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Bad Idea #25 "Climate catastrophism" with Ted NordHaus · Saving the World From Bad Ideas

0:00
There's a lot of reasons to think that we're pretty close to
0:03
peak emissions, which doesn't mean that, like, you know, to
0:07
stop global warming entirely, you basically need to get to 0
0:12
emissions. But when you put that all
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together, it's really hard to get much beyond 3° of warming by
0:21
the end of century, as opposed to this, you know, 5° that
0:26
everyone just a decade ago thought we were headed towards
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with, you know, close to a degree and a half of warming.
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Today, the overwhelming trend that we continue to see is
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people migrating towards hot climate hazards, not away from
0:44
them. So into flood zones, into
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coastal regions, because that's where economic opportunity is.
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I mean, I have become more and more skeptical about
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geoengineering. I think the most plausible
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scenario for climate catastrophe is that we start geoengineering
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and then we stop. Welcome to saving the world from
1:11
bad ideas. I'm Mark Linus, and I've had a
1:13
few bad ideas in my time. I used to go out in the night
1:16
time to destroy GMO crops, and I also posed nuclear power.
1:19
But then when I looked at the science, I found I got it wrong.
1:22
Oops. I've learned the hard way that
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none of us are right all the time.
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So now I'm here to challenge the assumptions that we all too
1:28
often take for granted because the future depends on us getting
1:32
it right. Hello and welcome to another
1:34
episode of Saving the World from Bad Ideas.
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I'm with Ted Nordhaus today, an old friend of mine and executive
1:40
director of the Breakthrough Institute, which is an eco
1:43
modernist think tank based in California.
1:45
And Ted's also the co-author of an eco modernist manifesto
1:49
alongside yours truly, which was published, I think back in 2015,
1:53
and alongside many others, some of whom shall not be named.
1:56
But Ted, welcome. Welcome to the podcast.
1:58
Good to finally kind of get together and do this so looking.
2:01
Forward to that, Yeah. You've been on our list of
2:04
design invitees for a long time, so it's great to have you.
2:07
We have to start off with a bad idea, and I thought we'd put
2:10
forward producer Rob, not if this is good enough for you, but
2:13
so we thought we'd have your bad idea as climate catastrophism
2:16
because you've just written a piece taking that on.
2:18
And yeah, how does that work? Is that about?
2:20
Is climate catastrophism a bad idea?
2:22
Climate catastrophism is definitely a bad idea.
2:25
So yeah, as you said, I recently wrote an essay about why I'm no
2:30
longer a climate catastrophist. I think I started out like a lot
2:33
of people hearing about this thing called climate change and
2:35
hearing that scientists were saying that if we didn't take
2:39
sort of immediate, very far reaching action, it was going to
2:43
be the end of the world. And over a lot of years, I've
2:46
come to realize that there are some scientists who sort of say
2:50
that, but if you look at the actual science of the science
2:54
tells A much more sort of nuanced and complicated story.
2:58
So I kind of wrote about sort of some of the ways that my views
3:02
on this have changed over a lot of years from that initial
3:07
pretty catastrophist view that I held myself to view now where I
3:12
believe that climate change is real, it's happening, it's a
3:15
problem, we should do something about it.
3:18
And I feel like at the Breakthrough Institute and
3:21
really through sort of the creation of eco modernism, a
3:25
part of what I at least feel like I have been up to has been
3:29
making a a non catastrophist and non apocalyptic case for climate
3:35
action. That we don't have to believe
3:38
that it's the end of the world or that it's going to destroy
3:42
human societies or lead to human instinction to have very good
3:46
reasons to think that we should do something about the problem.
3:50
Now, that doesn't mean we're going to go and sort of
3:53
reorganize the entire global economy over the course of a
3:57
decade or two to do it. But even with all this sort of
4:01
catastrophes claims rhetoric, we were never going to do that
4:04
anyway. So happy to talk a little bit
4:07
more about kind of how I view like the underlying science and,
4:12
and how we should think about climate risk and, and some of
4:16
the kind of, you know, I think particularly some of the claims
4:19
around sort of the role that climate change is playing in, in
4:23
present day and natural disasters.
4:26
I mean, obviously there's a lot to unpack there, so.
4:28
Yeah, that, that that really isn't absolutely.
4:30
There really is. I mean, it seems, seems an odd
4:33
time to write a piece saying declaring you're no longer a
4:35
climate catastrophes when we're imminently crossing the 1.5°
4:39
Paris Agreement limit. The speed of warming seems to be
4:42
accelerating. There's some pretty scary stuff
4:44
I've read about that. And meanwhile, the Trump
4:45
administration is trying to get the whole world hooked back on
4:47
fossil fuels. So I want to really get a
4:50
measure of what the parameters are of your thesis here.
4:53
Are you like, are you a Lukewarmer who now believes that
4:56
the planet is going to warm less than you did before?
5:00
Or is it more about, yes, the planet's going to warm by the
5:03
same amount roughly, but the impacts are going to be more
5:06
manageable or not as bad in some way?
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A. Little bit of both.
5:09
So the first place to start is that I think that oh, if you
5:12
went back a decade ago, I think most people thought that we were
5:16
on track for five plus degrees of warming.
5:19
I mean, you wrote a book called 6° and really when you look at
5:24
the sort of trajectory of the global economy, those were not
5:29
have turned out to be not even were they not sort of business
5:33
as usual scenarios. But it's really hard to get
5:36
there even in kind of worst case scenarios by the end of this
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century. And the reason for that you mean
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thought sorry. It's it's hard to get to 4 to 5
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to 6° of water, Yeah. Yeah, yeah, right, right.
5:48
And, and there's a bunch of reasons for that or the 1st is
5:50
that we're watching, I wouldn't call it population collapse, but
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we are going to hit peak population much sooner than what
5:59
people thought even a decade ago.
6:01
So as opposed to being on track for 10/11 million people by its
6:07
8th century, I think most people, I think increasingly it
6:10
looks like we may be lucky or unlucky, depending on your
6:13
perspective to hit 9 billion people before population peaks
6:17
and then it's going to decline. And we see all over the world,
6:20
most of the world is in some version of a sort of negative
6:24
fertility rates or below replacement rates.
6:26
So population is peaking and stabilizing much faster than
6:31
anyone thought. There are various assumptions.
6:34
You know, I think people especially, you know, 10/15/20
6:38
years ago, we're looking at growth rates in China and going,
6:40
Oh my God, if you just sort of project that out linearly, we're
6:44
going to have massive economic growth and massive massively
6:47
increase energy consumption. And energy consumption is
6:50
definitely going to increase a fair amount.
