 Good evening. We're going to go ahead and get started. My name is Iwista Ayu, but I'm director of the Fellows program here at New America. And on behalf of New America and Future Tents, we're delighted to welcome you this evening for David Wallace-Walls' book event. Since 1999, the New America Fellows program invests in thinkers, journalists, scholars, filmmakers, and public policy analysts. People who generate big, bold ideas that have an impact and spark new conversations about the most pressing issues of our day. In an age where journalism is dominated by the 24-7 news cycle and academia is becoming ever more esoteric, our fellowships provide opportunities for talented individuals who need support to pursue big, ambitious endeavors, books, films, photo essays, long-form storytelling, and policy projects, work that gets to a broad audience and changes the way we think, voices that represent the diverse backgrounds and ideologies of the American community. To date, we've supported more than 200 fellows who've gone on to publish more than 100 books. David's book is number 109 on that list. We're proud to have also supported the production of seven films and countless of long-form essays that have gone on to win national magazine awards and overseas press club awards in this past two years alone. The Fellows program aims to support these national fellows in three primary areas. We provide funding. We build a community and we provide access to platforms and partners to help the fellows do their best work. David, this past year, was brought on as a class of 2019 fellow and we remember interviewing him actually at this time last year. He told us about this book that he was working on called The Uninhabitable Earth. We knew it would be a big book. We didn't know it would be this big. And so we're delighted to welcome David back as a New York Times bestselling author now a year later. And so before we go to the conversation, I did want to show our fellows overview video. I think for those who may be familiar with New America, what they do know is that we support books. But it's more than that and I think David can attest to that, that we do provide support for really fellows to do their best work, to just take it one step forward so that the book has the ability to hopefully become a New York Times bestseller. So give me two minutes for time before we introduce the speakers. We'll show this video. We're committed to American renewal and we were committed by holding ourselves, our country to its highest ideals and taking on the challenges of rapid technological and social change. The fellows are really quite critical to that mission. It goes far beyond funding. This is about intellectual community. It's about having others to turn to as you write a book or engage in new ways of storytelling. I went from being a intelligence officer in the military to going back and getting a doctorate in public policy to figure out how to use policy to address some of these problems we have along the lines of race and have sort of reinvented myself in the second part of my life. New America has been instrumental in helping me make that transition. I left a newsroom to do this kind of work and it's isolating and part of it is just like you just don't have conversations with colleagues anymore and you don't have people to brainstorm with and New America has provided that for me. I had a question and then I want to explore the question and New America got behind my curiosity about that question and said, yeah, go explore it, go see what forms that takes and that's a gift because you don't really get that from a lot of, as a filmmaker you don't get that from a lot of commissioning editors. When I would tell people that I'm a New America fellow, it meant something. New America has a kind of reputation, it has a kind of reputation for seriousness of projects. There is this sense that if you're a New America fellow and you're working with New America on this, this is a real deal. This is something that's going to happen, it's not speculative, it's going to happen and when it does happen, it's going to have impact. So before I introduce our speakers this evening, two housekeeping notes. Please do wait for the microphone when we do ship to the Q&A. We are live streaming and otherwise those on the live stream will not be able to hear you. We do also have books on sale this evening and we encourage you to buy a copy. There's only 50, so I'm sure it'll sell out. Solid State Books is our book selling partner, so please stick around. We have tons of food and David will stay to sign books as well. And so with that, I'm happy to introduce our two speakers, David Wallace Wells and Van R. Newkirk II. David Wallace Wells is a class of 2019 National Fellow and Deputy Editor of New York Magazine where he writes about climate and near future of science and technology, including his widely read and debated 2017 cover story on the worst case scenarios for global warming. That article was the foundation for his book, The Unhabitable Earth, which has spent the last six weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list. The book delves into the scientific trends of climate change and also how it will shape our politics, our culture and our emotional lives. Joining him this evening as our interlocutor is Van R. Newkirk II. Van R. Newkirk II is a creative and multimedia savvy journalist, editor and content creator. He's a staff writer at the Atlantic on politics and policy. Van is also co-founder and contributing editor of Seven Scribes, a website and community dedicated to promoting young writers and artists of color. In his work, Van has covered health policy and civil rights, voting rights in Virginia, environmental justice, the confluence of race and class in American politics throughout history, and the evolution of black identity. He also contributed, he's also contributed articles and essays and photography to sites such as GQ, Gawker, Grantland and Ebony. So please join me in welcoming David Wallswells and Van R. Newkirk II. So to begin and to orient the audience, what I'm going to do is what David does in his book. I'm