 Hey there, welcome. Can you all hear me okay? Got it, okay, great. Thank you so much for coming. My name is Rachel Alexander. I'm the Associate Director of New America's California and we're really pleased to be hosting this event today with David Ball-Swells and with Autumn McDonald here at the beautiful Bloomberg Beta Space. So I think we're gonna have someone come in from Bloomberg Beta to give you a little bit of an orientation of the space and to address you about the company but before that starts, I'm gonna pick us up. So I think like many of you, I have been thinking a lot lately about climate change and in fact, in my case, thinking a lot about it is putting it pretty lately. Recently, my wife and I heard an advertisement for an NPR special in which a panel of psychologists would be counseling people on how to manage their climate-related anxiety and my wife was listening and she kind of shot me a side-long glance and she said, maybe we should tune into that. She said it really gently and she's wonderfully sensitive to my feelings in general. So she said we, you know, but I knew she really meant me because I'm the one who regularly keeps her up at night talking about polar bears and talking about climate refugees and especially talking about our son who's a toddler and the world that he's going to inherit. So my climate anxiety, to be honest, is pretty much ever-present. It's like a low simmer that is quick to boil over when I read particularly troubling news. The panic reared its head most recently. On the day I read the article from the Harvard Climate Adaptation Expert who identified cities near the Great Lakes as the most ideal locations for people like us West Coasters who would need to be fleeing these intensifying fires. Did you all see that article? That one really got to me. That night when my wife came home from work, it was the only thing I wanted to talk about. We just dropped everything I told her, forget trying to find a house in California, we are moving to Minnesota. The next day though I got a much needed reality check. In a rebuttal I read from writer Lindy West. So what she wrote is to be clear, are we just breezily submitting to dystopia here? And her point was that humanity can still take action to avert major elements of climate catastrophe. And this move to Minnesota mentality that I am so prone to actually speaks to a pretty paralyzing hopelessness that not only feels really terrifying to experience but is also the surest way to guarantee that we do experience the worst of what a warming world could bring. So to be clear, I do think that there is value in helping people especially the most vulnerable people plan for adapting to the changes that are already underway. But leaving the conversation simply at let's move to Duluth can feel deeply disempowering. As an alternative we must have faith that humanity will take the steps necessary to stem climate change and to let that faith fuel our personal and collective action. Our charge as you're going to hear David articulate today is to stay engaged with the truth without getting paralyzed by the challenge that it presents. This work of translating feelings into action is something that New America, California cares a lot about. We promote problem solving efforts that are locally grown and grounded in economic equity in which technology, innovation, and compelling storytelling yield transformative solutions for our most marginalized community members. One of the ways that we do that is through gatherings and events like this one that help Californians take action on our state's most pressing issues. When it comes to climate change we at New America, California are particularly concerned with its equity implications like how it will disproportionately impact people living in poverty. How it could undermine people's ability to have voice and self-determination in our democracy. How it could grow the racial inequalities that are already stifling opportunity in communities across our state. Our director at New America, California, Autumn McDonald who's going to moderate our discussion today, recently published a piece about how to turn feelings of overwhelm into productive action. And this is one reason I'm particularly glad that she's leading the conversation with David today. Autumn brings two decades of social impact experience leading partnerships with foundations, nonprofits and government. Before joining New America, she served as a senior advisor to San Francisco mayor at Lee focusing on women's economic empowerment and shaping policies, programs and public private initiatives to improve economic and social opportunities for women and families throughout the Bay Area. So as you listen to Autumn and David today I encourage that you not move to Minnesota just yet and avoid the temptation of tuning out or giving up. We cannot change what we do not first accept. Fear and paralysis might be way stations but we must continue through them on the journey to transforming our climate future. And David has some pretty good ideas about how to do that. So before I pass the mic over to Autumn, I'm going to pass it first to Malia from Bloomberg. We'll give you a welcome to the space. Thank you. Sorry, we're doing the reverse I guess. Good afternoon. My name is Malia Simons and I lead Bloomberg's philanthropy and engagement here on the US West Coast. And I'm delighted to welcome you to our offices today. As many of you know, Bloomberg is a media and technology company that provides data, news, analytics around government, finance and business to our customers. And it's through this global business that we're able to fund Bloomberg Philanthropies an umbrella organization that covers encompasses all of my global charitable activities including corporate giving, foundation initiatives and his personal contributions. One of our focus areas and an area that Mike cares deeply about is the environment. It sounds vague and broad and rather underlined but it's a little bit by design. We want to be able to help as many people around the world as possible in keeping our funding strategy nimble. So for example, Mike recently committed again to fill the funding gap that was left by the US federal government so that the UN can continue to empower countries to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. Speaking of Paris, last year we produced a film called From Paris to Pittsburgh that highlights the solutions that Americans are demanding and developing in the face of climate change. And we're happy that we've held over 200 grassroots screening of this film across the country. And on a very local level, during the birth land, Bloomberg employees around the globe volunteered with environmental stewardship projects like planting trees, cleaning shorelines and recycling drives to bring sustainability awareness to their home communities. These are just a few and varied ways that Bloomberg plan for peace is raising awareness and encouraging action against climate change. However, if everyone read just a few excerpts from David Wallacewell's book, they'd understand pretty quickly how important our environment truly is and that we are oppressed for time. So, without a moment to wait, we should probably get today's program started. Here you go. Thank you so much. Can you all hear me okay? Great. So, I'm thrilled to be here and thrilled to be having this conversation with you, with all of us. Because when, I would say when I read your book, but when you read your book to me, I'd be an audible on my drive to work in other places. I was terrified, just frankly terrified. And as I like to consider you like our cousin as a North American national fellow, we have the North American California fellow as our cousin fellow, I'm intrigued by what led you to read this, to write this book. Mostly because I know that you say you weren't an environmentalist to start with. You weren't born a tree hucker. So, what led you to say this is something that I should be writing about? Well, the short answer is that I started to see how much climate change would impact my life and the life of people that I knew and loved, even if all of them lived in the urban fortress of New