6:52
But the reality is that most developed economies today are
6:57
struggling with growth rates. We call it secular stagnation
7:00
sometimes, but most advanced developed economies are going to
7:04
struggle to maintain 2% annual economic growth over the course
7:09
of the century. You know, and then the global
7:12
economy, just just, and national economies continues to
7:17
decarbonize. There's a distinction between
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absolute decarbonization, where globally you hit a peak of
7:24
carbon emissions and they start to fall.
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And then there's what's called relative decarbonization, which
7:29
just means that the carbon intensity of each additional
7:32
unit of economic output is lower than the last unit.
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And this this very robust trends.
7:40
Obviously we can talk about some of the promising things that
7:43
have happened with renewable energy over the last decade or
7:47
so, but there's a lot of reasons to think that we're pretty close
7:51
to peak emissions, which doesn't mean that like, you know, stop
7:55
global warming entirely. You basically need to get to 0
7:59
emissions. But when you put that all
8:01
together, it's really hard to get much beyond 3° of warning by
8:09
the end of the century, as opposed to this five degrees
8:12
that everyone just a decade ago thought we were headed towards
8:16
so. So let me, let me stop you there
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and since you kindly mentioned my book 6°, I copied and pasted
8:23
some 3° chapter, right? So these are some of the impacts
8:26
that we might see before the end of the century, at least in a
8:29
three degree world, it makes us as hot as the Pliocene, that
8:33
which is about 3 million years ago, you know, numbers
8:35
crocodiles in the Arctic. So a very different world could
8:38
mean sea level rise in the worst case scenario as high as just
8:41
under 2 meters. So that displaces a few 100
8:43
million people, puts a lot of South Asia into the extremely
8:47
dangerous heat zone. 50 million people exposed to temperatures
8:51
on the wet bulb scale, which are above the kind of biological
8:54
survivability threshold. Drought magnitudes decreased by
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500%. Glacium mass in the Himalayas
9:00
decreases by half. We lose 90% of the of the ice
9:03
and the Andes and the European Alps.
9:05
And it's bad, particularly bad for ecology.
9:06
And this is probably something we should come back to.
9:09
Half of insects, quarter of mammals, nearly nearly half of
9:11
plants and fifths of birds lose half of their climatic rain.
9:14
So it really is devastating for biodiversity and 12 million
9:18
square kilometers of Arctic permafrost, which is there's
9:21
about 3/4 of the global totals now in the melt zone.
9:23
So that's releasing both CO2 and methane.
9:26
And of course, there's no Arctic, there's no sea ice in
9:28
the Arctic at all in the summer. So that doesn't meet your
9:30
definition of a catastrophe. No, actually it doesn't.
9:33
I mean, I would just say that obviously you wrote that book
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over a decade ago and you can go and dig in.
9:40
You know, the more I dig into these impact studies, the more
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I'm like, well, they're kind of, I don't want to say they're
9:46
dodgy, but you know, they're, they're, they're quite stylized
9:49
in a variety of ways, particularly when you start
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getting to things like assumed adaptation of agriculture, the
9:57
time frames that we're talking about.
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So if you're telling me two meters of sea level rise over a
10:03
couple of decades, I'd be very concerned when we're talking
10:05
about two meters of sea level rise over the course of a a
10:10
century or more, I get a lot less concerned about that.
10:14
And I don't believe these these sort of climate displacement
10:17
numbers at all. And in fact, the overwhelming
10:21
with close to a degree and a half of warming today, the
10:25
overwhelming trend that we continue to see is people
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migrating towards hot climate hazards, not away from them.
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So into flood zones, into coastal regions, because that's
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where economic opportunity is. So if you kind of go like there
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is this story that there's and you can see claims that a whole
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lot of this migration is already being driven by climate change.
10:51
But actually there's just very little evidence that that's
10:54
what's driving the vast majority of migration globally.
10:59
And that in fact, people are moving towards climate hazards,
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which also tend to be more developed areas that are less
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vulnerable to those hazards and have better infrastructure.
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Economic development has huge benefits.
11:14
And again, for all of this with a, with a, a degree and 1/2.
11:18
So we're halfway to three, right?
11:21
And what we see is that the numbers around things like
11:23
climate mortality, mortality associated with extreme climatic
11:27
events of all kinds has collapsed this year.
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Unless there's some really quite extreme event or a very terrible
11:38
loss of life due to some kind of major climate event in the last
11:44
like 3 months of this year, this year will likely be the lowest
11:50
loss of life due to climate extremes, certainly in recorded
11:54
human history. And, and last year was as well,
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right, 2024 was also. Yeah.
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I mean these trends are this is a very, very robust long term
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trend. And I agree with you.
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I agree with you. People don't know that.
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People tend to think, I guess if you have to ask the ordinary
12:07
person who's concerned about climate change, do you think
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more people are dying in climate disasters or fewer?
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They'd say more. And that's wrong.
12:13
Yeah. And so these, these are, these
12:15
are, there's this and that. But that's that's not because
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climate change isn't happening, just to be clear about this.
12:20
It's because humans are adapt, adapting and becoming less
12:23
vulnerable. I mean, what?
12:24
What's driving that change? Well, it's, it's, it's, it's,
12:27
it's two things. I mean, the first is exactly
12:29
what you just said, which is that human societies are, are,
12:32
are quite adaptable. Even, you know, before the
12:35
modern era, we had human populations living across a
12:40
range of, of, of extraordinary climate variability from Arctic
12:45
regions to subtropical reasons to highly desertified regions.
12:50
And you look at the range of kind of climatic conditions that
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even sort of pre modern, pre industrial humans had adapted to
13:00
and it's a quite remarkable range.
13:03
So then you obviously bring all the benefits of sort of modern
13:07
advanced industrial, urbanized societies, hard end
13:13
infrastructure, modern energy services, modern emergency
13:17
response, transportation networks that allow people to
13:20
kind of get out of harm's way, forecasting.
13:23
I mean, I can go on and on and on and on.
13:25
All the things that make us much, much more resilient to
13:30
climatic extremes having nothing to do with climate change.
13:34
Remember, like the climate has always been extreme and the
13:37
climate has always been dangerous just simply due to
13:40
natural variability. And then you bring all of this
13:43
adaptive capacity that comes with technology, societal
13:48
affluence, infrastructure, institutions, all that whole
13:54
package of things. And everyone, virtually everyone
13:59
on the planet, is vastly more resilient to climatic extremes
14:04
today than they were 20 years ago than they were 50 years ago
14:08
than they were 100 years ago. Yeah, I've seen this.
14:10
I've seen this in Bangladesh actually, where I think there
14:13
was a cyclone in in the 70s which killed like 1/4 of a
14:16
million people. It was absolutely horrifying
14:17
and. A half million.
14:20
Half million, there we are. And then, right, right and well,
14:23
you tell the story, then you know what I'm going to say.