going to dispense with the notion immediately that the debate and the argument that we're having is between climate and climate denial. And really get right into the science and talk about exactly how climate change, which is happening, which is already affecting the country and which will likely, which will affect us in many more ways to come. What's happening? And so what I want to start with is we're talking about climate change and democracy and American democracy. In your research in the sociology and anthropology of this country, what are the environmental sort of contributions to how American democracy has evolved over time already? And what do you think is happening right now on that front? Well, the research I've done was really eye-opening for me as someone who, you know, I'm literally a lifelong New Yorker. And I spent most of my life thinking that living in a city, I was living outside of nature and that my life was not determined in any meaningful way by the forces of nature. And one of the sort of most profound personal revelations that I've had doing this work is it sounds like a naive revelation, but realizing that no matter where you live, you are subject to the forces of nature. And when nature is disturbed or perturbed, it will affect your life. It will affect all of our lives. So really everywhere you look, I think that there are climate contributions to our commonwealth, to our economy, to our public health, to our culture. But to name just a few, you know, it's a kind of remarkable curiosity. But people studying climate and the economy believe that there is an optimal level of temperature for economic productivity, 13 degrees Celsius. That is the historical median temperature of the United States. It's also the historical median temperature of Germany and several other countries that we consider the most economically productive, at least in the modern era. Already, the country is a little bit warmer than that and that means that these economists estimate we're already losing about half a percentage point every year of GDP to the cost of climate change. Although there are parts of the country that are still at the optimal level of warming, Silicon Valley is exactly at 13 degrees Celsius right now. And the reasons for this, that sort of little narrow point opens up in some other points, which is to say the economy, the economic effects reflect other climate impacts. So agricultural yields are really affected by climate factors. Heat is one of them. And if we get at the end of the century to about four degrees of warming, which where we're likely to get if we don't change course, our grain yields could be only half as bountiful as they are today. We'd globally be trying to feed probably about 50% more people. Within the US, we'd probably still be trying to feed 25% or 30% more people than we have today. And our grain yields would be half as bountiful. The impacts on public health are sort of everywhere you look, especially when you start to think about the effects of air pollution, which is not directly a climate problem but is caused by the same thing that causes climate change, which is to say the burning of fossil fuels. Speaking globally, air pollution already kills 9 million people a year. And in the US, the numbers are somewhere in the tens of thousands. But the impacts go beyond direct deaths. Air pollution impacts cognitive performance. It impacts the development of babies in utero and out of utero. The effect of air pollution is so dramatic that when they instituted easy paths in cities, you could see the rates of low birth weight and premature birth decline immediately, simply because the cars slowed down less in those areas and therefore produced less pollution to be consumed by people who live nearby. And there are these kinds of impacts just about everywhere you look in the modern world in our country. I think one of the real profound lessons of climate change is that nature is the system in which we all live. It doesn't just affect, in some ways, it governs everything we do in this world and many of the features of our expectations for the future, which are really the basis for our ideological goals or struggles and how we organize ourselves politically to achieve them and to secure livable, prosperous futures for ourselves. And so looking forward, I think anytime we're talking about the future with climate change, it's hard to make really clear projections, predictions, because there's this enormous uncertainty, which is what will we do? There's the uncertainty of what we as humanity will do, where the planet will be in 30, 50, 70 years, whether it will be at 2 degrees, 3 degrees, 4 degrees. There's also the question of what the country will do, what our policy will look like. And those variables, I think, are so variable that it's almost hard to make projections of any kind. But if we end up in a world that's three or four degrees warmer within my own lifetime, which is possible, we're going to have much stronger intuitions of resource scarcity. And if you try to project what a politics built on that would mean, I think you'd say, you'd see more zero-sum calculations of political advantage, more nationalistic self-operations on nationalistic self-interest and nativism, more turning away from those suffering elsewhere in the world and focusing on the immediate needs of our country. And it's sort of shocking to say those things and realize that we're already living in a politics that is sort of shaped by those forces. I'm not sure you could say that Donald Trump is the result of climate change. But I do think it's pretty fair to say that if we continue on the path that we're on, we're probably going to see much more Trumpian politics because of these forces and the way that they impinge not just on our own lives in the present tense, but on our expectations for the future. I think that is really quite profound. There are parts of the world where if we continue on the track that we're on, we could have the very prospect of any economic growth at all completely wiped out by the end of the century by climate change. It almost certainly won't be the case in the