York City. So, I am lifelong New Yorker. I felt walking those streets that I was living up until a few years ago that I was sort of living outside of the forces of nature. And while I knew about climate change, was concerned about it, had some worries about how it was being managed. I also didn't understand that it was an all-encompassing story that it would impact your life no matter where you lived or how rich you were or what country you were from. And that the impacts would be quite universal and dramatic and profound. I had that revelation sort of not with any particular paper, not with any particular news event, but sometime in the course of the fall of 2016, seeing much more coverage of climate in the academic publications that I kept an eye on and some parts of the internet that also sort of focused on projecting our near-term futures, but also that that news that I was getting from those sources was much, much more alarming than I saw reflected in publications. I'm a, by day of magazine editor, publications that I thought of as my competitors and which I saw most of my colleagues getting their news from. So, when I read about climate change in the New York Times or the Washington Post or when I heard about it, saw it covered on television news, it was in terms that I didn't recognize from what I understood and knew about the science as it was emerging and evolving. And honestly, I had a kind of flicker of fear part of my response to that news was fear about my future and the future of the planet and the species. But I also just had a simple storytelling impulse as a journalist that there was a real gap between just how dramatic and all-encompassing and severe this crisis was, as it was understood by the world's scientists and how that story had been told to this point by the world's storytellers. I had a, came at it from a particular angle as someone who felt not just distant from in certain ways alienated from the environmental movement most of my life. I wanted the planet to be clean and ecosystems to thrive, but they were not especially important to me as someone who lived my whole life in a city just raised the way that I was and never had a pet. I didn't have my emotional triggers triggered by animal stories. And yeah, I just sort of started to realize that that was not, that didn't mean that climate change wasn't coming for me. And it also opened up a whole area of inquiry or really sets of inquiries that seemed to most people writing about climate and thinking about climate I think sort of secondary which is to say most activist advocates and climate journalists really were focused on direct climate impacts what kind of sea level we could expect how fast the Arctic was melting in the Antarctic. And in part because I was seeing all of this new research into things like economic impacts which could mean a global GDP that's 30% smaller than it would be without climate change by the end of the century. This impact that's twice as deep as the Great Depression or impacts on conflict which could mean twice as much more as we have today to public health and agriculture. It just seemed to me to be a much bigger story than we had been told before and that it would show up outside of the realm of science in the realm of politics and the realm of geopolitics and the realm of culture and storytelling and how we related to economics and how we related to technology. And I thought that those areas who really not been undertaken had not really been thought seriously about certainly not in a broad mainstream public way. And I thought because the conversation about climate was moving so quickly it also offered an opportunity to expand the aperture of that conversation to include some of these downstream effects which I think in the end may turn out to be just as profound and just as dramatic as the direct climate warms. It's interesting, you mentioned this piece about you know, you can go up in the pan of that the animal side of it or like the loving of nature and thinking about kind of what happens there. And it brings up for me this question of what is the true like distinction if there is one? Between kind of just generally environmentally friendly practices and trying to slow and I won't say reverse but slow climate change. And I'll give you an example which is that like you think about don't save the pelicans or make sure there's not oil on the baby whales and all of these different things versus how do we actually like carbon footprint and making sure that there's actually not sea level, all of that. So can you help us determine the distinction? I don't know who's here in the room but like for those of us who aren't necessarily as adept what is the distinction in your mind or how would you explain it? Yeah, I mean the global warming issue is a carbon issue. It's about how much carbon we put into the atmosphere. There are natural cycles that are that complicate that story a little bit but the main driver of climate change is how much carbon humans put into the air. And so anything that has to do with that is a climate issue. Anything which has to do with carbon production is a climate issue. And the whole suite of things that are not related to carbon I think of as sort of separate environmentally valuable to the extent that we want to preserve ecosystems and in certain ways sometimes connected to the carbon cycle but generally I'm someone who thinks if we had to lose some significant chunk of the world species to stabilize the temperature of the planet that probably would be worth it. And I think that in balancing these different imperatives I think that like rapid decarbonization is overwhelmingly more important than really anything else that we've learned or been told was environmentally important for a few decades. And that's because climate change is, I mentioned earlier, it's an all-encompassing story. It changes the cognitive performance of individuals. It changes rates of mental illness. It changes violence between individuals. So you have higher murder rates and rate figures when temperatures are higher. And additionally, the impacts on ecosystems and animal life are quite traumatic too. So if you care about the well-being of animals it's probably more important to reduce our carbon footprint than it is to be making more targeted, having more targeted responses to particular ecosystems even those that are in distress. And I think that that is a kind of a good analogy to the way that we think about this issue in our politics, which is to say we can care about many, many things when we worry about the future politically. We can care about economic growth and income inequality. We can care about conflict and violence against women. We can care about global justice issues. And yet in a certain way, all of those are not just impacted but perhaps even governed by the climate in that when the climate is destabilized all of those different concerns will be transformed and in most ways made worse. And so while I think there are for anyone who has a kind of progressive disposition towards the world there are a huge number of things that we should be doing politically to make things better. It's also the case that global warming hovers over all of it as the metanarrative of our time. And if we don't address it, it makes addressing any one of those individual challenges much, much harder. It's the same with animals. If we end up in a planet that's four degrees warmer there won't be any hope for the public homes. There won't be any hope for the whales. I mean, already the World Wildlife Fund says that 60% of the world's vertebrate mammals have died since 1970 and many entomologists believe that we have lost as much as half of insect biomass over the last few decades too. So we're already living through a mass extinction that is punishing the world's animals. But even so, I think the most important thing is for us to focus on the problem of carbon and the problem of global temperature. Whether we're focused on the plight of animals or the plight of humans is sort of the prerogative. The imperative to me is very clear. So you talk about how so many of these issues will be exacerbated by what's going on with the