14:27
Cyclone Bola in 1970, it was a quite severe cyclone.
14:32
And again, you have to remember that this is a very severe
14:35
cyclone really prior to the period that you could
14:38
conceivably kind of observe or even predict theoretically much
14:43
effect from climate change on tropical cyclones.
14:47
But it hit a very, very poor country.
14:50
And it hit a very, very poor country that was in the midst of
14:52
a civil war. Bangladesh was was attempting to
14:55
achieve independence from Pakistan.
14:57
And of course, this is where we see really terrible natural
15:02
disasters of all sorts, whether they're climate related or not.
15:06
It's at the intersection of a natural hazard, whether it's an
15:10
earthquake or a cyclone or a flood or something else.
15:15
And failed states, wars, poverty.
15:20
You put those two things together and you get really bad
15:24
outcomes. So the cyclone hits in 1970,
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kills half a million people and I think the same intensity
15:31
cyclone hit relatively recently and a couple of dozen that the
15:35
most people died. Yeah, I don't, I don't think
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there's been a tropical cyclone in Bangladesh that has killed
15:41
more than 10 or 20 people for at least a decade, maybe longer
15:48
than that. Right.
15:49
And that's to do with forecasting, it's to do with
15:51
shelters, it's to do with evacuations, it's to do with, I
15:53
mean, these are all. Richer too.
15:56
I mean, Bangladesh is sort of on the verge of being a middle
15:58
income country from having been truly one of the poorest
16:03
countries in the world. I mean, it's quite a remarkable
16:05
story and the Bangladesh has been in the midst of some
16:09
political turmoil more recently. But, you know, Even so, societal
16:15
affluence, and that's both sort of private wealth and public
16:19
wealth makes a huge difference in terms of people's
16:23
vulnerability to extreme climatic events of all sorts,
16:27
so. Yeah, yeah, I've told you, I
16:29
worked with the Climate Vulnerable Forum, which is 74 of
16:32
the world's most climate vulnerable countries.
16:33
And how that's defined isn't so much to do with geography,
16:37
whether you're a small owned state or something.
16:38
It's really to do with socioeconomic capacity to deal
16:41
with the impacts of climate change.
16:42
And so that's why the first thing these countries are asking
16:45
for, as alongside the mitigation is, is help, is financial help
16:48
for adaptation, which is only fair given that they are,
16:51
they're not the ones who've caused the problem.
16:53
Yeah, Yeah. I mean, that is a an interesting
16:56
debate and I've written elsewhere that I kind of think
17:00
they're barking up the wrong tree.
17:01
I just don't think this sort of loss in damages is ever going to
17:05
deliver what I think a lot of very poor countries hope it will
17:09
deliver. But it is absolutely the case
17:12
that most of the climate change has been overwhelmingly the
17:17
result of emissions from rich countries.
17:20
And the places and the people who are most vulnerable to it
17:25
live in very poor countries. But, you know, I mean, it's also
17:29
important to read. And Bangladesh is not remotely
17:32
an exception. I mean, it's why we see this
17:34
incredible decline in loss of life due to climate extremes is
17:41
that the whole world has gotten a lot richer, even people in the
17:44
poor countries. And we see the numbers around
17:47
the reductions in in the number of people living in extreme
17:51
poverty. And I think people reasonably
17:53
say that that should not be our goal is to get people from being
17:59
incredibly, extremely poor to just really poor.
18:03
And there's still a lot of people all over the world who
18:07
are really poor. But even going from being in
18:11
real extreme poverty to just a little less poor actually turns
18:17
out to make a huge difference in terms of vulnerability to
18:20
climatic extremes. So that is one part of the story
18:24
here, right? It's these about adaptive
18:26
capacities. It's economic growth, it's
18:31
adaptation, it's infrastructure, it's all these things.
18:35
The other part of the story though, around.
18:37
Sort of again, why I've become a lot less catastrophist is that
18:41
again, even with a degree and a half of warming, when you kind
18:44
of look at how much that amplifies extreme events, just
18:50
the actual climate hazard, how much hotter is the heat wave?
18:55
How much more intense by various measures is the hurricane or the
19:01
tropical cyclone or the flood? The impact that climate has is
19:06
climate change. That climate change has is
19:08
really on the margins of natural variability.
19:11
So the heat wave, that without climate change, you know that
19:17
with the heat wave that we experienced today, that five
19:20
days above for your audience, I'll do this in Celsius, which
19:24
is, yeah, please, centigrade. Yeah, but that's above say 40
19:27
and you get 4 days or five days above where the high temperature
19:31
every over 5 days above 40°C. Well, it's not like without and
19:36
you get this very misleading what's called single event
19:40
attribution, which is, which is. This is.
19:43
When they say it's 50 times more likely because.
19:45
Yeah, 50 times more likely than without climate change.
19:49
And so like for a layperson and you read the headline and you
19:52
read the story in the newspaper or or hear it on, I guess we
19:55
don't read newspapers papers anymore.
19:57
However, we get that real factoid, it's a reasonable, a
20:01
reasonable understanding to go, OK, so that means that the heat
20:05
wave would not have happened except for climate change.
20:10
Well, that is not at all what these single event attribution
20:16
studies are finding. What they're finding, and when
20:20
they say it's 50 times more likely, what they're saying is
20:24
that it was as little. It's a complicated, it's hard to
20:29
explain simply, but basically like we like, we like
20:32
complexity. So, so take your time.
20:33
So, so basically the heat wave that hit 40 C for five days
20:39
without climate change, there would still have been a very
20:43
severe heat wave. It just would have been let's
20:45
say 38C over those five days instead of 40 C And so when they
20:52
say, well, it's like 50 times more likely, it's actually kind
20:56
of a tautological claim and just an extreme heat wave is, is like
21:00
the best example of it because it's literally like you're just
21:03
kind of mostly just adding the anthropogenic average warming to
21:09
the high temperature. So it's a little more
21:11
complicated than that statistically and in the
21:14
modeling and all that, but basically anthropogenic warming
21:17
is making turning the 38° high temperature heat wave to a 40°
21:23
high temperature heat wave. And that would be, it is true
21:28
that is extremely unlikely without climate change.
21:32
But without climate change, you would have still have had a
21:34
very, very extreme climatic event that if you had 1000
21:41
people who died in this heat wave, as we've seen in some of
21:44
these bad heat waves that we've seen across Europe, which is not
21:48
well, despite being very wealthy actually like, like Europeans do
21:53
really, really badly in heat waves.
21:55
Your house is unbuilt for it and and it's old.
21:57
People aren't built for it. The people kind of aren't
22:00
adapted to it. There's no AC either, which you
22:02
apparently have in the US. Yes, we have too much of it
22:05
probably. But anyway, so the reality is
22:07
that the fair amount, most of that mortality would have
22:11
happened at 38° as well as as much as it did in 40°.