US. But what is possible in terms of economic growth here will be much smaller. And it will be distributed probably in even more unequal ways. That's one of the really grotesque features of climate suffering in general. It punishes all of us, but it punishes us unequally. And those who suffer most are probably those who are least prepared to deal with it. And so my hope is that we can respond to those challenges by developing more empathic politics, one that puts some of these social justice concerns right alongside the straightforwardly climate concerns and not just adapt and decarbonize and prepare, but keep in mind that, again, those who are likely to suffer most are those who need most help and that we should be trying to do through policy whatever we can to protect them and prevent them from suffering in quite as dramatic ways as they might otherwise. So when you talk about growth and you talk about all of these underlying economic assumptions that basically make the engine run, that govern our lives and what we think our capabilities are and what we believe the world would like for our children, I just read the book, Fossil Capital, which you cite in your book. And so everywhere with these questions, I see oil. I see emissions. I see petrochemicals with agriculture. I see the fact that petrochemical goes into that. And you're talking about the solution or not the solution, but the way to limit climate change possibilities will be basically changing our fundamental relationship with fossil fuels. What does that do for our understandings of what human economics are, what the possibilities for progress are, and kind of the basic assumptions that have been built into at least American civilization over the past century or so? Yeah, well, I think that the Fossil Capital book is a really interesting place to start answering that question. So this is a book by this guy, Andreas Malm, which is really, it sort of puts forward the idea that everything that we think of as economic growth, certainly everything we think of as industrialization and the economic history that followed is the result of the discovery of fossil fuels. So if you look at all of human history, for almost all of that human history, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years, there was nothing like economic growth. Whenever, on that level, Thomas Malthus was right. Whenever there was a kind of a boom harvest, it would be eaten up by additional children being born and that the well-being of humans was always, again, for tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years, effectively the same. There was no improvement in quality of life. That changes with the Industrial Revolution and the sort of conventional history of that period is that it was, yes, in part the result of fossil fuels, but also innovation, both technological innovation and political and social innovation allowed for capitalistic enterprise to really get moving. And what Mom says is that really you can effectively reduce the entire story to the story of the discovery of fossil fuels and that puts forward the kind of uncomfortable dilemma for those of us who are trying to imagine a post-fossil economy, which is if you take those fossil fuels out of the picture, what are we left with? As a society that is quite profoundly oriented around the promise of economic growth, quite frustrated when that growth comes slowly, angry when it's distributed unequally, what does it mean to be considering what they call a steady-state economy that is one that is basically flat? And as I say, that is actually the world that is projected to be brought into being by climate change for places like India and Bangladesh and much of Sub-Saharan Africa over the course of the century. My own sense of the future is a little bit more optimistic, which may sound strange given that I'm also so, my worldview is so important. The book is called The Uninhabitable Earth. Yeah. Yeah. And I brought that up myself, I guess. But it used to be the case up until a few years ago that the best economic research really did downplay the risks of climate change. And most economists would have said there are real humanitarian costs here. We may have a moral obligation to do things to avert climate change because of the suffering, especially of those who are most in need. But that if you totaled it up in dollars and cents, climate action actually didn't make much sense. This was the sort of conventional wisdom up until a few years ago because it required massive upfront investment and also some foregoing of economic activity in the sense that you'd have to close some coal plants before they were really ready for retirement. And I think that's one reason why we've had such slow political movement on this issue because our policymakers globally are so, they listen so closely to what economists tell them about how they can foster economic growth. And those economists were basically telling them not to worry too much about climate change. They also thought we had enough time that we could grow our way out of the problem, innovate our way out of the problem. But just over the last few years, there's been a real radical sea change in the conventional wisdom of economists studying this material. And in a way, it's because they've started to estimate the costs of climate change much, much, those costs are much, much higher now, they estimate, than they thought just a few years ago such that it's now predicted that by the end of the century, if we don't change course, we could have climate damages totaling $600 trillion, which is double all the wealth that exists in the world today. And we could have a global GDP that's 20 to 30% smaller than it would be without climate change, 30% is a impact that's twice as deep as the Great Depression and it would be permanent. But it's also because they see in the very near term some huge economic opportunities if we do take action on climate quickly. It was a big report in 2018 estimating that rapid decarbonization could add $26 trillion to the global economy by just 2030. And that's a little bit rosy, but it does give you a sense of the sort of exciting