carbon capture, carbon removal and low carbon transportation. He is a Public Policy Forum fellow and formerly the executive director of the Pembina Institute, a national clean energy think tank.

Produced by Amit Tandon & Bespoke Podcasts

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Transcript

Ed Whittingham: Hi, I'm Ed Whittingham. On December 2nd, David and I spoke with best selling science writer and essayist David Wallace Wells. David is currently a columnist and staff writer at the New York Times, where he writes a weekly newsletter on climate change, technology, the future of the planet, and how we live on it.

He was previously the deputy editor at New York Magazine, where he also wrote a column on climate change, including the cover story, The Uninhabitable Earth. Which was expanded into a New York Times bestselling book with the same title. David has also been a National Fellow with the New America Foundation and wrote previously for the Paris Review.

We covered a lot of ground with David W. W., including our own mercifully brief post mortem on the U. S. election and climate being a non factor in the result, plausible guesses on post election U. S. climate energy policy, what's next for climate politics in potentially an era of greenlash, Communicating the risk of climate change and what it might mean to live in a world two centigrade above pre industrial global average temperature, and responses to a few listener questions.

A reminder that Sarah's on medical leave for the time being, so it's just David Kaye, David W. W., and me. Now here's the show. So this is actually the first show that, uh, we're recording after the U. S. presidential election. And as a Canadian. You know, my bottom line take on it is, wow, I really don't understand the U.

S., but I guess in that respect, I'm a typical progressive voter. And since then, like many, I'm kind of rubbernecking at a car crash, uh, and watching YouTube clips of late night talk show hosts for the first time in four years. I don't think we need to add to the volumes of post election postmortems out there, but I will want to say that you wrote a very thoughtful column about it called 13 things to keep in mind when talking about the election.

And that certainly helped to clear up some of my misunderstandings about the U. S. and the election result. Any tidbits that are top of mind for you from, from that column? 

David Wallace-Wells: Well, yeah, I also wrote one the day after the election, which was sort of a scramble. I would sort of actually point to the theme of that first column more, which is to say that, um, I think it's important for especially people on the left in America and thinking about America to understand that we have actually been through a quite long period of liberal dominance, um, in politics and society.

This isn't necessarily the best way to talk about these things. Um, but you know, before this election, seven of the eight previous presidential elections have been, the popular vote had been won by the democratic candidate. Now, George W. Bush won in 2000 without winning the popular vote. Donald Trump ran one in 2016 without winning the popular vote.

But just as it's kind of a taking the temperature of the country, the national vote is probably you know, as good as a measure as any. And for eight elections, Democrats had won seven of those. At the congressional level, at the Senate level, things weren't quite so clear. But in general, when you look at the media, when you look at Hollywood, when you look at, um, the scientific establishment, the academy, all of these institutions, um, that sort of help structure American political and social life had been growing considerably more democratic over the last generation.

And that's maybe most. dramatic actually in the corporate world, which used to be understood as quite hostile to liberal governance, but over the last, you know, 15, 20 years, especially in the post Obama era has come to be identified with democratic instincts in many ways. And I think basically what we saw was the end of that, or what we are seeing is something like the end of that cycle.

Um, a lot of that has to do with, you know, inflation and, and sort of the general shakeout from COVID, but more broadly, Um, I think voters said, as they did in 2016, and to some extent, as they did in 2020, by, you know, um, kicking Trump out of office, they said, like, we just don't like the basic direction of history here.

We want to change. And that's a pattern that we've seen all around the world. Um, in fact, in the U. S., it's been more muted than it's been all around the world. But I think we have to look back at the last, you know, at the last generation of, of politics and say, recognize in a way that we hardly did ever during that period, that it was a period.

kind of dominated by, by, um, Democrats and democratic policies. We're going to be wrestling with some backlash to that going forward. Now, exactly how long that backlash lasts, what it means in a country when the backlash only gave Donald Trump, you know, 49 point whatever percent of the vote, not 60 percent of the vote, not even 55 percent of the vote in which Kamala Harris, who's now understood as this sort of this failure character still won 48 point something percent of the vote.

Um, these are open questions and my own. instinct is to say that this is less like a Reagan revolution than it is, um, like one moment in a, in a topsy turvy period in which Democrats are likely to make major gains relatively soon. I can't say that for sure. It's especially hard to say given a lot of the damage that Trump would like to do at least to the institutions of American government.

Which may make it a little bit harder for the out party to come back into power quickly. So we'll see. 

Ed Whittingham: Yeah. Well, and, and I'd love to now just double click a bit on climate and energy in particular. So David and I, we had on a campaign strategist named Stephen Carter in late September. There's a bunch of elections up here in Canada as well.

Provincial elections. And incumbents have sort of fared, uh, in, in a mixed way, but then we've got a looming federal election that will be sometime in 2025 at this point, and the current, uh, Trudeau government is, is likely to be ousted and by an overwhelming majority. So far, like, climate in these elections hasn't really played a role.

I'm wondering about, so I'm assuming it's a non factor, but about energy production and in particular U. S. oil and gas production, because I noticed in campaigning Kamala Harris seemed to spend more time talking about the U. S. setting records for oil and gas production Then talking about climate. So is your sense that energy production writ large was was a factor in the auction?

David Wallace-Wells: No, my impression is sort of the same as yours and I would say before even talking about the US context I would establish the global context which is it seems to me like the temperature on climate politics is much lower and These issues are much more in the background almost everywhere. You look around the wealthy world We just went through, you know, the the cop in Azerbaijan, basically none of the world's most powerful people even showed up to that conference when I think back over the cops over the last five or 10 years, you just regularly saw much more of a glittery who's who's list of global powerful than we saw this time around.