22:15
And you can kind of start splitting hairs about is it 1000
22:19
people versus 800 or something like that.
22:21
But but like that's the effect that climate change is having.
22:24
And this is like the clearest case we have of climate
22:29
impacting the climate hazard that is being experienced today.
22:35
And you can see other examples of it that are fairly clear cut
22:39
on various cases like because the atmosphere holds more water
22:43
vapor when it's warming, you get a 10:00-ish percent increase in
22:49
precipitation in like extreme precipitation events, whether
22:53
that's a just an extreme rainfall event or tropical
22:57
cyclone or that kind of thing. There's also things that work
23:00
the other way. So for instance, like I can't
23:03
remember if you get less or more wind shear makes makes it harder
23:07
for tropical cyclones to to form and climate change reduces or
23:13
increases wind shear. It depends.
23:15
Very well, it's. Yeah, that is complex, that's
23:17
how. Yeah.
23:18
So and you start getting into really complex things and
23:22
there's factors sort of driving in in in either direction.
23:25
And so the result of that is that when you start looking at
23:28
long term trends as opposed to the single event attribution,
23:31
things like it's very difficult in most certainly globally and
23:37
even in a lot of regional contexts to find much actual a
23:42
very clear climate signal in terms of intensification of
23:46
extreme climatic events beyond just temperature in most
23:52
regions. And even where you can find
23:54
them, they're not particularly large factors.
23:59
So you have this natural climate variability.
24:02
It remains the main event. It will remain the main event in
24:07
extreme climatic phenomena of all sorts, certainly through
24:12
this century. And the thing that determines
24:15
what the consequences are of these events is how many people
24:19
are in harm's way and how well adapted, how vulnerable they are
24:24
to to these events. And, and, and again, that is
24:29
mostly a socio economic and sort of institutional and human
24:33
societies question. It's not a warming question.
24:37
So you know that as I kind of got my head around that and to
24:42
get your head around for me, that was not just about being
24:46
like, well, there's not a the mortality is going down and you
24:50
normalize the economic costs, they're flat.
24:54
And if you further like really account for what the trend is in
24:59
terms of share of economic output in actual affected
25:04
regions, there's pretty good examples that actually the, the
25:08
cost of these extreme climatic events relative to the overall
25:12
sort of GDP, economic output, wealth in harm's way has
25:18
actually been falling. And so for me, it's like, yes,
25:23
climate change will continue given the trajectory that global
25:28
emissions and the global population, global economy and
25:31
technology are on, we're going to see more warming.
25:34
Climate change will continue to moderately intensify some
25:40
extreme events. And I think the likelihood is
25:43
that human societies will actually continue to become more
25:47
resilient to those events, not less resilient.
25:51
And so then when you get to these really catastrophic claims
25:57
and, and sort of frankly, fantasies, and you have to ask
26:01
yourself, well, what would have to happen to go back to say the
26:08
kinds of sort of mortality rates that we saw in, say, 1970, much
26:15
less 1920 or 1880 without like some real catastrophe having
26:23
nothing to do with climate change, Like the world just
26:26
descends into sort of failed States and.
26:31
Well, nuclear war, which we've both written a showing top Ed
26:35
about and I think it was the Wall Street Journal.
26:36
Right, Right. If you want to, if you want to
26:38
kill a few billion people, that's the way to do it.
26:40
Not not Yeah. Exactly.
26:42
And it's like, it's like in the aftermath of the nuclear war,
26:48
the surviving, whoever survives will be much more vulnerable to
26:53
climate change. But that's kind of sort of, I
26:59
mean, it's almost laughable to be concerned about it in that
27:02
way, right? Like.
27:03
Well, I mean, nuclear, nuclear winter is a climate change, just
27:06
in the opposite direction. And it's.
27:08
Absolutely anthropogenic climate change.
27:10
I guess when most people go with this maybe in pushing back on to
27:14
you would be would be to talk about tipping points and I've
27:18
put the collapse of the Amazon in my 3° chapter.
27:20
It's very uncertain. All the tipping points are very
27:22
uncertain, which is one of the issues here.
27:24
It's difficult to quantify when these things will happen.
27:27
The models will say different things, but these these are are
27:30
probably genuine features in the Earth system.
27:32
They've tipped before in different geological areas which
27:36
have been warmer. Do you not lose any sleep over
27:38
the the Amazon? The Arctic?
27:41
I mean, I lose a lot of sleep over it, but not because it's
27:44
going to kill all the people. You know, Like I lose sleep over
27:48
the Amazon because I think the Amazon is just an incredible
27:52
sort of source of biodiversity and wonder and beauty and
27:57
complexity and evolutionary or evolutionary sort of.
28:04
I can't even tell you it's exact.
28:07
I couldn't actually quantify why I care about the Amazon, but I
28:11
care about the Amazon not because I think that it's at
28:16
risk of collapse and if it collapses, it's going to like
28:21
produce a human catastrophe. And just if you go to like,
28:27
well, what is the real threat to the Amazon?
28:29
It's not climate change, it's deforestation desource station
28:32
contributes to climate change. But when you look at like all of
28:37
the again, you look at all of the kind of almost all of the
28:41
recent work on sort of what is driving these dynamics in the
28:47
Amazon that would they kind of continue amidst all this
28:51
uncertainty could create collapse.
28:54
It's not climate change. It is.
28:56
It is literally just like the thing that leads the to the
29:00
collapse of the Amazon is just cutting down all the trees or
29:04
not all the trees, but you get to you get to a tipping point
29:08
where you clear enough of the forest that it stops doing the
29:12
thing. That the hydrological thing,
29:15
Yeah. Hydrological thing, right?
29:17
So it's like, I, I also don't think that's likely to be a,
29:21
again, catastrophic for human societies, but it will be
29:24
absolutely catastrophic for the Amazon and all of the
29:28
biodiversity there. And we should try to stop the
29:31
deforestation. And I don't need to like,
29:34
believe that there is a looming human apocalypse to want to save
29:40
the Amazon. It's absurd.
29:42
Which is like the same for coral reefs.
29:43
I mean, I've, I've seen coral reef bleaching in real time in
29:46
the Maldives and elsewhere. And there's no doubt this is
29:48
driven by by warming, I mean the marine heat.
29:50
Yeah, and it is one of the the real direct biodiversity
29:55
consequences. And again, I think that I mean,
30:00
and this is where it gets hard, right?
30:02
Like like 1 I even if we lose most of the coral reefs again, I
30:08
don't think it will be a human catastrophe if people are like,
30:10
oh, there's all these people who depend on the coral reefs, but
30:13
the coral reefs go away. Certainly in the context of sort
30:17
of continuing social and economic modernization.