new frontier that economists now see in really remaking our economy from the root up. And on that point, I'm actually especially encouraged by a plan that was just put forward, I think last week or the week before, by the government of Indonesia. Indonesia is a country that over the last two decades has doubled its per capita income, has halved its poverty rate, but at the same time doubled its emissions. And that's really a representative story for many of the nations of the developing world that in order to pull yourself out of poverty for a long time, it was thought and probably true, required industrialization that depended on fossil fuels and emissions. But Indonesia says that they can have their emissions by 2030, which puts them ahead of their commitments in the Paris Accords and still grow at a rate of 6% per year. And that's faster than the 5% per year that they've grown over the last two decades. And that to me illustrates the new, really the new economic thinking about this, which is not that we need to adapt to a world with much less economic growth in order to avoid climate catastrophe. It's that if we take action quickly, we can actually make ourselves considerably more prosperous relatively soon. Now, a lot of these projections, I don't know entirely how seriously to take them, their projections too. Again, they may be too rosy, they may be too optimistic. But I think that it's really critically important for those of us who are hoping for climate action in short order. And the UN says that we do need to have emissions globally by 2030. That the conventional wisdom among economists has changed so dramatically and offers actually an appealing, inviting path forward. So my hope is that we don't find ourselves two or three decades from now, living in a world where there is no dream of economic growth and we have to completely reorient our political value system and our goals for the future and our sense of the future is more just and prosperous and fulfilling than the past. I think if we don't take action, we may well end up in a world where that is the case. But at least for now, I think the opportunity is in front of us to still secure some of these opportunities for us and our children. Now, you mentioned earlier, our president, Donald Trump, and I was gonna save him for the very end, but I figure now we can talk about it. Most of my reporting on climate change comes from places like Puerto Rico. When we're talking about sort of the near range effects of climate linked disasters, potentially climate linked disasters, like Hurricane Maria, like possibly Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans. And those is kind of representative of a future climate disaster regime, right? What I see from other people in the field, like Naomi Klein, is the idea that perhaps the most likely possibility of mass government reorganization is not the kind of optimistic rebuilding from the ground up, it's the advance of what she calls disaster capitalism, right? It's the use of the existing economic incentives and system to basically create a world that does cope with climate change by kind of assigning the risks to some people and lending protections to other. What do you think, what would you say is the likelihood of inertia in that sense versus a more radical reorganization? Well, I think that it's probably the case that we will find ourselves living in a world where climate change has been capitalized in that way in exactly the way that she sketches and that many more people will suffer than if we developed a new response, a different kind of response. But I also think that it's, as with everything in climate, I think a little misleading to think about that question in binary terms. You know, I often say this. Is that one government? Yeah. And governments behave in slightly different ways and to respond in slightly different crises in slightly different ways and different ways in different years. And there can be a mix of, yeah, a mix of responses even to a particular disaster, some of which are quite movingly humanitarian and exciting in the sense of putting forward, for instance, renewable energy goals. Puerto Rico is now committed to 100% renewable energy by 2050, which is maybe a little farther off than I would like. They just passed a bill a few weeks ago about that. On the other hand, the Department of Energy just recommended that a new gas plant be, I think it was gas plant be built on the islands. So again, that's a neat illustration of how the response is not, it's not single-minded. And I think in general, we will need to remodel the capitalistic system that we live in to deal with this threat. And there are a variety of ways that we could remodel it. We could remodel it in ways that make almost all of us worse off and make almost all of us less prepared to endure in a prosperous way in the face of climate suffering. We could remodel it in ways that make us more resilient. And probably we're gonna end up somewhere that's a mix of the two. But it's also true, as you mentioned, looking globally that different countries will do very many different things and place different kinds of values on individual human life. I mean, it's a sort of strange feature of contemporary climate advocacy that there is a certain amount of hope for the sort of authoritarianism of China, which is ugly in so many ways. I mean, Xi Jinping has behaved terribly in so many ways, but does have, from a certain perspective, have the power to take more dramatic action than, say, an American president would in almost any imaginable case. And I think that there's a whole spectrum of possibilities before us. We could see some climate authoritarianism responses. We could even conceivably see a global climate authoritarianism approach. The climate leviathan, yeah. Yeah, I mean, do you wanna talk about that book a little bit? Yeah, sure, let's talk about it. So this is a book by these two political scientists, Jeff Mann and Joel Wainwright, and they basically put together a matrix. So I'm a editor in New York Magazine, we have the approval matrix. This is a totally different kind of matrix, but the two axes are