climate. I would love to hear you tell us kind of a two minute version. Obviously, you cannot in any way melt down this amazing book in two minutes. But like that, the working for a five year old, like how do you explain to a five year old the two minutes of like, what's at stake? What's going on here? It's for a five year old, okay. So the air is composed of a variety of different kinds of gases. We see it as a single thing but it's actually quite complicated. One of those is carbon dioxide. And one thing that carbon dioxide does is makes the earth a little warmer. That's because it's like a little blanket. It's kind of like a blanket in the atmosphere that keeps whatever heat is in the planet there rather than just pitting up into outer space. The more carbon we have in the atmosphere, the hotter the planet will get. And because of the carbon we put into the atmosphere over the last couple of hundred years but really especially over the last 30 years. The planet is already hotter than it has ever been in the entire history of humanity. So that means that you and I are walking a planet that is warmer than any planet walked by any human before. That means that it's kind of an open question whether humans would have ever evolved in a planet that was always this warm, I think they would have but it's conceivable that they wouldn't have. And a much more pressing open question whether we would have ever developed agriculture and farming and through that civilization under conditions like this because the places where we did invent farming and civilization, the Middle East, it's already gotten a lot harder to grow crops. So much harder that it's not certain to me that people would have been able to do that through scratch under these conditions. More generally, everything that we know of as human history, which I mean not just the 10,000 years since the beginning of civilization but the entire biological history of the species has been conducted under a very particular set of temperature conditions. Everything we know of this civilization and know of this history was conducted in this window of temperatures which we are now outside of. And that means that we can't necessarily take for granted that those features that we thought of as permanent features of human life can or will be able to endure and continue in the way that we've assumed they would for a very long time. And we are adaptable. We know how to invent our way out of problems and there are a lot of reasons for hope and optimism in this story. But we are literally outside of the laboratory in which the entire human experiment has been conducted. It's sort of as though we've landed on a new planet with a completely different set of rules than the one that we grew up learning and responding to. And we need to develop new tools and new responses to make that new planet livable for all of us. So I mentioned earlier that I have been listening on Audible and you read it very well. I would love if you would read just a short passage to us. This is from the beginning of the book, so it shouldn't require too much intro. Many perceive global warming as a sort of moral and economic debt accumulated since the beginning of the industrial revolution and now come due after several centuries. In fact, more than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in just the past three decades. Which means that we have done as much damage to the fate of the planet and its ability to sustain human life and civilization since Al Gore published his first book on climate that in all the centuries, all the millennia that came before. The United Nations established its climate change framework in 1992, advertising scientific consensus unmistakably to the world. This means we have now engineered as much ruin knowingly as we ever managed in ignorance. Global warming may seem like a distended morality tale playing out over several centuries and inflicting a kind of Old Testament retribution on the great, great grandchildren of those responsible. Since it was carbon burning in 18th century England that lit the fuse of everything that has followed. But that is a fable about historical villainy that acquits those of us alive today and unfairly. The majority of the burning has come since the premiere of Seinfeld. Since the end of World War II, the figure is about 85%. The story of the industrial world's kamikaze mission is the story of a single lifetime. The planet brought from seeming stability to the brink of catastrophe in the years between a baptism or bar mitzvah and a funeral. We all know those lifetimes. When my father was born in 1938, among his first memories, the news of Pearl Harbor and the mythic air force of the industrial propaganda films that followed, the climate system appeared to most human observers steady. Scientists had understood the greenhouse effect, had understood the way carbon produced by burned wood and coal and oil could hot house the planet and disequilibrate everything on it for three quarters of a century. But they had not yet seen the impact, not really, not yet, which made warming seem less like an observed fact than a dark prophecy to be fulfilled only in a very distant future, perhaps never. By the time my father died in 2016, weeks after the desperate signing of the Paris Agreement, the climate system was tipping towards devastation, passing the threshold of carbon concentration, 400 parts per million, that had been for years the bright red line environmental scientists had drawn in the rampaging face of modern industry saying, do not cross. Of course, we kept going. Just two years later, we hit a monthly average of 411 and guilt saturates the planet's air as much as carbon, that we choose to believe we do not breathe it. The single lifetime is also the lifetime of my mother. Born in 1945 to German Jews fleeing the smokestacks through which their relatives were incinerated and now enjoying her 73rd year in an American commodity paradise. Paradise supported by the factories of a developing world that has, in the space of a single lifetime too, manufactured its way into the global middle class with all the consumer enticements and fossil fuel privileges that come with that percent. Electricity, private cars, air travel, red meat. She has been smoking for 58 of those years, unfiltered, ordering the cigarettes now by the carton from China. It is also the lifetime of many of the scientists who first raised public alarm without climate change, some of whom incredibly remain working. That is how rapidly we have arrived at this premonitory. Roger Ravel, who first heralded the keeping of the planet, died in 1991, but Wallace Smith Broker, he's actually no longer alive. He died since the book was published. Wallace Smith Broker, who helped popularize the term global warming, still drives to work at the Lamont Doratory Earth Observatory across the Hudson every day from the Upper West Side, sometimes picking up lunch at an old Jersey filling station recently outfitted as a hipster eatery. In the 1970s, he did his research with funding from Exxon, accompanying now the target of a raft of lawsuits that aim to adjudicate responsibility for the rolling emissions regime that today, barring a change of course on fossil fuels, threatens to make parts of the planet more or less unlivable for humans by the end of this century. That is the course we are speeding so blightly along to more than four degrees Celsius of warming by the year 2100. According to some estimates, that would mean that whole regions of Africa and Australia and the United States, parts of South America, North of Patagonia and Asia, South of Siberia would be rendered uninhabitable by direct heat, desertification and flooding. Certainly it would make them inhospitable in many more regions besides. This is our itinerary, our baseline, which means that if the planet was brought to the brink of climate catastrophe within the lifetime of a single generation, the responsibility to avoid it belongs with a single generation too. We all know that second lifetime. It is ours. It just made that, whoo, was the same thing I did as I was listening with my earphones and doing like six other things. I love that