30:22
I, I, I don't think this is going to be like a, a
30:25
catastrophe for human or material catastrophe for human
30:29
societies. It will be a catastrophe for
30:32
biodiversity and it will be due to climate change.
30:36
I mean, you can find there's other factors, right?
30:38
But but climate change is going to have a a lot is going to be
30:42
responsible for a lot of that. And honestly, like, I don't
30:49
think you're going to convince 2 to 3 billion Chinese and Indians
30:54
not to continue to pursue economic development and sort of
31:01
economic modernity to save the coral reefs.
31:04
That's it's like, I don't I wouldn't say it's, it's
31:08
unfortunate for the coral reefs and all we're going to lose.
31:10
I'm enough of a humanist to be like, I can understand why the
31:16
Chinese and the Indians and the Africans, if they have the
31:20
opportunity, are not going to like, turn away from continuing
31:26
economic development to save coral reefs.
31:29
Although, I mean, it's a bit more optimistic than that in
31:32
that China's rapid economic development is now largely
31:35
driving the global clean energy transition, right?
31:37
Yeah, no. And, and yeah, so, and of course
31:40
in that way too, it's also very double edged.
31:43
If we're going to lose the coral reefs at 2°, then kind of like
31:48
we're going to lose, we better figure out if we want to save
31:51
that, we better figure out how to genetically engineer coral.
31:56
Or maybe I'm, I'm a sceptical of solar geoengineering, but you
32:01
know, there's like a set of other ways that you could
32:04
theoretically save a lot of those coral reefs, but I think
32:07
it's extremely unlikely you're going to do it by like keeping
32:11
global warming well below 2°. Yeah, I want to shift the
32:17
conversation back to politics a bit.
32:19
I mean, we're in a different place.
32:20
If you'd written this piece, maybe well before Trump, I
32:24
guess, at least. Trump well, I sort of did
32:26
actually wrote it in. I wrote a different version of
32:29
this for a magazine called New Atlantis in the spring of 2024
32:33
and. Did you get, did you get
32:35
cancelled? I mean, I was going to say like,
32:37
if this would have got you cancelled a few years ago when
32:41
the climate movement felt very powerful.
32:43
It feels now like it's very much on the back foot.
32:45
I mean, climate denialism is now the official policy of the, of
32:48
the United States. Trump stood up in front of the
32:50
UN and said climate change was a hoax.
32:52
I mean, you can't get much more blatant than that.
32:54
So like it what, what function does it serve pushing back
32:57
against the, the, the climate sort of demagoguery now, if you
33:02
want to characterize it that way?
33:03
Well, I mean, honestly, I think it's important to kick it when
33:06
it's down. That's kind of you.
33:09
That's a nice philosophy to have, isn't it, I?
33:11
Mean, I, I, I, I think that like, if you kind of go like,
33:15
well, how did we get here? There's a lot of reasons that we
33:18
got here, but one, not insignificant 1 was the climate
33:23
movement and the huge backlash that we've had to the climate
33:27
movement in part because of the these apocalyptic and
33:31
catastrophic claims, in part because it just became kind of
33:35
part of what do people call it, the Unicars, the Monocas is.
33:39
That the kind of general general wokery sort of thing.
33:41
Yeah, it's climate change and and Palestine and George Floyd
33:46
and every other kind of left. The progressive issue all folded
33:53
up together. But the climate issue, I think
33:57
if you kind of go and like I, I wrote a piece recently, a series
34:01
of essays about sort of Marx and ecology and the way that Marx
34:05
gets sort of repurposed to the captured by environment.
34:10
Well, Marx himself didn't, but the sort of post 60s sort of
34:15
left kind of repurposes Marx to kind of be suddenly become an
34:20
ecologist. And this is all part and parcel
34:23
of sort of liberal and leftist parties all over the world in
34:27
becoming increasingly alienated from working class
34:31
constituencies which even enriched developed countries.
34:35
So still typically hold the balance of power.
34:38
And I personally believe that the kind of integration of sort
34:45
of, according to Hoyle, environmentalism into the sort
34:49
of sort of ideology and sort of praxis of center left and
34:57
leftist parties all over the developed world over the last
35:01
generation has had a lot to do with the kind of departure of
35:07
working class constituencies. But Tom, can you evidence that?
35:10
I mean, how'd you know? Is this?
35:13
Does polling show that environmentalism is that
35:15
unpopular? It shows that that many of most
35:18
of the things that environmentalists want to do
35:20
like so. So when you when the rubber hits
35:22
the road on climate and a lot of other issues, it's basically
35:27
things that make energy more expensive, that often make food
35:30
more expensive, that make transportation more expensive.
35:34
And if you're kind of well educated, high socioeconomic
35:39
status, kind of talking heads like you and me and we live in
35:44
these sort of, oh, I guess you don't live in one as much as I
35:48
do maybe when I'm not in. New that's what you're talking
35:50
about. What do?
35:50
What do I live in big house? These sort of urban, sort of
35:54
coastal, it just doesn't affect me.
35:56
Like $5 gasoline, which has most of the United States just up in
36:01
arms, doesn't affect me that much.
36:03
I don't drive that much or I don't.
36:05
Yeah, I don't, I don't. I have an EV, but I mean it does
36:08
cost me 400 pounds a month because it's new.
36:11
So that's something that somebody wouldn't be able to pay
36:13
on a very low income so. So, you know, like when you
36:16
start talking about like we're going to phase out internal
36:19
combustion vehicles in 10 years and here's our carbon price that
36:24
just like raised the cost of petrol by a dollar gallon and
36:28
suddenly your electricity price, your electric monthly
36:31
electricity bill. Because we're, you know, pushing
36:35
lots of wind and solar and various other things and various
36:38
other things to electric like that.
36:40
Like has, if you're like a, a working class household, if
36:45
you're in the sort of bottom half of the income distribution,
36:49
that's a way bigger share of your income than it is for
36:52
people like you and me. And we've been doing this in
36:55
various ways for decades. And like one of the things that
37:02
I think sort of center right and right wing and just sort of
37:07
populist parties figure out is that this stuff is really,
37:10
really unpopular and especially the policies.
37:13
So it's one thing. People don't like it when the
37:15
price of gasoline is high. They really don't like it when
37:21
some part of that is due to like, you know, a party that has
37:25
decided that climate change is really a big problem, deciding
37:29
to like, put a car, establish a carbon tax that's responsible
37:33
for it. And you can go.
37:33
And there's a whole literature on the fact that these taxes,
37:39
gas taxes, carbon taxes, things like that are just much, much
37:43
more salient for voters then either sort of price increases
37:50
that aren't at least so obviously the result of policy
37:55
decisions and particularly taxes of one sort or another.