the relationship of the response to capitalism and the relationship of the response to state power. So you could have a response that was international in scope and anti-capitalist. They call this climate X. That's sort of their hope, because they're really on the left. They wanna see a true internationalist, anti-capitalist response to climate change. They think you could have a response to climate change that was pro-nation state and pro-capitalistic, which is more or less the kind of hopeful version of where we are today, I would say. They see a possibility for a response that is anti, sorry, wait, that's anti-nation state and pro... Anyway, you get the point. The big U.N., the anti-nation state pro-capital, yeah. Yeah, and then an international response that is capitalistic, which they call climate leviathan, and that would mean a new order sort of succeeding the liberal international order that we have today that was even more focused on the interests of capital and positioned itself as a response to climate change, and perhaps in some ways did deal with the problem of climate change, but really exclusively through the interests of capital rather than the interests of people. And this is what they call climate leviathan, which they say, the book is not all that predictive, but they think this is the likeliest future for all of us. We were talking backstage. I don't know if you all have seen the movie the day after tomorrow. It sucks. And we were talking about backstage, you know, what at least for me doesn't resonate. And it's this idea in the film that climate change is a single event, right? That comes for everyone at once. It is irrespective of persons. It doesn't care about what you make. It doesn't care about where you live. What we know in the research though is not quite that, right? Yeah, I mean in a certain way it is a universal system. It's all encompassing. I think especially as it gets more intense over the next few decades that the impacts will be inescapable that all of us, no matter where we're living, no matter how rich we are, will be affected by climate change. But it's also absolutely the case that it punishes those who are least able to respond most intensely. And you know, I think that's especially tragic because those who are most able to help are often responding by turning away. And you can see that very much in the world today. I mean, in the US we are having some degree of significant climate suffering. I mean, Puerto Rico has suffered enormously. The Gulf Coast too. But all of the flooding we've seen in the Midwest over the last few last six weeks or so, all the wildfires in California. The heat in Florida? Yeah. Last year in Hawaii, a whole island was literally wiped off the map by climate change. It was a small one. It wasn't one that was really inhabited. But still. And yet, you know, most of the country is going on about their business and looking away from that suffering and sort of believing that if their own lives were not directly impacted, that there isn't that much that's necessary to do. I do think in a certain way, some of those impulses are changing a bit. Our impulses to look away in the sense that extreme weather is happening so often that it's hard to totally ignore. And if a natural disaster happens once every few years or even once every few months, you can sort of naturally, you know, get to a new normal about it and not be so agitated by the threat. But if it's really every night or every week on the news, it's a lot harder to do that. And just to give you a sense of what kind of a climate future we may be headed into, by 2100 it's estimated, if we don't change course, that we places in the world that could be hit by six climate-driven natural disasters at once. So when we're talking about Sounds bad. Houston being hit by three, 500-year storms in a three-year period, you know, multiply that by 18 is the kind of impact that we're talking about for the end of the century. California wildfires burned more than a million acres last year. There's good science that says that that could get 64 times worse by the end of the century, which would mean more than half of California would burn every single year. I think those projections are a little bit dark. I think we're not likely to see damage quite that dramatic. But... I feel like the doubling is bad enough. Yeah, oh, totally. And, you know, it's also illustrative in that, you know, to your point, like, these impacts are here. We are already living among and amidst kind of intense climate suffering. We just choose to process it in different ways. We choose not to think that we're living in a completely unprecedented climate situation that completely changes the conditions of life almost everywhere we are. People in California, I was just in California a few weeks ago doing reporting about wildfires. The people there still think of it as weather. And I just, I'm an east coaster, I'm a New Yorker. I literally can't get my head around thinking of fires as weather. They're far too biblical for that, right? Do you think that's like a sort of basic kind of human adaptation to your conditions? Well, like, yeah, you gotta get used to it in order to cope, right? Yeah, and they also, they've had fires of some kind, of some scale. If you've lived in California for a long time, you know, as long as you live there, I met one woman in Malibu who's lived through nine wildfires in Malibu. And I just thought, how can you still be living here? This is completely insane. And I think on some level with climate, we have to fight those impulses towards normalization and kind of compartmentalization. And I think that the science actually helps us there. When we look squarely at it, we're reminded that the planet is already hotter than it's ever been in all of human history, which means we are living under completely unprecedented climate conditions. And everything we know about human life and modern life arose under climate conditions that are no longer holding. It is as though we've landed on an entirely different planet with new conditions and how well our old conditions will endure is very much an open question. It