you mentioned your mother and your father because you take us personal for a moment. And if you're willing, I'd like to go even more personal. I know there's another point in the book where you talk about having kids and your role as a father and Waka who is one, right? So I also, as the parent of three kids, six, four and two, think a lot about this. And so my question to you is, what is the way of hope? What is that in your mind that the thought of it will be okay? Or are we all being screwed? Well, it's a really complicated question to answer. And I think, to be completely honest, I'm part of how I thought about having a child is simply a reflection of the fact that I, like everybody else on this planet, is live, I live through compartmentalization and denial about climate change as well. But to the extent that I thought more reversely about the problem in going through the process of having a child, what I came to are two or three really big thoughts, which I think are not just important on the question of childbearing, but on the question of how much hope we're gonna have for the future. And the first is, I think politically and in every other way, it's important for us to fight for the kind of world that we want to have, for the kind of lives we want to be able to lead for ourselves and for those we love, rather than giving up before the story is over. And I think that even when you understand, the second thing is even when you understand just how dramatic some of these impacts could be, that we could have agricultural yields that are half as bountiful as they are today. You know, that there would be places in the planet hit by six climate-driven natural disasters at once. 600 trillion dollars in global climate damages by the end of the century, which has double all the wealth that exists in the world today. You realize that those impacts, as horrifying and scary as they are, are actually reflections of our power over the climate and over the planet. If they happen, they will happen because we bring them into being by making choices from here on out. And that means that we can make different choices. You know, as I mentioned earlier when I'm talking to the five-year-old, you know, the main driver of climate change is how much carbon we put into the atmosphere. Our hands are on those levers. We can determine how much we do, hopefully in short order, we can put zero into the atmosphere. But if we don't, it will be our responsibility. This is not a story that is outside of our control. It is a story that is in our hands. And that power, you know, as some people find it a little overwhelming, it's the kind of power we really only used to see in mythology and theology. But we truly do hold the fate of the world and the species in our hands. And we can choose to behave responsibly in a way that will secure a more prosperous and fulfilling future, or we can make other choices. But it's all up to us. And given that, and given that everything we know about the state of the planet, the scale of the planet's resources, knowing that it can sustain a bigger human population than the one that we have today if we manage that development properly, I think of having a child as a kind of investment in that future rather than an imposition of cost, a carbon imposition on the future, although it is that too. But the most important thing to keep in mind is, for me, that climate change is not a binary thing. It's not a matter of is it here or not, it's not a matter of have we passed the threshold of catastrophe or not. Every tick-up word of temperature will make many of these impacts worse. Every tick-up word that we can avoid will make them less intense. And that means that it will, while in a certain way I think it is already too late to avoid, say two degrees of warming, which is the level of warming that most scientists describe as the threshold of catastrophe and many islands of the nations of the world called genocide, it will never be too late to make the future climate of the planet better or worse. Even if we end up at four or five degrees, which I think would be quite tell-ish, we will still be able to engineer the climate of the decade following, making that better for human flourishing or worse. And I hope that I raise my child, I hope we all raise all of our children to have that perspective in mind because I suspect that we will have considerably more warming. As I said earlier, I think, I don't think there's much chance we'll stay below two degrees of warming. This century, I would say the guess that we end up somewhere, the high end of the two degree, the three degree range. But I would like that the people who are alive then to not think, well, the game's over, we might as well just retreat into self-interest and narcissism because there will be people in other parts of the world who are suffering quite intensely. Global warming is a universal story, but it also punishes unequally. And I would like my child and I hope all of our children to be raised with enough empathy that the suffering of those in places like India, Bangladesh, for instance, would really count in their sense of the state of the world and its well-being and would really motivate them to take actions to alleviate some of that suffering, both in the immediate term, in the sense of being more generous with those in the world who are most in need, but also in a longer term, taking more aggressive action to secure a more stable, prosperous, fulfilling future for everyone. And I think if we find ourselves in a mindset of we have to avoid two degrees or else we're lost, which is a kind of emerging narrative on the environmental left, although I support everything, almost everything they're doing. I think that's really dangerous because I don't think there's any chance that we're gonna stay below two degrees. So the story of how we adapt and mitigate and develop ways of living in that new world I think is as important as marshaling all the resources we can to slow the pace of warming and ideally stop it relatively soon. So I have a few more questions, but I wanted to make sure that Elizabeth and the audience note that those cards in front of you and those pencils are for you to write any questions that you have so that when I finish my questions, no matter who it is, you can pass those forward or pass those to a pova and I can share those with David. So to the point you said, our hand is on the light and that really resonated with me. It actually reminded me of just the other night when I was watching a family show or some show where they were doing some comedy skit and they were specifically talking about the environment and climate change. And they have one of their comedians sit down with like an expert and the guy was explaining something to the effect of the reason we don't do anything about it or what gets in the way of us is what he called I guess caveman brain. I don't know exactly what that was talking about. Except for the fact that they had a visual of the comedian coming up and winding up against like a lion. And then the response is this is a lion and I must do something and he takes his club and he tries to fight, see hi, see ones, all of those things. And then they show the same caveman coming up against real large melting ice cubes. In a lot of ways it's far too abstract, right? And so my question is what you left us with with our hands on the lever, we can make it worse, we can make it better going into the future. What is it that you think keeps us from being able to see it? Is it just that it's so darn abstract? Or is there something else? And what do you think would make us, what makes us move? What could be the side? Well I mean it's a really complicated story. Personally I think that the abstraction has been a problem for a while in part because the storytelling was conducted in that mode. We heard a lot about climate change as a distant threat, distant time and place, it was something that was gonna be affecting our grandchildren at the earliest and maybe centuries down the road which enabled you to think that we had a lot of time to grow our way out of it, to invent our way out of it, to innovate politically our way out of