37:59
And also other sorts of taxes. Like you would be hard pressed.
38:04
Certainly in the United States, I'm less knowledgeable.
38:08
You'd be hard pressed to find any tax that is as pot as
38:12
unpopular in the United States as a gas tax.
38:16
I mean, it's, it's very, I think the whole clean energy
38:19
transition has been very regressive probably in terms of
38:22
its impact on income distribution.
38:25
Yeah, there's, there's, there's and there's lots of evidence for
38:28
that. When in fact, Once Upon a time
38:30
we people admitted it. Like when you had these like
38:32
James Hansen and other people are very into these sort of cap
38:35
and dividend things where you would put your carbon tax on.
38:39
But then like everyone would get this dividend.
38:40
And you could sort of see these economic analysis that would
38:44
show that if you kind of did it that way, it was more equitable
38:48
and less regressive. But I was a before I kind of
38:52
started writing screeds about climate catastrophism and things
38:56
like that and manifestos. I was a pollster for a lot of
39:00
years. And when I did, I actually did
39:02
some, like I actually moderated some of the very first focus
39:06
groups like testing these various sorts of environmental
39:09
tax shifting ideas. The things that you saw is that
39:11
people had no doubt that you were going to raise their taxes
39:14
and raise the cost of things for them.
39:17
And they were completely, completely cynical and
39:21
disbelieving that you would they would ever get the the money
39:25
would ever be refunded. Well, that that'd.
39:27
Be right. It's not happened.
39:28
I mean their taxes are there. And I mean in, in Europe, it's
39:32
happened through an emissions trading scheme, which means that
39:35
the the income's gone to the big companies who are doing the
39:37
polluting. I mean, it's been grandfathered
39:38
and it couldn't be worse than that in terms of any kind of
39:42
equality, no. You end up, you know, like a
39:44
decade plus ago when I like my, I'm not sure if it was my
39:48
original cancel. I've been cancelled like 6 times
39:51
Mark. You're ahead of me, damn you.
39:53
One of the things that I got cancelled for was just sort of
39:56
we started putting out analysis of like what the Waxman Marquee,
40:01
which was the big US cap and trade proposal, like how much
40:05
emission, like when you factored in the trading schemes and all
40:09
these free emissions allocations that they gave to polluters and.
40:15
All of these other things it allowed like a huge increase in
40:18
emissions. It was, it was sort of sold as
40:21
this cap that was going to kind of ratchet down and ratchet down
40:23
and ratchet down. But when you looked at all the
40:26
offsetting both domestically and internationally, various other
40:30
sorts of price off ramps and all the free allocations that they
40:34
were giving, it allowed for just massive expansion of US
40:38
emissions. So that got me.
40:41
That was maybe my second cancellation.
40:43
Like the first one was the death of environmentalism.
40:46
The second one was actually kind of showing what the real numbers
40:50
on the cap and trade bill were. The third one was coming out as
40:54
pro nuclear. And it turns out it is this
40:56
amazing statistic that US emissions today are still like
41:02
vastly below, very, very significantly below what they
41:06
would have been, what would have been allowed under the Waxman
41:10
marquee caps. And remember that we were like,
41:13
because we were giving these allocations away for free, like
41:18
we, it would have just incentivized like the big, the
41:21
biggest driver of that remains the coal to gas transition where
41:24
we have all this cheap gas so close all these coal plants in
41:27
the US and, and literally the Waxman marquee cap and trade
41:31
bill because it gave so much of what was really a very valuable
41:36
pollution, right? Two polluters would have
41:40
subsidized them to keep these pole coal plants open.
41:43
So US emissions today had wax when Markey passed almost
41:47
certainly would be significantly higher than they are.
41:50
Wow. And that was the bombers.
41:51
Like flagship climate, Yeah. This was the, this was the like
41:55
Obama, Obama came in and like kind of ran on the Breakthrough
41:59
Institute program, right? We're going to build this new
42:02
clean energy economy. We're going to invest in the new
42:05
clean energy economy. But then, like when it came time
42:08
to like go actually kind of do a climate bill in the US Congress,
42:12
the environmental groups, and this was like really before
42:16
there was really a climate movement, this was just the old
42:18
of the Sierra Club and the natural really old line groups
42:23
that kind of gained power particularly, you know, and
42:26
almost exclusively in the Democratic Party in the US from
42:30
the 1970s onward. We're kind of really going to
42:32
drive that program and they wanted a cap and trade program.
42:36
They were back then was ironic because now they all take credit
42:41
and claim that on for the IRA before it was repealed and
42:45
what's the most important climate legislation
42:47
transformational, all that. Well, all those groups were like
42:50
highly, highly skeptical of that approach to the problem.
42:54
And they just saw climate change just a big kind of an air
42:59
pollution problem on steroids that you would just basically
43:02
regulate. And then after 1990 when
43:06
Congress sort of shifted the air pollution regime to this market
43:10
based cap and trade program, they all were like, yeah, that's
43:14
what that's how we'll solve climate change is with this
43:16
market based cap and trade program.
43:18
So that's despite Obama literally running like, I'm
43:21
going to like save the US economy by investing in this all
43:26
the new jobs and all the new opportunity that would come with
43:29
this new cleaning. You know, and there were lots of
43:32
things to be skeptical about. Some of the claims that were
43:34
made there, and I bear some responsibility is sort of one of
43:37
the people who kind of created that whole argument about how to
43:42
solve climate change. But but that's what he ran on.
43:45
But like the actual vehicle for dealing with it was a pretty old
43:49
school environmental approach. So where have we ended up now
43:52
with Trump? I mean, what's your take on the
43:54
current administration's energy policy and what impact it might
43:57
have on US emissions and the climate generally?
44:00
I mean, the amazing thing is that if you kind of pull back
44:05
and you look at just to take the US, but it's true globally as
44:08
well. If you look at just the rate of
44:13
US decarbonization going back to certainly at the very least back
44:18
to the oil embargo, the 1973, the first oil embargo, when
44:22
suddenly everyone's like, holy crap, we have an energy crisis.
44:25
We need to pay much more attention to energy.
44:28
The rate of decarbonization, the US has been steady and
44:32
consistent for decades, for literally 50 years and has been
44:38
kind of pretty robust and, and, and at least apparently
44:41
unaffected by Republican presidents and Democratic
44:46
presidents by sort of periods of kind of green enthusiasm and
44:52
periods of retrenchment. So I certainly think in the sort
44:55
of medium term, we will look back.
45:00
Even if you take the, the, the, the sort of 2020 and the
45:03
pandemic kind of real collapse of emissions out of it.