And I don't think that that's an accident. I don't think it's just about the American election. You know, I think that's the direction that we're heading more generally where you see a lot of countries around the world. Deprioritizing climate action. That's not to say that decarbonization isn't continuing because market forces have been, you know, are making progress there.

But if we think back to 2019 to 2021, that period, it was just much more front and center in politics in almost every country that we look at. Um, it was, You know, talked about as an existential urgent challenge by nearly all of the world's leaders, and there was a serious effort to bring new and serious kind of policy into law in many, many countries.

And in the U. S. we did that primarily with the Inflation Reduction Act, although there was, you know, some some other bills that have contributed progress there, and that's a second part of or second. piece of the explanation is that a lot of countries have done a fair amount. Um, it's not, it's no longer the case that climate advocates could say nothing's being done.

You'd have to say some things were done. There's been a bit of a, especially in the U. S., maybe a bit of a gap opening up, a rivalry opening up, a fight opening up between sort of climate establishment um, energy centrists who have climate sympathies, but you know, who are Um, not radicals and the sort of movement groups who, who want to see much faster action.

The other part of the story as it relates to presidential election is that, you know, for reasons, for a variety of reasons, um, but including by design in the Inflation Reduction Act, a large majority of the money that was, uh, doled out by that bill is heading into Um, Republican congressional districts.

It's often described as heading into red states. That's actually not totally accurate. It's more red districts in purple states. There's a way in which I think that that has softened some of the intensity of the climate hostility that we used to see on the right and kind of brought both parties into a bit of policy alignment and agreement on a sort of, you know, all of the above energy strategy, which is what the Biden administration pursued and what the Trump administration is likely to pursue, I think, too.

Now. Exactly how that mix shakes out will be different under a Trump administration than under a Biden administration, but you know, in the same way that the last four years, we're not an experience of climate communism the next four years. I don't think you're going to be an experience of, you know, oil and gas dystopia either.

It's going to be a bit of a mixed bag and a lot is to be determined. But I think that the commonalities and the continuities are probably going to be more striking in retrospect than the huge discontinuities. 

Ed Whittingham: Yeah. And I'd love to get to speculation on what might be, be determined, but David, um, love to get your thoughts on, you know, us, but also where we are globally.

Right now and in this moment as a global traveler, the way that you are. 

David Keith: Yeah, maybe I'll offer kind of two extreme views and then talk a little bit in the middle and I want to hear David's feedback. So, one extreme view from the kind of environmental left side of climate is that, Uh, That people have lost the focus that, that we're screwed that because there aren't the glitterati going to cop, because it's not such a high profile issue, that attention is really going to get diverted away.

And there's not going to be the kind of action that in their view, this kind of crisis demand. So that's one view is that this is really to read this as climate failure. Another view is I should read a success. It's like the end of the beginning, like in, in pretty much any political topic, you have a lot of fights when you're establishing the topic, but once Topic is established.

You don't keep fighting about it. It's just a thing that government does, a thing that happens. And I'd say you could actually make a case in, in, in both directions to, to make the case that it's just a thing that's happening, not to say the Klan poem solved, but that. It's happening. Now, first of all, this thing I mentioned almost every time on this podcast, this enormous amount of money the world is spending on clean energy, roughly 1.

7 percent of the entire world's economy. It's just stunning. And, and some consequences of this, the fact that it looks like China is probably going to peak its emissions this year or, or, or certainly by next, or very likely by next. And my point Personal bet would be that the world will peak emissions, uh, this decade and, you know, after 150 years of fossil fuel driven economic growth to peak emissions and have growth go on, it's just a giant turning point.

It really is hard to overstate that, and I think that. Pace of movement in solar, in changing batteries, not just, uh, vehicle batteries, uh, and other technologies is really large and it's larger than the direct flows of money, say for the, the Biden IRA act, a lot of the money is coming from a set of different reasons.

One view would be this, just that solar got cheap and it's pure market, but I don't think it is pure market. It's kind of a mixture of market that much of subtle incentives that are helping to, to, to drive those things into the market even faster than they would on a pure market basis. I guess my point of view is it's healthy in a way that climate is now at a stage where you can have the world's attention focused away from it a little bit into wars and other things.

I'm not saying those things are good and yet still have some confidence that actually decarbonization is going to keep chugging along. 

Ed Whittingham: You know, pre pandemic we had Greta Thunberg, the Green New Deal. We had the Sunrise Movement in the U. S., we had Extinction Rebellion in the U. K., we had the E. U. Green New Deal, or the Fit for 55 package, and climate strikes throughout the developing world, and just about every leader everywhere in the world at least acknowledged the reality of climate change, and then had some sort of plan to do something about it, whether the plan was good or not, and it, I think you can draw a straight line between What was happening there and David Cheerpoint around the world and its emissions peaking before the end of the decade.

It kind of reminds me of punctuated equilibrium, you know, Stephen Jay Gould wrote The Panda's Thumb and It's a Wonderful Life about the the Cambrian explosion just close to where David and I live. where you have rapid moments of, of heightened change, and then you get periods of stasis. And I wonder on climate, if we're going into this period of stasis right now, and that, I'd put it back maybe to David Wallace Wells, when will the next kind of global awakening be, or do we actually need that kind of next global awakening?

Do we need another moment where the confluence of Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion and the Green New Deal all in a very short, uh, span of time? 

David Keith: I'll jump in just one second first and then over to David is again, one framing is if you think that 1. 5 was really the target and the actual goal, which obviously is what some activists want to say was to cut emissions fast enough to do that, then by that measure, obviously we failed.