it. And that's just misleading on science. I mean the truth is climate change is already here. There was a study that came out last week or the week before showing that many countries in the developing world have already lost as much as 30% of their potential GDP growth over recent decades because of climate change. And when you see the extreme heat waves that we saw last summer, unprecedented global heat waves, hurricane after hurricane hitting in the Caribbean, Houston has had three 500 year storms in three years and the wildfires here in California last year was a record year before was they had the worst most destructive wildfire in California history. And depending on who you ask, scientists expect the fires are gonna get at least twice and perhaps four times as bad just by mid-century. I think that extreme weather is already showing us that climate change is here and it's not abstract. It's right in your face. The wildfires I think have been an especially vivid teaching tool on that point because I think people, no matter where they are in the world, actually have a hard time turning away from those images. They seem incredibly intimate, incredibly immediate. Even if you don't live near any brush or forest that could catch on fire, you see someone's house burning down and a whole town full of houses burning down. It's hard to turn away from that and not take it seriously. But there are also many obstacles to action even if you do understand that the climate change is here and threatening now. And I think those obstacles work at every level. I think there is some truth to a kind of caveman brain explanation. I think we have many impulses as individuals to look away from scary stories to be more optimistic. And I think it's a real problem that we anchor our expectations for the future based on our experience of the present. So every time we look out the window, every time we walk outside, we are reminded that the world as it is today is relatively livable. There are people suffering, for sure. But in general, things are okay. And we build our model of the future off of that basis. And it's just not a good model because no matter what we do, the UN says we need to mobilize on the scale of World War II against climate in order to avoid two degrees of warming. Even if we did that, we would still end up at about two degrees. We're very far from doing that. And that means that there's almost twice, inevitably about twice as much warming to come as we've seen to this point. So basing your expectations on the world as it is today is just not a good model for the future. But that's just one of many, many cognitive biases and psychological reflexes that push us away from taking seriously the threat. But there's also the problem of our politics, which has been quite inert on many fronts, but maybe especially so on climate for a very long time. And I think that that is in part reflection of this longstanding economic conventional wisdom, which held that it was expensive to innovate on climate, to take action on climate, because it would require a massive upfront investment and some foregoing of economic growth. Thankfully, that conventional wisdom has been reversed quite dramatically in the last few years where most economists now believe will be better off economically if we decarbonize it faster. And at the individual level, there are huge, huge growth opportunities there, business opportunities there, because if you think about what is necessary to avoid catastrophic warming, it's not just the energy sector, it's transportation, it's infrastructure, it's agriculture and diet. It's really absolutely everything about modern life. And each of those sectors requires massive, massive innovation to get us where we need to go. Each of them contains probably thousands of fortunes to be had. If we need to completely change all of these aspects of our life in order to avert some of these worst case scenarios, it's not just like one silver bullet technology that's gonna save us all. There are thousands that need to be brought into being and each of those are an opportunity as well. And then there's the sort of geopolitical challenge, which I personally find most difficult to solve because I'm a child of the 90s, I grew up in the 90s. And in a certain way, I really think of myself as a kind of end of history kid. I would have argued with you as a teenager if you told me that history was a neat line of progress and globalization was a pure force for good and markets were always productive. I knew that there were problems with each of those narratives. And yet that was my basic emotional posture towards the world that over time, things would get better. There would be more prosperity in the world, there would be more peace in the world and outcomes would be more just and equal and more cooperation. And I expected that that story would unfold over my lifetime. I now feel quite differently about that. The Paris Accords were established very much in that spirit. It was a kind of maybe a last gas of the post-war war two international order trying to work and no major industrial nation in the world was on track to meet its commitments under Paris. Even if all of them did, we would still land north of three degrees of warming, which would mean all of the biggest cities in the Middle East and South Asia would become basically unlivable in summer. It would mean as many as 200 million, possibly as many as a billion climate refugees according to the UN, a billion is as many people as the North and South America combined. Those numbers are high, too high, but they give you a sense of just how dramatic these impacts would be, even if all of the nations of the world honor the Paris commitments, which none of them are. We're just three years in and already the model of cooperation that was encoded in that agreement is failing. And we're seeing, at a time when you'd want to believe the world's nations were coming together to face a truly international global existential threat, instead we're seeing so many nations of the world retreating into nativism and self-interest and nationalism. And on the one hand, that may not be a surprise if you were to project what a politics in a time of resource scarcity and huge migration would look like. It would probably be exactly that, which means I can't say that we won't see more people like Donald Trump and Jared Bolsonaro emerging on the world stage of the next decade or two as climate change becomes a more important driver of geopolitics and politics. But I also want to believe that there is an opportunity for some kind of cooperation going forward because if we don't cooperate, if we let every nation work entirely on their own instinct and out of their own sense of self-interest, action on climate will be much, much harder. Even if all of the nations, leaders of the nations of the world agree that this is a pressing crisis, which I think at this point actually almost all of them do, individual nations are really incentivized to slow-walk action and let the rest of the world clean up the mess. And that means that you're gonna have more outcomes exactly as we've seen with Paris where everybody is rhetorically committed to the problem. But when the rubber hits the road, they're doing much, much less than they need to and hoping that it'll be someone else's problem. Problem with that is that it's everybody's problem. And I said earlier, it's also important to keep in mind the kind of climate inequality part of the story that some nations will be hit much, much harder. But all nations will be impacted in some way. And if the US is comforted or if Russia is comforted by thinking that of all the nations in the world we'll be suffering among the least, that's not good. We want to be motivated by the well-being of the planet as a whole but also to think we can secure a better future for our nation too if we take action quickly. So we'll see how that all plays out. I think the last few years don't give much reason for hope. But then again, if you had said to somebody living in Europe in the 1920s, 1930s, that we're gonna have an international order that presides for 50 years built on the principle of human