reminds us that this is not a binary system, that it's not a matter of climate being, you know, below a threshold of two degrees, for instance, or above it, it's not a matter of being totally fucked or not fucked, which is how a lot of lay people talk about the issue. Every tick upward is gonna make things worse and every tick upward we can avoid will make things better. And it reminds us that the impacts are staring us right in the face and that they are the result of action that has been taken in the very recent past. You know, I write about this in the book, but we think of climate change as being a legacy of the Industrial Revolution, something that's been handed down to us by several hundred years of industrial activity. That means that we don't feel necessarily so responsible for the problem, although we may wanna solve it, but half of all the emissions that we've put into the atmosphere in the entire history of humanity from the burning of fossil fuels have come in the last 30 years, which means that my lifetime, I'm 36 years old, contains this entire story. When I was born, the planet's climate was basically stable. Scientists had concerns about the future, but where the planet was in 1982, we were gonna be able to live like that well forever. I'm now 36 years old and the planet is on the brink of climate catastrophe because of what has happened in those intervening 30 years. That's since Al Gore published his first book on warming, it's since the UN established the IPCC, their Climate Change Panel, which means we've done that damage more damage than we'd ever done in the entire history of humanity knowingly. We've done more damage knowingly than we ever managed in ignorance. We're seeing those impacts now in real time, and that means we have a real time responsibility to take action. This is not something that we can afford to delay by a decade, by a generation. Really, we have to do it right now. You know, I mentioned the UN call for having our emissions by 2030. They say that would require a global World War II to scale mobilization against climate, and the Secretary General says we need to do that starting this year, 2019, to avoid a level of warming. The UN calls the threshold of catastrophe and the island nations of the world call genocide. So when we look at the science, it prevents us from compartmentalizing, from normalizing. It tells us there's always more work to be done. We are not just in a new normal, however horrible. We're past the end of normal and it's up to us to determine how far past that end of normal we land. That's another, among many reasons, I think it's really important to take seriously the work of the scientists who are making these projections for us, even if they terrify us, which they should, really the only responsible, the only reasonable response is to be scared and to act accordingly. Now I want to have everyone start thinking on your really good questions because we're gonna open the floor for questions in just one minute. But I have my very last question and something we talked about backstage and you talk about in the book is you have a daughter. You have a young daughter, one, right? I have a two-year-old son and as a climate communicator, I know my own sort of, not desperation but sort of motive to get people to hear me has definitely changed over the last two years. What do you think now, having published this book, having made the bestseller list, what would you say are sort of your, the lessons you've learned now as a climate communicator for dealing with the compartmentalization, for thinking about the hyper object and based on my own interest, do you think things like those really big disasters that are becoming more and more frequent, are they ways in maybe for that climate communication? Well, I'm excited to answer that but I'm also curious how your perspective has changed. So, I mean, I think the science was real for me and obviously I've been reporting this for some time but I really, 30 years from now, I'll be 60. I'll be not like, elderly, but I think I'm hoping to live a much longer life than 60 years, but I'm a black guy so I don't know how long that's gonna really work out. But you know, we're talking about sort of the horizon for the hell type scenarios that people bring up. Those are just far enough for me to where I can't rationally plan for them in my mind. But now thinking about what my son, the world for my son is gonna be like when he's my age. That's a whole different way to think about this and you want to, I'm not gonna be paying for all this education and all this soccer practice just to have him like live in hell. I joke, but I think that's a thing that lots of parents now are thinking about and so that's where I am, yeah. Yeah, I mean, when I think about my own daughter's life, I think actually I'm still sort of living in compartmentalization and denial about it in the sense that I'm not picturing a world that's 40 years from now, 50 years from now that is on fire. And I suspect that even if we end up following the path that we're on and warming gets quite dramatic and there's a lot more climate suffering in the world than there is now, probably the people alive at that time won't be running around saying the world is on fire either because they will have adjusted over time and we have a remarkable ability, it's a grotesque, horrible ability to normalize an enormous amount of suffering and especially in the kind of wealthy West we really turn away from so much pain and I think probably we will continue to do that in ways that make our own lives feel basically normal. But I think that there's actually wisdom in that, talking about the broader communication question, which is to say, I'm a newcomer to the subject and one of the reasons I think that my work has sort of broken through is that I'm quite upfront about that. I'm not someone who loves nature in the sense of wanting to spend my life in a national park. I never had any pets growing up, I hope I don't ever have pets, I'm not into animals at all. I've never been moved by the images of polar bears. I mean, I understand the value of ecosystem supporting