But if you think of the goal was actually to really accelerate decarbonization, and now the, you know, likely we're aiming a little over to, um, then it looks a lot more like success, albeit maybe not as much success as I might like. 

David Wallace-Wells: On that point, I would say, um, when we think about that period of remarkable climate awakening, you know, the protest movements, the climate strikes, the sort of elevation of climate into a top shelf political priority of the world over, I would say it wasn't just the 1.

5 goal, but the two degree goal that did that. I mean, the 1. 5 degree report, which outlined that difference was like, here's what we can avoid if we stay close to 1. 5. And here's what we're going to get if we, um, get to two. And so I think the fact that it seems unlikely to me, at least, that we stay below two is also a failure.

But of course, you know, when I first started writing about climate almost a decade ago now, something like four or five seemed quite plausible. And those now seem possible, but only if we get unlucky in some, in some ways, um, with climate feedbacks. And, you know, the, the, the likelihood of that happening seems considerably smaller than it did five or 10 years ago.

And so, You know, from that perspective, it's a success. So looking at these, you know, the charts that we were looking at five years ago, the charts we're looking at for 10 years ago, the charts we're looking at now, you have to say we're in a considerably better place. One problem is that we're not looking at those charts in a vacuum.

We're looking at them from the present. And in all of these stories, things are gonna get worse from here. And our experience of that future is going to be bumpier than the past. There's going to be disruption and needless suffering. And for all of those reasons, I think I wish that there was more public Focus on an attention paid to climate changes.

We're already seeing and what science is telling us about what to expect, which is, I would say, generally speaking, not universally, but generally speaking, we're discovering more things to worry about rather than fewer things to worry about at particular warming levels. That relates to something that you asked at, which is what's going to move another another kind of awakening like like that one.

If that one was prompted by a lot of things, but sort of directly by the 1. 5 degree report, what might generate a future awakening like that. And I frankly see quite diminishing chances of that happening at any point in the foreseeable future. I look out at the climate landscape, the climate impacts that we're seeing, the extreme weather, um, things that would have shocked us To our core, five or 10 years ago, um, now arriving and being not major news stories in the way that they might have a half generation ago, you know, in Hurricane Helene, just a few weeks before the election, which, you know, all of these estimates are preliminary, who knows whether they're So, um, we're They'll, they'll bear out in the end.

But some estimates suggest that that single storm caused as much as 250 billion in damages. Maybe it's not quite as dramatic or striking as Hurricane Katrina was in 2005, but Hurricane Katrina was one of the several major drivers of, you know, the end of the George W. Bush presidency. It felt for a moment as though the entire Republican Party was discredited in part by, by that storm.

And Hurricane Helene, here we have a story, you know, about an election. What was it, three, four weeks later? It hardly even comes up when people are talking about the political impacts. So it seems to me in some basic way, we have come to terms with the fact that the climate is now going a bit haywire, that it is producing more and more disruption, more and more extreme events, um, that rather than mobilizing us as a society, as a globe to faster action, to more, So while we've always had the negative focus on climate policy, we've sort of just put it in the background and are trusting that we'll be able to navigate it and endure.

I wonder sometimes about the work that I did earlier in my career about climate, whether one of the things that, that alarmist writing about climate did was prepare people to then normalize events that came that didn't seem quite as damaging or destructive as they looked in prospect, you know? And it's maybe something interesting about, you know, human nature generally, that these things can often seem scarier when we're looking at them.

to come than they are when we're actually living through them. But of course, you know, even in a world at two or three degrees of warming later this century, there will be billions of people on the planet living lives that they understand as normal and fulfilling. And we're probably taking some steps Even in the kind of climate community towards understanding and acknowledging that I think that there is some delusion there.

I think there is some unfortunate normalization that there is a lot of suffering that can be prevented that we are learning to simply accept, but I don't see real world events conspiring to shake us out of that delusion anytime soon. And I think we're likely to be operating in a world in which we're kind of letting the past Program of decarbonization play out sort of on its own terms, um, rather than one in which there's a lot of external pressure to accelerate it, at least for the time being, um, there, there are people who are outraged about green policy in particular parts of the world.

Um, but for instance, to return this answer to where we started looking at the American presidential election, I don't see much evidence that many voters were moved by this, by this set of issues, um, by the Biden administration's policy is, you know, you could say that they maybe felt. That Biden was, you know, not focusing on their material concerns in a direct way.

When you compare and contrast the aftermath of the IRA, the political aftermath of the IRA to the political aftermath of Obamacare, it's just night and day. I mean, Obamacare produced a decade long Republican backlash in which every single election in every single election cycle for, you know, for a full decade was.

Dealing among other things with the fate of, of Obamacare. That's just not what we saw with the IRA at all. And some of that is a credit to its design that it was this sort of, you know, all carrots, no sticks thing. Um, but part of it, I think is just that, you know, the temperature and climate, um, politics has, has somewhat subsided if you think about it narrowly in terms of whether we should be pursuing green tech and, and, uh, more rapid decarbonization.

The thing that worries me somewhat more is if we expand the, Circle of what we mean by climate politics. Um, to include things like, you know, migration and how we're relating to people elsewhere in the world. What obligations we feel to the people elsewhere in the world who may be more in need of support, not just because of the way that climate change has burdened them, but because of the, you know, the way that what is required, what would be required of them to decarbonize their own energy systems.

Um, and I think we saw at this cop a kind of a clear illustration that You know, the wealthy countries in the world are still really not ready to do what's necessary to help the poor countries in the world, um, move faster there. 

Ed Whittingham: I'd love to ask both of you, you know, for, for tips or advice. And I think our listeners would appreciate around communicating climate risk, but I'll, I'll frame it in this way.