rights where nations will go to war because someone has violated someone's human rights, they would have laughed at you too. And I think that we will likely see a kind of new international order emerging over the next decades that really does put climate issues front and center in much the way that human rights at least rhetorically was the center of the liberal international order that presided over the last now 60, 70 years. And I think you see some nations of the world already waking up to that. When you see NBS, in many ways, kind of a trotious leader of Saudi Arabia, saying that he uses countries economy to be entirely off oil by 2050 and mostly off oil by 2030, it contains an insight that you won't be able to produce because it's also fueled much longer and still expect to see that the table of nations, that you will be kind of an outcast in the same way that someone who runs roughshod over human rights is today, an outcast of those in that community. Now, do I think that 30 years from now, if someone like Jared Bolsonaro came to power promising to defarge the Amazon that the US and China would go to war to take them out of office? Maybe not, but it actually doesn't seem preposterous to imagine. I think that's how totally our geopolitics will be remade by this force, which really promises to remake every aspect of our lives going forward. And that's really, the part of the book that most excites me is not the question of science and walking through exactly what the heat impacts will be and the flooding will be, et cetera, et cetera. Is these humanitarian impacts? It's the questions of humanities. What will politics in a time of climate change look like? What will a culture in a time of climate change look like? And I think we're really entering into a new era that will be defined by climate in much the same way that you would have said the 19th century was defined by modernity or the late 20th by financial capitalism. That's how profound, epic a story it is that we're talking about. And we're all protagonists in that story, which is another kind of exciting, interesting part of it. It's interesting because the piece that you said is the most interesting to you is my very last question, which is just you spent the first half of your book talking about the science of it and then you talk about the impact on how it will disrupt our democracy, how it will exacerbate racial and income inequalities, how all of these different pieces of it. And so, just at a very high level, because I want to kind of get to some of these questions, is just that question of, can you tell us a little bit more about that? Because I think with California, that's like huge into what we're building into these issues of inequities and economic, believe it or not. Yeah, I mean, I mentioned sort of the global inequality picture, which is some nations are gonna be hit much harder than others. And in general, that's a portrait of the global South, the global poor being hit harder than the global North. That holds true in almost all ways, actually. That's also true within nations. So it's the poor nations, but the poor regions of a country that tend to be hit hardest on the U.S. That's largely the Southeast, but it also holds true even at the level of local communities where, for instance, in the flood plains of Houston, it's not the oil parents of Texas that are living in the most vulnerable areas. It's the working poor. And that's true nearly everywhere in the country. It's also true that the wealthy have the ability to protect and defend themselves. In California, about a third of Cal Fire and Firefighting Force are inmates that have been brought out of prison to fight fires and for pay of a dollar a day. And yet, the wealthiest people in Albu can hire private firefighting forces to protect their homes in the face of fire. Not everyone can do that. And that sort of dynamic plays out with nearly every impact. So public health issues, mosquitoes that used to really only fly through the tropics are now probably gonna be flying as far north as the Arctic in the next few decades. And how we respond to that will play out along a differential of class as well. It means one thing for me to contract malaria and another thing for someone who doesn't have any health insurance to contract malaria. And agriculture, same way, the wealthier landowners and corporate farm conglomers will be able to adapt and respond in ways that smaller scale farmers or people who grow their own food will be able to. And in that way, it's a really dispiriting portrait of the future, which is intensifying and exacerbating the things that we all basically agree are the worst features of our current world. And which may simultaneously be diminishing our capacity to respond. If our economic growth is as significantly impacted as most economists predicted will be, that means that we'll have less wealth to deploy. Probably we will be more interested in deploying that wealth closer to home because humans being who they are, their Californians are more interested in protecting their homes from wildfire than in building a sea wall to protect Bangladesh. And unfortunately, the smaller our, not just the smaller our economic pious, but the stronger our intuitions and resource scarcity are, the less likely I think we're going to be to support some of the necessary tools of mitigation and adaptation that will be required to protect communities elsewhere that are suffering. And these are not just like this one neighborhood or that one neighborhood in the case of Bangladesh. I mean, we're talking about a whole civilization. India, even more dramatically. And if those regions become something close to uninhabitable over the course of the century, those are major, major losses to the heritage of the planet. Now I don't think that we'll get to a place where there won't be a single human living in all of India. I think that's a wildly apocalyptic picture. But there may be population centers that get dramatically smaller. There may be floodplains that used to be quite prosperous centers of agricultural activity that no longer can support it. And the coastlines of those countries will be drawn quite dramatically. It'll be a very, very different world. And if we want to stop that world from happening, it will require much more commitment on the part of the world's wealthy to innovate. And especially sort of focus their humanitarianism for its on the needs of those most in need. Questions as I can. And so to that end, there are a lot of really good ones. So if I can ask you where it's possible based on the question. Let's go short. If you can do like a minute on it. Sorry, I don't mean to be silent with it. No, no, no, no. I mean, it's all amazingly important and great stuff. It's just all, they're really interesting things. It's all so connected. So it's, you know, it's hard to talk about one particular chair falling apart. Yeah, yeah, I think I'm okay, so back in. It's hard to like, I'll be extremely quick. But in general, it's like the more you know, the more it's all connected. Yeah, no, no, no. I completely get that. And I think people are interested in hearing these answers. So we'll start with this one, which is, this individual says we face three systems crises today. Climate, capitalism, democracy. How do you see these as connected? Yeah. That simple. I think I explained a little bit of the connection between climate and politics, which is to say that it's already, I think, introducing a sense of resource scarcity and competition in a way that's really damaging. The relationship between capitalism and climate change, I think it's probably intuitive, but in general, we've had, we have a system that has really prioritized economic growth built on fossil fuels for several centuries now and is incentivized to continue that practice. You know, the, going forward though, I'm not, I'm not someone who wants to personally upend the whole apple cart of capitalism to solve the climate crisis. I think, you know, there are countries in the world that are considerably to the left of the US that are behaving considerably worse on carbon emissions than we are. And I think that, frankly, there are a