themselves for a lot of reasons but including the support that they give to human life but I'm not someone who was brought to this issue out of concern for non-human interests, I'm someone who came to it out of humanitarian concern and I think that we need to bring, we need to count more people like that as supporters of climate action than we have in the past. If what we're saying is that in order to consider yourself a climate advocate, you need to completely give up meat or never take a plane. People should do those things like reducing your carbon footprint is valuable for a number of reasons but that just means that you're only gonna be talking to five or 10% of the population and we need change at such a dramatic scale that we need the support of not just a majority of the public but I would say an overwhelming majority of the public and we can only do that if we talk to people who have more complicated relationship to the issue who maybe don't wanna give up all of the benefits of their modern life to whom we can say you don't need to but if we're really defining the cause of climate in such totalizing ways that we exclude people like me I think we'll end up turning a lot of people off. That's one lesson I've sort of my experience I think teaches. Another is that the science is really scary and being honest about that is appreciated because intelligent readers, intelligent observers of the news see that the climate is changing and they don't really want to be told in their climate journalism by their policy makers by their politicians that everything's gonna be okay and there's nothing to worry about. They want the threat that they see themselves to be taken seriously by the people who are in charge and when I started writing about climate I really felt that that was not at all the case there was a kind of conventional wisdom among scientists among climate journalists that it was irresponsible to alarm the reader and that it was only responsible to talk about climate in terms that were dominated by hope and optimism. I think there's a place for hope and optimism too but if the science is really scary if the world that we're already living in is terrifying and what it requires is massive change. I think for a number of reasons from the history of environmental movements that have drawn on alarm to my own experience being awakened from complacency by fear to our current politics. I think you have to say that fear is useful it's a useful motivator and especially as a journalist as a kind of person who sees his main job as truth telling it's also honest. The science is terrifying the response we need to mobilize to address it is so large it would be irresponsible from my perspective to leave the rhetorical tool of alarmism on the table. And I think actually as a, I think that the scientific community has developed in that direction over the last couple of years the UN's IPCC report from last October was a major step forward in that regard it was, came wrapped in a lot of alarming rhetoric and I think it had a much bigger impact than all the- Lots of people right? And I think we need more of that again. I don't think fear mongering to use a sort of uncomfortable word is the only way to talk about this issue. It's not the only way that I feel about it. There are days when I feel quite optimistic. There are days when I'm excited by technological breakthroughs. There are days when I'm interested in sociological questions and political questions moved by individual stories of suffering and moved by some days just the kind of poetic, the awesome poetic power of the story which is really a drama at a scale that we only used to recognize as mythology or even theology. It really took us 30 years to completely destabilize the world's climate and bring us face to face with total chaos and catastrophe and we have about that much time now ourselves to address that problem in a way that secures a livable future for ourselves and our children. That is an unbelievable drama that we're living through and I think that simply telling the story through the kind of dewy-eyed optimistic lens I think really undersells just how exciting a drama it is that we're living through. Hopefully it will be a happy drama that we end up with but I think we all need to appreciate the scale and scope of the challenge that we face in order to respond appropriately to it and thankfully I think that a lot of the messaging is sort of following suit and extreme weather too is helping. It's a grotesque thing to say that all of the suffering that the climate change has brought over the last few years has been a teacher but it has been a teacher and I think that's important because I get asked a lot is there one kind of disaster that will wake us all up? Is there like a day after tomorrow scenario that will wake us all up? But to me it's really about the accretion of events. If we go through one disaster and then we wake up the next day and have a few weeks of normalcy again we could renormalize our expectations but if it's every day and we're seeing different threats in different parts of the globe all the time I think that we'll start to see this is an entirely new system that we're living in and we need to respond to it in a completely unprecedented way. I think that's starting to happen although obviously it's not happening fast enough. All right, well thank you for answering my questions and now I do wanna open the floor for your questions and we have a mic going around and now let's see I'll start up front right here. I'll be brief. Just two statements and I have a quick question. It's really sobering. The day of reckoning is coming faster because the polar ice cap is melting at a alarming rate and ecosystems may not move you or polar bears. However, most of our fresh water is tied up in the Arctic and we don't know what the climate situation's gonna be like because we've never not had a polar ice cap. Also the whole eastern seaboard, DC, all of it will be gone if that polar ice cap goes so it's gonna be hard to ignore all of this. The other aspect- Yeah I'm not urging anyone to ignore that. No, I didn't say that. I didn't even reply