David W. W., yeah, you said the temperature has subsided. And David K., you talked about the glass half full versus the glass. Half empty. I'll take the half empty view right now where we are in this moment. My question is how much is climate catastrophism or alarmism actually to blame? Because these days it seems it's so effortless for the right To dismiss a chunk of the progressive part of the political spectrum or the Democrats to, you know, treat them as hysterical.

And the accusation being, you know, you're just worried about climate change. You've got this, your actual hidden agenda is like a Greta Thunberg one. And what you're trying to do is declare war on capitalism or undermine any chance of wealth creation. But at the same time, as David K., you do on a professional basis, on a regular basis, and David W.

W., as you do in your columns, we do need to be very clear and upfront about the risks that we face and about the warming that's happening now. You know how it's destabilizing, uh, our ecosystems and how it's destabilizing economies now. The second question first is how much is climate catastrophism or alarmism to blame for where we are now?

The second question is how do you communicate climate risk without falling into that snake pit? of climate alarmism. And maybe David Kaye will start with you. 

David Keith: It's a, it's a hard one. I mean, first of all, I'm not going to concede that the progressive side is, as, as the owners of hysteria, there's certainly been a wild piece of hysteria on, on the Trump side, on all sorts of things from bathroom bills to Who knows what we can go on, I guess I personally do think that the progressive side overreached about overstatements about climate risk in a way that may have backfired a little bit, but I'm also in some ways the completely wrong observer.

Like I'm an insider. I've been working on it for a third of a century. I don't really know enough about what regular people think, but I do believe that this idea that there's really, that it counts as an existential risk, that there's this giant impacts, I think. There's an overreach where people forget how big other environmental impacts are.

Air pollution is still a much bigger killer than climate. And probably always will be. Yeah, for me, I'm, I would, hard to know. Our, uh, friend David, uh, Michael Greenstone's research suggests that you'll get roughly a million deaths a year from heat related deaths. Um, and it would be a much higher as a fraction and in the hot world.

And I think air pollution deaths will fall a lot. Um, so it could be that those cross actually late this century. And I think that's actually a reasonable. 

David Wallace-Wells: Oh, yeah, just just to be clear, I wasn't suggesting that there would be no crossing, just that the level of deaths that we've seen in the recent past from air pollution will probably never be reached from climate impacts.

Mhm. 

Ed Whittingham: Yeah, I'm sorry, I just want to ground the number. I think is the estimate between 5 to 10 million people per year are dying prematurely from respiratory illness related to air pollution. Is that the right figure? Very broadly. 

David Keith: I mean, the people who are really the experts tend to critique that don't like us to count.

Death is better to count years of life, years of life or change in lifespan. But yeah, five is a good number. Okay, five right here globally, which is just a giant number, obviously. And I do think there's a way in which kind of assumption that the climate was this just Thing that was worse than everything else, I think it didn't help, but again, I'm maybe not the right audience.

I certainly, I guess the strongest thing I feel is I feel like the IPCC and some of the climate establishment permanently blew some of their credibility. Through the way they released the 1. 5 report. So as is, you know, we all know, as is public, no mystery. 1. 5 is a political number. There are, there aren't sharp thresholds that really aren't tipping points of a significant scale.

And, uh, people who wrote that report and the IPCC bureaucracy, let it get pushed to the press as this eight years to save the planet story that was most definitely what they didn't say. And at least from my perspective, and I was an IPCC author long ago, just Was it kind of one way about, like, I just don't trust it anymore because that was, I think, to be clear, we need activist organizations.

I don't think we would have got the climate action we have without people like Greta and without people like chaining themselves to things, I think we're going to need to see more street activism to get more climate action. So I'm totally in favor of activists and I'm happy to help fund them and support them.

But I think IPCC have a different role. And I think it confused what his role was and, and I think that was a fundamental mistake. 

David Wallace-Wells: I guess the way that I would say, I would put it as to emphasize something that David just said, which is that I don't think we would be where we are now without some of that alarmism.

And um, that doesn't mean that it was wrong. correct in all of its particulars. I mean, when I've had, you know, subsequent editions of my book come out, I've made changes and, you know, they're, they're things that I myself feel like I overstated. Certainly that, you know, scientific reports turned out to have been, you know, or papers turned out to have made projections that no longer seem plausible.

All of these things are important to acknowledge as we go forward. But I think that if we are in a place now where we have globally committed to, to decarbonization in a more serious way than we were five or 10 years ago, I think that is to some important degree a credit to climate advocacy that is a result of that, that alarm.

And as I was saying earlier, I don't really see the, um, the case that there is a major, um, Backlash to that at the moment, you know, there, there's, I would say that there's, there's been an impulse to say, like, maybe let's, let's hit the brakes here is how I would describe some of the, the sort of global mood is we're in a, let's hit the brakes moment, but we're not really unwinding and going back to an energy world of 20 or 30 years ago.

That is not the direction that we're heading in. So if we've made a meaningful step forward over these, over this last five years, put ourselves in a new place. I think on balance, my, I would have to say that I think that we're, you know, that's all, that's all to the, you know, not all to the credit of, um, climate alarmists and climate advocates, but significantly to their credit.

And as a result, I think I don't look back with all that much regret about, um, I don't, on a kind of efficacy front on what was said or done. There are questions to raise about, you know, just, Truth telling and whether everything that was said was true. Um, and I think there are some questions there. I mean, David mentioned that, you know, that 12 years to cut emissions in half, um, language that did play a really major role in the immediate aftermath of the 1.