45:07
US emissions fell faster annually on an annualized basis
45:13
in the first Trump administration than they did
45:17
during either the 2 terms of the Obama administration or the
45:22
Biden administration. That's crazy.
45:24
So it's like it has no policy, has no relevance at all in
45:28
terms. Of, I mean, I, I would have a
45:30
slightly a more nuanced view of it, which is that what really
45:33
matters for pot for in terms of the, the policy really only
45:37
matters in so far as it's sort of having an, a real impact on
45:41
the long term rate of technological change.
45:45
So if I kind of go and I forget about administrations, forget
45:49
about climate targets that they adopted and then they got rid of
45:55
and was a in Paris or out of Paris, in Kyoto or out of all of
45:59
that stuff. And I go, well, what's driving
46:02
this decarbonization? Certainly on the energy supply
46:05
side, it's been a set of things that have had very substantial
46:10
policy support going back for decades.
46:12
It's 20% of the US electrical system comes from nuclear
46:17
energy. And that doesn't happen without
46:20
policy. That goes all the way back to
46:22
the 1950s. If you go and you look at like
46:25
the coal to gas transition and the shale gas revolution, that
46:29
was policy. I mean it was private sector was
46:31
innovative and did all the private sector things.
46:33
But there was huge policy support for it, including like
46:37
production tax credit for non conventional gas production for
46:40
over 20 years in the 1980s and 1990s, huge investments in
46:46
demonstration tech projects and technologies by national
46:50
laboratories, all of that. And again, you say the same for
46:53
solar and wind and batteries. So you know, the thing that will
46:58
determine an electric vehicles and literally everything that
47:02
you go like is contributing to decarbonization might decrypt
47:06
contribute on the sort of supply emission side to decarbonization
47:10
over the long term, as well as a bunch of the energy efficiency
47:13
heat pumps. Literally all of this stuff has
47:16
had long term policy support of one time, one type or another.
47:21
And the stuff that's most important is the sort of early
47:24
stage commercial, you know, getting these things
47:26
commercialized into market once they're kind of commercialized
47:29
into market, or you can keep throwing subsidies at it and do
47:33
various sorts of deployment mandates.
47:35
But but the main event is kind of getting to the point where
47:38
you have a a reasonably commercially competitive
47:41
technology. So I look at the Trump
47:43
administration on the one hand, like wind, the deployment was,
47:49
was really flagging in the US even before Trump, commodity
47:52
prices permitting. And, and there were a whole
47:56
bunch of other obstacles that just were making it really hard.
47:58
And like literally big wind companies trying to sort of
48:02
develop offshore wind in the US were literally cancelling
48:05
projects all through the Biden administration because literally
48:08
like they just couldn't get them to pencil out even with quite
48:11
generous subsidies. Solar is a whole different
48:14
story. And there's there's tariffs and
48:16
other things that are kind of making that a bit more
48:18
difficult. But I think we'll see record
48:21
deploy solar deployment this year and maybe it won't grow
48:25
quite as fast as it might otherwise.
48:27
And then next. You mean you're talking in the
48:29
US? Still not in the US.
48:30
In the US. So they're still going to be
48:32
even with Trump kind of getting rid of all the subsidies and
48:36
whatever is going to be a lot of solar deployment.
48:38
So then you kind of go, well, what's next, right?
48:40
I think they'll be a lot, a lot of continue almost every, all
48:44
solar that's being deployed in the US now is being deployed
48:47
with batteries and they're still quite significant subsidies for
48:51
battery storage that survived the kind of repeal of the IRA,
48:56
which was not fully repealed. In the next 5 years, we'll start
48:59
to see this next generation of geothermal coming online, which
49:03
will provide what people call clean firm generation stuff
49:07
that's not variable and that you can kind of actually produce
49:11
electricity on demand. Arguably the biggest thing
49:15
positively that the Trump administration is doing or
49:18
affecting climate is it it's just they're kind of all in on
49:22
nuclear in a way that so no U.S. President or administration
49:26
really since Eisenhower has been.
49:29
I mean, I think there are some real risks there of just sort of
49:35
kind of trying to push things that aren't really ready and
49:38
sort of losing public confidence and things like that.
49:41
So I, I don't want to say it's all roses here, but I do think
49:45
that this administration is going to actually get some next
49:48
generation reactors deployed in the next 4 years, which no one
49:52
thought was possible and they're going to kind.
49:54
Of be like a kind of nuclear version of warp.
49:56
Speed. Yeah, yeah, yes, it really is.
50:00
And they've all they're now. They've now got Bobby Kennedy
50:04
Junior at HHS trying to undo everything that they did, which
50:09
is insane. But like, literally like we can
50:11
thank Trump for the COVID vaccine and for I think what one
50:15
way or another is probably going to be a real revolution just
50:18
more broadly in miRNA. In cancer, cancer treatments and
50:22
all sorts of things. Kind of quite, quite remarkable
50:24
possibilities here and they're coming really fast.
50:26
So there is a world here where despite all of this, like
50:30
actually Trump, despite getting in front of the UN and calling
50:34
climate change a hoax, like this administration actually ends up
50:36
like getting a bunch of nuclear and geothermal deployed that
50:41
accelerates decarbonization in the US and maybe even globally.
50:45
Hindsight's 2020 and I think that.
50:48
You know what? Well, why do they, sorry to
50:50
interrupt, why do they even light nuclear?
50:52
I mean, they don't care about the climate.
50:53
It's not about decarbonization. What what's what's the
50:56
motivating factor? Is it just to own?
50:58
Is it to own the libs? I mean some kind of culturable
51:01
thing. There's there's a there's an own
51:03
libs part of it. I I, I, I think to give kind of
51:06
people on the right a bit more credit.
51:08
I just think there's a view that energy density and a sort of
51:14
scale and rely firm, reliable power matter.
51:18
I'm in a way that I think the left and liberals get kind of
51:22
captured by the Amory love and soft energy path.
51:26
Which is for those who don't know, just give us a quick.
51:28
Yeah, this is the idea that wind, solar, energy efficiency
51:32
and batteries basically can power the whole world can can
51:36
meet all of our energy needs. And it's always been like a
51:39
pretty preposterous idea when you really kind of look at all
51:42
the different ways that we use energy.
51:45
But that has been the sort of default like every energy plant
51:50
produced by literally every environmental, you know, kind
51:53
of, again, according to Hoyle Environmental Organization for
51:56
50 years has been one version or another of the soft energy.
51:59
Yeah. It's been 100% renewables for
52:01
sure, although I have to say that's less wrong than I
52:03
originally thought. Given how rapidly solar and
52:05
batteries have come down in price and how that's not the
52:08
same. It's going to 100% of course I.