lot of, there's a lot of market energy to be harnessed in the solution. When you look at how much progress renewables have made in the US, it's been quite astonishing over the last decade or two. But I think we understand not just on climate, but in general, looking at our political economy, that we can't behave as though a completely hands-off approach to the market will solve all of our problems. We need to intervene in ways beyond letting market forces do their work. And I think that's especially true on climate where we've responded to this incredible progress on renewables, not by retiring dirty energy sources, but by simply expanding our energy capacity so that the proportion, globally, the proportion of renewable to dirty energy has not grown at all over 40 years, even though our renewable capacity has expanded enormously and gotten much cheaper. We need some more directed public policy and regulation to make sure that the gains that are made in the areas where we can innovate dramatically are actually helping the problem, rather than just pushing us farther down the path. What countries or companies are currently mounting the most effective responses to climate change? Well, companies, I mean, I happen to be an enormous admirer of Elon Musk, who gets a ton of bad press these days, but I think that not just Tesla, but Solar City are enormously important parts of this story. I actually wish that there was considerably more innovation in Silicon Valley generally focused on climate change. I think that we need to think of tech innovation as something that happens well beyond programming as something that involves new kinds of infrastructure and new kinds of transportation and the more that we can channel the capital and sort of talent that's in the valley to those kinds of problems and projects I think the better off will be. In terms of countries, honestly, there are not many who are doing great. There are everybody's emissions. Globally, our emissions are going up. There are some countries whose emissions are going down, but they're not going down nearly fast enough to even keep up with the Paris requirements. I'm heartened that yesterday or the day before the British Parliament declared a climate emergency and they came down with a plan to get to zero emissions by 2050. Quite serious plan. A plan that the government of Indonesia put forward a couple of weeks ago, I found really exciting. This is a country that has doubled its per capita income over the last 20 years. It's halved its poverty rate, but as with many countries in the developing world that have done that exactly, they get did it by industrializing, which means that they double their carbon emissions, but they say that they can have their carbon emissions by 2030, which would put them ahead of their commitments under Paris and still continue to grow at 6% per year, which is actually faster than the 5% per year that they had been growing on. So there is this new economic wisdom that is developing and sort of percolating up into the minds of policymakers the world over that we don't need to choose between prosperity and climate responsibility. We can choose a path that allows us both. It's especially exciting to see a country in the developing world make that choice because for a long time it seemed as though we were gonna be asking countries like that to forego classness and ask their people to continue to stay for the sake of the health of the planet. And that was a really morally complicated ask to be making as nations of the west that have benefited from the burning of fossil fuels for several centuries. But I do think that that's changing, I think it's changing fast enough and I don't think those policies are yet in place, but hopefully over the next year or two we'll see more of it in the US, maybe especially. It's really sort of exciting and interesting to see the war of ideas competition in the Democratic Party, in the Democratic primary over climate and we'll see how that all plays out, but at least we're arguing over these things now, which is much better than we were doing five years ago. Is the population a crucial issue? I was born into a population of two billion. Now there's almost eight billion increasing by 80 million per year. Doesn't this have to be confunding? Well I think every new person who walks the planet walks over carbon footprint. So yes, there is an impact. Every new life has some cost. But demographers believe that the planet's population will peak probably towards the end of the century or early next century around 10 or 11 billion and they think that the planet has the resources to support that population if we manage that development properly. The question is ultimately how we organize those lives, how we supply energy to them, how those people do business and travel and eat and if we can get all those questions, the population question becomes much less pressing. But you know, we need to because we are going to be adding those people and if we don't get those questions right, many, many, many of them will be suffering because most of the population group is actually scheduled to take place in parts of the world that are gonna be hit hardest by warming. Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, most particularly. When you say it's in our hands, can you speak to whom's hands specifically and this person's asking like the collective versus people in power slash policy and they underline policy so I think they're asking like that's where policy gets into this. For me, policy is the whole story. I mean, the challenge is so big that we can't possibly address it through individual action alone, even large scale organized action. That is especially clear to me, I think, when you realize that we don't just need to reduce our carbon emissions, we need to zero them out because if we continue to produce any carbon, the planet will continue to get warmer and they get warmer at a slower rate and in the present day, we could probably afford a little bit of warming without things getting too catastrophic but if we're at two and a half or three degrees, even adding a little bit of carbon is gonna continue making things considerably worse. So we need to zero, the UN says we need to zero out on carbon by 2050. In order to do that, we need public policy. It's the only way to remake our infrastructure. It's the only way to remake our transportation systems. I don't think that if everyone in this room never flew again, if everyone in this room knew never flew again, if every American never flew again, there would still be hundreds of millions of people elsewhere in the world who wanted to fly, which means if we need to have a zero carbon transportation sector, that means we need to have zero carbon planes, we need to have electric planes and that will require significant R&D because we're quite far from that now, probably so significant that it will require public subsidy and also meaningful legislation and regulation that will require airline manufacturers to be building those kinds of planes and airlines to be flying them. Same is true at the level of diet. You hear a lot about how people, how you can reduce your carbon footprint by eating less red meat. That's true, but again, there are hundreds of millions of people in the world who are billions of people in the world who are not gonna wanna go vegan. And it's also the case that small scale studies have shown that if you feed seaweed to cattle, their methane emissions fall by 95 or 99%. So if we could conceivably, if that study held up, those studies held up and we could legislate that every single cattle farmer had to feed their cows some small amount of seaweed, then we wouldn't have to talk about what choices you were making on your dinner plate because the problem would be solved before it even got to you. And that's the great gift of public policy is that we can, rather than asking individuals to make choices that range from irresponsible and climate-responsible, we can basically ensure that they're making choices between a variety of options, each of which are responsible. And ultimately, it's a sign of just how big, dramatic, urgent this crisis is that it can