5 degree report. I think that that was in some serious ways misleading. How much damage that really did in, in tarnishing credibility among the public. And I'm 

David Keith: not sure. Maybe not. I'm not sure. That's, that's what I was trying to say. Like, maybe I'm so much of an insider. I have no idea. I I'm, I'm kind of inclined to agree with you.

I certainly agree that, that the activists have a fundamental credit for pushing the issue on the agenda and getting the progress we've had for sure. What happened now is this kind of middle world where we chug along with decarbonization, some years go by, climate isn't the top thing. And then I hope it becomes a high thing again, because I personally would like us to go over the hump, decarbonize quickly.

I'd actually like us to. Pull CO2 out of the air. So we go back towards a pre industrial climate. And I think we should think seriously about solar geo sharing to reduce risks, particularly risks for the poorest people in hot countries. I'd like to see more of this action happen because I think. That the climate impacts are really substantial, despite me not wanting to not kind of subscribing to the existential view.

But I think the climate risks are huge and there are ways we could and should reduce them more quickly. 

David Wallace-Wells: I do think that there is a, a, a worrisome consequence at the level of, um, individual and collective psychology here though, which is to say that, you know, we've familiarized ourselves broadly with a landscape of quite, you know, Catastrophic climate impacts over the last five or 10 years, we live in a world in which many of those things are already coming true.

But because we familiarized ourselves back then, they may not shock us as much as they as much as they would have if we had. It's hard for me to assess that. But at the level of, you know, at the anecdotal level, when I talked to friends, it does seem to me like people were more worried about climate change.

Three or four years ago than they are now. Partly that's because we can see some progress. I think that's true, but partly I think it's because we're contextualizing the climate events that we see in the prophecies, for lack of a better word, that we had from a generation ago and realizing that they're at least not yet up to that level, causing human misery at the scale that we, that we worried about.

And. Whether that leads to more tuning out or not, I think, you know, unfortunately, it means that when we read about, say, the devastating fires in Lahaina or something, um, it may concern us for a day, but we, we then turn the page and stop freaking out about it. Whereas something like Katrina really was a national scarring 

Ed Whittingham: event.

Even if you can press it these days, the alarm doesn't sound very loudly in the ears of people because now the negative impacts are becoming so much more apparent. And I think of the, the issue, you know, as we talked about with premature deaths from respiratory illness from air pollution. I mean, that problem has been around for a long time.

And it's still even on the low end of that number, 5 million people per year. It's a staggering number. And yet, we're still building new infrastructure, not so much in the West, but in developing countries, that's going to just aggravate that problem, and you still have places like Delhi in India, where, and, and, and, David W.

W., I've heard you say this, that the average lifespan is knocked back by as much as 10 years, for someone living in that part of India. 10 years, in a, in a city with 25 million people. And that's an alarm bell that maybe it hasn't been sounding loudly enough, but certainly given the track record, people just have not been doing much to actually address what is actually a very solvable problem, given, given the, the, the, uh, the clean electricity sources, they're not just available, but they're now increasingly and not just cost competitive.

But becoming the cheapest new build electricity on the planet. 

David Wallace-Wells: Well, the way that the public has related to some of this is, I think, quite interesting in part because we're becoming aware of the consequences of air pollution as we are already improving it. And so a lot of these numbers are growing. But the actual when, if you back cast the projections, we were in a considerably worse place, you know, a generation ago.

And if you look at a, you know, country like China, it seems like they've done a lot better. Um, they've moved dramatically, um, to clean up their air and, and, you know, improve their health as a result. India and the rest of South Asia has been moving more slowly, and the truth is we don't have all that much great data about Sub Saharan Africa.

Um, like, we lack data in many ways, but it, you know, one of the scariest things is that we're living through, you know, a kind of an air pollution apocalypse for, you know, decades without really thinking about it. Knowing it or seeing it clearly, and that we're actually only seeing it clearly as we exit that phase into a future of relatively cleaner air.

Now, we're also learning that air polluted at much lower levels can still be damaging. You know, the WHO keeps revising its threshold for what it considers safe air downward. And, you know, so you end up with these crazy figures like, you know, 95 percent of the world's population is breathing on unsafe air, which, you know, is another question about Some, you know, some of the sort of environmental hyperbole.

Like, does it make sense to talk about 95 percent of the world is breathing on unsafe air when you're presumably one of those 95 percent and you may not understand yourself is sickly. As a result, it tells us a lot about how we process stories of progress, how we think about the future, how we conceptualize, um, You know, the risks of, of, of future climate environmental damages that, you know, a lot of these numbers probably would have been a lot bigger 10 or 20 years ago.

Um, you know, certainly China's numbers would have contributed massively to the global totals in a way that they don't today. And yet the reports are producing larger and larger estimates that make people's eyes grow wide and think we need to bring the alarm here. I think that's true to a certain extent, but it's also the case that as we're doing that, as we're growing more concerned about some of these issues, um, the global trajectories are pointing in the right direction.

And we may well be on a similar cultural path with climate where, you know, we have a clearer sense of climate's impact across all of these metrics. We start to add up the totals. When we put dollar figures on them, they're unbelievably large. And yet that is happening at a time when we're actually making a You know, not just progress, but faster progress than most serious people thought was possible a decade or two decades ago, and that mismatches, you know, those are some of the boundaries of the of the culture in which we're going to be living for the rest of our lives.

and making sense of those contradictory stories is one of the challenging, but also kind of important parts of my job. Um, you know, how, how it can be that we make sense of some truly apocalyptic indicators and some quite encouraging indicators that are part of the same story, even, even as they seem to contradict each other on the surface.

David Keith: I want to jump in and I know you want to get the listener questions and so do I, but that's one very minor thing, of course, is, is, or important thing is, is the, the, the memory. For these environmental insults. So, so air pollution just lasts a week or so in the atmosphere. So we really are cleaning it up and people in China presumably are living longer and healthier and that's happening now.