52:10
Mean, I think no, I mean it's going to be I think cheap solar
52:12
is an amazing thing and it is not remotely going to approach
52:16
or ever approach 100%. It just it just it's just
52:20
implausible between the variability between the need for
52:24
heat and all sorts of really important industrial processes.
52:29
It just it just like this is not going to happen.
52:32
And I think that cheap solar, a lot of really cheap solar with a
52:36
lot of really cheap batteries, we'll get further than I
52:40
probably would have thought 15 years ago when I really sort of
52:44
became a new, a real full throated nuclear advocate.
52:49
But that is just, it's just sort of part of the puzzle.
52:52
It's not the whole puzzle, and it's never going to be the whole
52:55
puzzle. One another part of the puzzle
52:57
is that the climate Dumas tend to be anti nuclear, which
53:00
doesn't sort of stack out right. If you were that worried about
53:03
the impacts of climate change killing a billion, 2 billion
53:05
people, you wouldn't be against low carbon energy.
53:08
And literally like now it kind of you go read like a Bill
53:11
McKibben or something like that and they're like no, no, no, no,
53:13
I'm not anti nuclear. Just like the solar so cheap.
53:16
We just it's a waste of time and waste of money to build more
53:19
nuclear. And now and this is the change,
53:21
like the changes that now they're like, yeah, but but
53:24
don't don't close the nuclear. Yeah, Bill.
53:27
Bill said maybe you heard it. Bill said this on on this very
53:30
podcast only a couple of episodes ago, which I think was
53:32
a shift for him. It was saying don't, don't close
53:34
the nuclear and it may have a role, which I felt was a shift.
53:37
No, I mean it's sort of a shift. It's I mean, you could call it a
53:41
shift. You could also call it a
53:42
rearguard action. But because I kind of kind of
53:45
like, like it's really what's happened in the last decade
53:48
thanks to your work and mine and a bunch of other people is that
53:53
it's just, it's just like you can still sort of maintain some
53:58
kind of credibility and say like nuclear is just too expensive to
54:03
build more of it. And we've got all this cheap
54:06
solar, so we should do that. It's faster, it's cheaper or
54:08
whatever. But the thing that is just
54:11
totally uncredible and indefensible at this point is to
54:15
like, still be advocating for closing nuclear plants that are
54:18
actually literally creating clean energy today.
54:22
Like the German, like the German Greens have done, and we're just
54:25
about to release a report quantifying the number of
54:27
additional deaths from air pollution and millions of tons
54:30
of carbon dioxide that have been released as a result.
54:32
I mean, it's it's it's frankly incredible.
54:34
Listen, I don't want to close without going back to the
54:36
climate just one last time, though.
54:38
Give us like, is there something that could happen in the climate
54:41
that would make you worried again and make you a
54:43
catastrophist again like some? Yeah.
54:45
I mean, I would have to like get more convinced that you could
54:48
see really rapid climate change and, and, and, and climate
54:51
change in terms of like at the level of like hazards that
54:54
actually affect human population.
54:56
You told me we're going to see 2 meters of set of sea level rise
55:00
in a decade or two. I would be very concerned if you
55:03
told me that warming could accelerate in a way that like
55:08
again, like agriculture, large swaths of agriculture would
55:13
become unviable and sort of decadal time scales.
55:17
I would be very concerned. I think when we start talking
55:21
century or when we get to a lot of these tipping points, one of
55:23
the things that nobody talks about is that you look at these
55:27
tipping elements as I think now the term of our not tipping
55:30
points because like they are in some cases irreversible, but
55:37
they happen over hundreds or even thousands of years.
55:40
So you look at like you can get to sort of like a faster
55:44
disintegration of the Greenland Ice Shelf, but even like kind of
55:48
pretty fast disintegration that's like 800 to 1000.
55:52
It's a it's a few centuries. I agree.
55:53
Yeah, yeah, W Antarctic ice shelf is several 1000 years.
56:00
What's what's incredible is some of the geoengineering proponents
56:02
are talking about stabilizing ice sheets artificially with
56:05
like curtains under the water and all these kind of crazy,
56:08
crazy schemes. And that's presumably predicated
56:10
on the fact that they think these things are happening in,
56:12
in a desperately catastrophic immediate sense, right?
56:16
And having looked at the rate of warming of the planet and the
56:20
fact we're crossing 1.5 in maybe this year, maybe next year,
56:24
maybe a couple of years. Hence, the only physically
56:26
plausible way actually to keep the planet 1.5 is probably to do
56:29
to do engineering, particularly given that we're doing the
56:32
opposite at the moment by really removing sulfate pollutants from
56:36
shipping fuels and coal-fired power stations and so on, like
56:40
you mentioned earlier. And I just want to end with
56:41
this, like, where'd you come down on that on that issue?
56:44
I mean, I have become more and more skeptical about
56:47
geoengineering and the reason for that is that like like the
56:50
thing that I have a have catastrophist, the thing that
56:55
where you can get me back to being a catastrophist is rapid
56:58
climate change again like decadal scale.
57:04
Varies. Maybe termination short term?
57:07
Yes, yes, I think the most plausible scenario for climate
57:14
catastrophe is that we start geoengineering and then we stop.
57:19
And like, it would be truly, it would both be ironic and somehow
57:25
predictable that like the impact of the climate catastrophism
57:30
would be to create the climate catastrophe.
57:33
Because basically you get everybody so freaked out by
57:37
these what are pretty implausible fears that
57:40
anthropogenic warming due to greenhouse gas emissions is
57:44
going to like very rapidly change the climate and kill us
57:47
all, that we convince the world to start geoengineering.
57:51
And then once you start, you really can't stop until you've
57:55
like basically gotten rid of all fossil fuel emissions.
57:59
And there's all sorts of ways in which you could, it's entirely
58:02
plausible to see various sorts of geopolitical, social, other
58:06
kinds of conflicts resulting in actually stopping at which point
58:11
you do get really rapid climate change.
58:14
And that for me is like, that's where I'm like, you get, you get
58:21
me catastrophic there. Wow.
58:23
Well, so climate catastrophism can cause the climate
58:25
catastrophe via geoengineering. Producer Rob's an advocate of
58:28
geoengineering, but he's on mute.
58:29
You can't hear him, so he can't he can't defend himself here.
58:32
But I'm just so grateful to you, Ted, for all your time and for
58:36
all your insights. It's been absolutely fascinating
58:38
conversation and I think a lot of people will will have learned
58:41
a lot from it. We're not going to cancel you.
58:42
In fact, we'd love to have you back and.
58:45
Always happy to do it Mar. Definitely, and keep up with
58:48
good work with the Breakthrough Institute.
58:49
And thanks again for coming on Saving the World for Bad Ideas.
58:55
Thanks so much for listening to Saving the World from Bad Ideas,
58:58
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