only be addressed through policy. So for me, it's all politics and policy. There's the individual choices stuff that's, you know, marginal at best when compared to the impact of policy. Bringing the carbon levels in the atmosphere to the current levels took many people's combined action over many generations. In contrast, it appears that some mitigating actions could be undertaken in an afternoon by a single individual, like launching shading particles into the atmosphere. This could also lead to a lack of coordination and applying these approaches, thoughts, thoughts. Yeah, I mean, personally, I'm more inclined to hope for and push for solutions and that are collectively managed rather than kind of rogue projects. And I suspect that if we see something like solar geoengineering, which is I think the technology that's being referred to, which is basically suspending particles probably to sulfur into the atmosphere to reflect some sunlight back to the sun, so the earth is a little cooler than it would be otherwise. I suspect that that is, while it is conceivably possible that a single person could do it, with a few billion dollars, I think it's more likely that a nation or seven nations that are not working through an international framework but operating on their own would do it. And I think that's dangerous in part because those impacts could be distributed unequally so that, for instance, you could preserve some of the viability of agricultural land in Russia without doing much to help the people who are suffering in Bangladesh or sub-Saharan Africa or something. For that reason, I hope for a more coordinated global response but I do think that the math is such that we do need some kind of external drivers. We're not gonna be able to decarbonize fast enough to make, to arrive at a climate that you and I and everyone in this room would recognize was prosperous and fulfilling and habitable for everyone in the world. And so I think we are gonna have to bring in some other solution. Geoengineering is one of those solutions. There's also carbon capture, which takes carbon out of the atmosphere, which I have more hope for. And other solutions having, you know, there are many, many kind of exciting but also kind of crazy-seeming ideas that are really at the very laboratory stage. My hope is that, well, first of all, I think we'll be moving forward with a huge constellation of them rather than just a single one. I think it's another reflection of the size of the crisis that we won't be able to address it with just a single solution. But also I hope that when we do move forward with them, it's through coordinated action rather than rogue action because if it's individuals or individual nations, the great power dynamics there get really complicated, which is to say really ugly quite soon. So my last question is related to, I think a conversation you and I had related to California wildfires, right? So last year, substantial part of the state was on fire, right? And so I remember thinking about people who were talking about they were gonna go on, you know, Amazon, I get their $800 air filter where people who were tweeting or putting on Facebook that they were gonna head to their summer home or fly to meet a friend because they wanted to be somewhere where the air was safe. And it just exacerbated, or I should even say, it lifted up for me the huge discrepancy between the house and the half house. There are plenty of people who had no ability to let alone fly somewhere to even just get one of those masks if you're living, you don't have a home, right? So I'm gonna need some words that I heard you said and then I'm gonna ask you what we should all do about it. So you said, I'm not mistaken, we have an incredible ability to normalize a grotesque amount of suffering. So if you wouldn't mind just talking a little bit about that and then finishing it with a call to action about us, like how do we do better? I mean, the story that I tell to illustrate that is you know, there's this study that I read about in the book which looked at the difference just between 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming and 2 degrees of warming just through the effect of air pollution which is not exactly a result of climate change but is produced basically by the same thing that produces climate change which is the burning of fossil fuels. And just that half degree of warming just through air pollution, the study found would kill an additional 153 million people. When I say that, you know, to the individual I'm talking to, to a group of people, you know, I see their eyes wide and their faces go ashen. It's horrifying. It's death and suffering on the scale of 25 holocausts. And we think, how could you possibly conscious that it's unconscionable? Which it is. But 9 million people are dying already each year from air pollution. And we're not really focused on that at all. And I think the same is true with wildfires. I mean, I've actually been reporting a story about wildfires, which is very closely on the subject. I went to California to report on it and felt as a New Yorker, I don't understand how anybody could live in like, you know, Malibu after, I met a woman in Malibu that lived through nine fires. And I'm just like, well, how could you possibly do that? And I expected to see a state that was like, and in particular, I was working around the LA, reckoning what a completely different climate future would look like. But actually, what I found was that people had already, six months after these unbelievably catastrophic fires, had already totally adjusted their expectations. And we're talking in quite practical terms about the real estate implications and what they had to do to their lawns and what they had to do with their homes. They were not thinking, this is a world that we can never live in. This is an environment we can't live in. Nature is trying to tell us something. We need to change course dramatically. They were thinking, what are the marginal adjustments that I can make to my life to make it marginally more habitable? And I think ultimately, that's how we've all been trained to think. And we need to think really differently. The challenge is much bigger than that. It requires a complete remaking of our energy sector, our infrastructure, our transportation systems, and our agriculture, our diet. In many ways, it changes. It requires change of our culture. And this is a quite profound challenge. We don't have much time to do it if we want to avoid some really terrifying outcomes. And whatever happens, climate change will have completely remade the planet because even if we engage in such a large scale mobilization that we avoid some of these worst case outcomes, it will mean there are many huge plantations and solar panels. There are huge plantations for carbon capture machines that our transportation looks completely different, that our infrastructure looks completely different. The way we eat, the way we produce our food will be completely different. So even if we solve the problem, we will be living in a world that is completely transformed by the force of climate change. And we need to understand that as an opportunity to build a new world that will be equitable and prosperous and fulfilling and just rather than one in which only those who have the most can secure their own lives and livelihoods. And if we take for granted that a complete transformation of the world is inevitable and what we're doing is really choosing between designing that world ourselves or letting nature with its retributive power make that world for us. To me, the choice is clear. The incentives are really clear and there's no excuse for not taking the more productive path, especially because, you know, if we don't, I think our children and grandchildren really won't forgive us. Thank you so much for spending your lunchtime with us. Let me know if this is true, that you might be willing to pick up new covers. Yeah, I think I'll stick around for a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. And if you didn't know that these books are all provided by Bloomberg, thank you so much, please take one. Yeah, thanks for coming, everybody.