And I think we will see progress in India. I'm pretty confident, but climate of course is different. And I think this is the scary thing is, is it gets normalized in the background? Of course, emissions just are. Incrementally making it warmer as we gradually get towards zero emissions, which is still a long way off, then the problem is just staying where it is.

And the question for me, as somebody who'd like to see us kind of do the environmental thing and try and return at least some way, of course, the pre industrial is, will people be motivated to do that at all? Or will it be so normalized that nobody wants to make a change? 

David Wallace-Wells: I think in terms of the geoengineering question, that to me is the real question, which is, you know, did we actually miss the boat on making the case for a more aggressive intervention.

Um, will the public be ready or willing to consider radical, quote unquote, radical solutions if they've already normalized, um, some quite dramatic climate impacts? And I don't know the answer to that, but it seems like it's an open question to me. 

Ed Whittingham: Yeah. The, the concern is that the avocado phenomenon goes just from being on the right to also like across political spectrums, whereby we've talked about in the show before the green fleshy part is green.

Saying, yes, it's a problem, and I accept the overwhelming evidence, uh, for climate change, overwhelming scientific evidence. The brown part is, and there's not a lot we can do it, so it's battened down the hatches, and we need to just focus on adaptation. And I'm gonna look out for myself first. And that, I think, is, is a risk, where we get to that point, where, uh, David W.

W. is, as you've been saying, we just normalize so much of what's happening in the world, And we're not able to hit that alarm sound as loudly as we could and then just people become apathetic or even just fateful about, and I see that as a father of two. I don't quite see that in my kids, but in their generation, so called the anxious generation, I do see some of that prevalence now, which is frightening, disturbing, and not their fault.

But let's pivot to listener questions. On that happy note, Aaron Cosby, who works with the International Institute for Sustainable Development, which is a prominent Canadian think tank, has asked, is it realistic to hope that any international climate progress can be sneaked in the back door? Now at the federal level, and I think he's thinking in light of the Trump administration and what it's likely going to do.

And of course, we've got on a topical note, Canada is going to be hosting the G7 presidency starting next year, and typically there's a climate and energy ministerial. Now, I'll just, I'd love to get your take. I will start, Aaron, by saying very recent conversations with the federal government here in Canada is they think there might actually be more space Under a Trump administration and with appointments like Doug Borgum, the North Dakota governor for secretary of the interior on select files.

And those select files are the ones that. You know, either have direct ties to the fossil fuel industry, like oil and gas, or they fit in that kind of tech not taxes frame. David has, of course, founded a direct air capture company, I work in carbon removal, and actually carbon removal might be one of those areas where you could still see international cooperation happening between Canada and the U.

S. to start. Across the G seven, but maybe David ww would love to get your take on that international space for international cooperation question. 

David Wallace-Wells: I feel like there's so much internal contradiction and chaos around every issue here that it's really hard to plot a clear path. You know, one. somewhat paranoid view, I think, on the left is that, you know, having spent four years out of power, um, the, you know, the sort of Trump comes back to, to DC armed with project 2025 and with a whole army of quite experienced, you know, bureaucrats ready to implement a, a much more aggressive agenda than he left office pushing for in, in 2019, 2020, um, that that administration was kind of exhausted.

And there's been this kind of reboot of expertise and, um, Um, intelligence qualification, and that's going to make the whole movement much more productive than it was in the first, uh, the first term. And I just don't know if that's true. When I think about across areas, it's like you have people in the public health space who are, um, vaccine accelerationists and, you know, and then you have people who like RFK who want to do no, um, new drug, no, New drug development at all.

Um, who's gonna win that fight is very unclear that that dynamic is and that dynamic holds almost everywhere. You have, you know, people who are insisting that the tariffs are a short term negotiating ploy and people who think that Trump's most sincere ideological commitment right now is to put up, you know, 100 percent tariffs on the whole world.

And we just don't know what how that's going to play out or how it's going to shake out. For me, the clearest indication of the likely disorder that we're going to see Is in the Trump campaign 2. 0, which was heralded through the summer and fall as this increasingly professional operation with people who really knew what they were doing, unlike the people who ran the Trump campaign in 2016, 2020.

And the Trump campaign to me was, you know, roughly as chaotic as the last two. Um, he ended up winning, you know, I guess that's to their credit, but you know, it's like he didn't spend his last weeks on the campaign trail talking about the cost of living crisis and what he was going to do to bring down inflation.

He's literally spent talking about like, How people were unfairly criticizing him for bringing up Hannibal Lecter. That was like his favorite talking point. They, his advisors couldn't even like keep him on message. Um, uh, you know, in the closing weeks of the campaign, they got Vance on message, but so I, I don't know what's going to happen.

It seems to me that there is less hostility to not just towards, you know, carbon capture, certainly LNG. You know, also I would include in the same bucket, you know, geothermal and nuclear, which I think are, there's, there's more openness to on the right, generally, um, than there was a few years ago and, and probably on the left too, actually, um, at least in nuclear.

I, I think that those, those trends are important, but I also don't know whether there'll be determinative, but I do think that looking more broadly, you know, taking a broader perspective. And longer historical view in a broader global view, I do think that, um, we're heading in the direction of, you know, continued decarbonization, not just in the areas that we know are already working, which is to say, like solar to a lesser extent, wind EVs and battery technology, but that there's a new suite of tech that is I'm becoming much more operational and scalable and which the world is coming to understand as a workable substitute for some older tech.

And, you know, I think one of the most important stories of the last couple of years, everybody talks about the deployment of, of solar and wind, and that's astonishing and it's changed our global trajectories and, and as everyone says, But I think almost as important is the fact that all of these things that we used to call hard to abate are now seeming much less hard to abate, and that timeline was actually much shorter than I understood it to be, you know, five or six years ago, I really thought a lot of heavy industry, um, a lot of infrastructure was a full generation away from being deployed out in the world.

And that may have been, you know, naive on my part, but I would say that that was that was broadly speaking, the public understanding. And now it seems like we're, you know, in some areas already deploying some low carbon solutions in other areas. We're just a few years away, and that opens up a whole, you know, a whole new landscape of possibility for decarbonization.

It's not just in, you know, in electricity production and energy production. It's really across the board. I do worry a little bit about it. Agriculture, which was something that five years ago, I think a lot of climate people thought, you know, could tell a hopeful story about and now seems to me a little more challenging on that.

The solutions in the agricultural space are seem a little farther away. The things that were emphasized and sold a few years ago now seem like promising. But generally speaking, it feels like one thing that's happened over the last five years is that we've expanded the solution set far beyond solar and wind and EVs and globally.

And on a longer term timeline than just a single presidential term, I think we're likely to see that play out, maybe not as dramatically as, say, the solar deployments have taken place over the last half decade, but again, more dramatically than most analysts would have predicted just a few years ago. And that's incredibly encouraging.

Ed Whittingham: So, uh, we had Rebecca Dell with Climeworks on the show talking about decarbonization and cement in particular a few seasons ago. And, uh, as a result, I've now expunged the phrase hard to abate. From my lexicon. But think about 

David Wallace-Wells: it. What a great development that is. There are many people in climate world who used to use that as such a casual shorthand and now.

You can't really say it while being serious. And that's just an amazing transformation. 

Ed Whittingham: Well, and on a political note, you don't want to say it. You don't like if industry and industry says we're hard to debate. You don't want to say, yes, you're hard to abate. And so therefore we're going to give you a pass.

You've mentioned tariffs and of course the. The talk of the national town, David, WW, in Canada has been the threatened 25 percent tariff on all goods, uh, from coming from Canada. And the Mexico, we care about the Mexicans less, unfortunately, we're myopically focused on our own benefit. But, uh, we've got a question from Justin Fish.

Who is a, uh, dual Canadian American renewable electricity lawyer. And he wondered if human rights concerns that have been plagued, that have plagued clean technology sectors in the past few years. And I've worked in renewables and I've seen, you know, uh, labor human rights concerns attached to modules coming from China or Southeast Asia.

He's wondering if terrorists indirectly can help address those concerns. 

David Wallace-Wells: My sense is that they're going to be, they'll be sold partly on that basis, but that they won't be directed in that towards that purpose in any meaningful way. And so that we're not likely to see a major effect there. Now, if the net result of climate tech protectionism against China is that we see the development of more green tech industries elsewhere in the world, presumably those places will have somewhat more.

for lack of a better word, Western familiar labor practices than the ones that we've seen in China, that would be progress on, on, on human rights there. But I think that that's just not going to be a central part of the focus of anyone designing these tariffs. And so I don't think it may be a secondary effect, but I don't think it's going to be an immediate or primary effect.

And, you know, I wonder in the longer term, What the fate of this whole movement will be is the U. S. Really seriously engaged in trying to build out a solar industrial bait. You know, here it seems to me implausible. The Chinese are so far ahead. There are things that we can do more competitively in the green tech space.

But it seems likely to me that in, say, five years time, we sort of give up on competing On solar and and probably on batteries. Maybe maybe less on batteries. We'll see. But the question of how geoeconomic competition evolves and how our understanding of our comparative advantage and opportunities evolve.

I think those are gonna be much more important factors in driving how we target tariffs. You know, then then human rights concerns. And I also wonder, given what I said at the top about the thinness of Trump's claim to real power in this country, whether the public will tolerate a suite of policies that Almost certainly drive up prices, um, beyond where they would be.

Otherwise he came into office here in part riding this wave of resentment against inflation, how, how much price elevation can he really tolerate? We don't yet know how the suite of tariffs will be designed. We. We, even if we did, we wouldn't know for sure exactly what the effect on prices would be. All of that's very dynamic.

I wonder if four years from now, if even the Republican party will be as devoted to, you know, protectionism in any of these areas as, as it is right now. And I suspect that the Democratic party will be running against Trump's policies here rather than trying to extend them as Biden did in 2020. 

Ed Whittingham: Yeah, I mean, I have the sense U.

S. energy policy under Trump, it's, well, I thought it's twofold. It's undoing and relaxing regulations, uh, to boost oil and gas production and then repealing parts of the Inflation Reduction Act that he and his team don't like and won't be the whole thing, but selected parts. But I think a third is really ceding leadership in clean energy and clean tech manufacturing to China.

And that, you know, already China's the hub for it. And I think four years from now, it's just going to even greater market share. 

David Wallace-Wells: This is one of those things that I, you know, everybody knows anyone who knows anything about climate knows that China is like really powering the, the, the global revolution here, but I still find the scale of their expansion quite.

Breathtaking. Even since the pandemic. I mean, really, we're talking about a period of five years. They've gone from a position, a competitive position to an absolutely dominant position. You know exactly what, what the U. S. is capable of and competing with that is an open question. And whether we have the patience to try, I think is another open question.

You know, when you look at those charts, it's just like astonishing. Solar power production globally really is fundamentally a Chinese story, and you even have, you know, Fatih Birol saying every clean energy story now is a Chinese story. I think that's a little bit of an overstatement, but the fact that the head of the IEA is saying that is a remarkable, remarkable phenomenon.

And I said this, um, casually a few times over the last couple of weeks, but if you had asked me a decade ago, I would have been shocked to see that the clearest indication that sort of America had passed the baton of imperial leadership globally to China. If he had told me 10 years ago that the clearest indication of that would be on climate, I would have been shocked.

Now, maybe that's not exactly what's happening. We'll see how this all shakes out, but it is nevertheless astonishing just how, how rapid their, their ascent here has been and how, um, how dominant they are in, in the sectors that the world is moving fastest to decarbonize. 

David Keith: Have you thought about how that changes the geopolitics of climate because it means that the Chinese government now has a huge stake in pushing renewables driven decarbonization so they can sell more of the gear and that may in some deep ways change the international politics of of mitigation.

David Wallace-Wells: Yeah, I mean, you know, Brian Deese wrote a long piece in foreign policy a few months ago calling for a Green Marshall Plan in which he basically analyzed this from the U. S. side and said that what we really need to be doing going forward is subsidizing, the global consumption of American green tech. And he was sort of grouping a lot of things together that I don't think really go together.

Like the U. S. could be a global leader in geothermal and nuclear. That's true, but it's not the same kind of business as selling solar parts or EVs. Nevertheless, you could see the same logic applied from the, from Beijing and saying, like, we're literally turning out more stuff than the world is ready to install.

Maybe we should help them install it in order to at least think about it. Secure if not developed the market for it. And, you know, in general, China has been a little less aggressive in that kind of development financing than they were a decade ago. But you could see it returning as part of their diplomatic toolkit going forward.

One of the things that I find most interesting about this development, though, is that on all of these other areas, China is geopolitically aligned with a lot of petro states. We'll see how all of this stuff we'll see. Um, but it is possible to imagine China playing a role there that the U. S. Was was actually incapable of playing, which is to say, converting some countries that have real legacy dependence on fossil fuels to something that's a little bit more forward looking and green.

And it's weird for an American person concerned about climate to be crossing their fingers and hoping for Chinese leadership, given All the rhetoric that surrounded China on climate for decades now, but I do think I do think fundamentally that's where we are. I think even if a Democrat comes back into office in 2029, I just don't think that the world is going to accept U.

S. Leadership here in the same way that they they did say around the Paris Accords, 

Ed Whittingham: just in the way as a proud Canadian. It's weird for me to you. advocate before the Canadian federal government to not invest in making a solar panel production chain value chain here. It just doesn't make sense, but I really think it doesn't make sense.

David W. W. So I always get my best tips for new stand up comedians from stand up comedians that I go to see and talk to them after the show. So a lot of people in our audience read you, but we're, last question from Jim McPhail is maybe a tip or two of someone that you're reading, an influencer that may not be on the radar screen up here in Canada.

David Wallace-Wells: Well, I think it all depends on what Area of this issue you're most interested in. And the thing that I've become preoccupied with more over the last couple of years is, um, the international dimension, the climate justice dimension, um, the huge gap between the size of, you know, carbon footprints in places like the U.

S. And, um, in the poor parts of the world and the huge financing gap that those countries face in trying to build a cleaner, healthier, more sustainable energy future for themselves. And I think very few people are In countries like the U. S. Even pretty climate conscious people really see those issues clearly, and I think you could do really well to, you know, learn more about them so that some of the people that I trust most and like reading most.

There's a there's a guy named Tim. So hey, who's, uh, does a lot of work around clean energy here in the U. S. But is Indian. He runs a newsletter with Kate McKenzie called Poly Crisis, which is kind of focused on the geopolitics of clean energy, but does a lot of stuff about it. Development, development, finance, as it relates to these issues.

And then for a more sort of moral perspective, I, um, I find myself really returning again and again and admiring, um, the work of the novelist Amitav Ghosh, who's become a sort of a part time climate and environmental writer himself over the last decade or so. He did a, he did a book called the great derangement, which is about the sort of narratives of climate change, but that was in, I think, 2016, but in the decade since he's written and spoken quite a lot about the way that climate, uh, changes and global inequality intersect.

And I think that that is, you know, I'm not going to say that it's going to dominate American or Canadian political discourse around climate in the next few years. I think it probably won't. But if we're trying to see this clearly from a perspective of moral obligations, um, I think that it's really important to reckon with the perspective of people who are at least speaking on behalf of, um, and often from, uh, the poorer parts of the world who are seeing, you know, Both development and decarbonization as an uphill battle, um, that the rich countries in the world are, are, you know, really not doing very much at all to help them with.

Ed Whittingham: I think that's a fitting note to end on. So David Wallace Wells, I know you're in the midst of a move and you managed to squeeze in, uh, this hour to chat with us. Uh, we're really grateful. Thanks so much. 

David Wallace-Wells: Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it. Great to talk to you guys. 

Ed Whittingham: Thanks for listening to Energy Versus Climate.

The show is created by David Keith, Sarah Hastings Simon, and me. Thank you. Ed Winningham, and produced by Emmett Tandon, with help from Crystal Hickey, Vinouki Arachchi, and Harris Ahmed. Our title in show music is The Wind Up by Brian Lips. This season of Energy vs. Climate is produced with support from the University of Calgary's Office of the Vice President, Research, and the University's Global Research Initiative.

Further support comes from the Trache Family Foundation, the North Family Foundation, The Palmer Family Foundation, and our generous listeners. Sign up for updates and exclusive webinar access at energyversusclimate. com and review and rate us on your favourite podcast platform. This helps new listeners to find the show.

We'll be back with an Ask Us Anything show around Boxing Day, for which we'll call for more listener questions. Looking forward to it, and see you then.