to what I'm saying. It's gonna be in our face. It's not gonna be something you can turn away from. My other point is that we know that meat eating is the number one driver of climate change because it delivers like a four punch combination because of deforestation, the depletion of the water, the pollution of the water, fresh water and of the methane gas. Question I have is people respond to incentives. So what kind of incentives are being put in place for people to consider veganism or at the very least vegetarianism? Thank you. Yeah I mean on the question of the melting of the ice cap, the ice sheets, I think it's in a certain way reasonable that we've spent so much time in learning about climate change, learning about sea level rise and Arctic ice. But even if those impacts arrive and it's possible that we could sort of bake them in at just north of two degrees of warming which is not that far away, the impacts will take a long time to unfold and so there'll be tons of coastal flooding and inland flooding this century but actually the most dramatic impacts there are centuries down the road. Some of the things that I'm more worried about in the more immediate term are the impact on conflict which could double the century, the direct heat effects so that cities in the Middle East and South Asia could be unlivably hot as soon as 2050 so you couldn't walk around outside in a city like Calcutta in summer without risking heat stroke. That's a city that has like 12 million people living in it. Right now, the UN estimates that we could have 200 million climate refugees by 2050. Possibly as many as one billion which is as many people as live in North and South America combined. I think that the sea level rise is a really important issue in part because it does totally transform the map of the planet and change many of our, really the whole, all of the conditions that we take for granted as permanent features of life on earth. But some of the other ones are gonna come faster. On the question of beef and incentives, I don't really know of many incentives at least in the US to encourage people to stop eating less meat. Personally, I'm more excited about the possibility of reimagining the way that we do agriculture to limit some of those impacts. So methane is the biggest reason why there's beef as a carbon footprint. And if you, there's small scale studies that show if you feed cattle seaweed just a small amount of seaweed, their methane emissions will fall by as much as 95 or 99%, which means that if we legislated, required all cattle farmers to do that, we could actually kind of single handedly eliminate the carbon footprint of red meat entirely. Now I don't know exactly how those studies will scale. It's possible there'll be some problems with it. It's possible that people won't like the taste of beef that has been where the cows were fed seaweed. I don't know, but I think that solutions like that and lab grown meat are maybe more productive paths forward than trying to convince everyone to give up meat entirely. I see a similar problem with air travel, which is to say, you know, I think it's noble those people who try to fly less. I feel guilty when I fly and I'm doing it less than I would otherwise as a result of climate. It's for people like me, the biggest part of our carbon footprint, even though globally it's only about 2% of the global carbon emissions pie. But if we wanna stabilize the climate generally, we need to totally zero out on carbon. We can't just reduce our emissions. And unless we think it's possible that the entire planet could completely give up air travel, which I don't really think is possible over the next few decades. That means we need to completely reimagine what air travel is in a way that does not impose a carbon cost on the future. So that means inventing electric planes or coming up with carbon neutral jet fuel. And that means massive public investments in R&D, legislation or regulations requiring this kind of innovation. And to me, it illustrates as does the problem of beef that while we can all make a difference in our own individual lives, that the solutions, the problem is too big to solve through individual choice, too big to solve through persuading some more people to go vegan or some more people to give up air travel. It's really a political problem, a policy problem, which we need to address through our politics. And so whenever I'm asked, what can I do? What can we do? I always say by far the most important thing that any individual can do, can vote, can hold, is to hold their leaders to account for the climate promises they've made when campaigning and making sure that those people who are in power are prioritizing this issue as it needs to be prioritized as the preeminent kind of all-encompassing even all governing feature of our lives. All right, next question. Let's see, I want to take, let's see, you got your input. My impression has been that most of the world laughs at us for doubting climate change, just like they laugh at us for doubting evolution. Why is the United States so different? What's wrong with us? That's a big question. Well, the first thing I would say is that I think, you know, I wish that there were no deniers in the U.S. and I wish that one of our two parties was not captive to interests that promote climate denial, climate denial. But when you look around the world, there are a lot of countries that, they're basically no countries that are doing better on emissions than the U.S. is. And, you know, there are green, there are countries with green leadership, there are countries, social democratic countries, there are countries that have no, even a conservative party that's sympathetic or captive to the fossil fuel interests and none of those nations are reducing their emissions at a faster rate than the U.S. is. So I think we sometimes, as Americans, somewhat overestimate the impact that this has had globally, but it is also the case that it's a horrible, moral blemish on our politics that we are unable to even commit rhetorically, collectively, to taking action. So the sort of gold standard of climate communication is done by, it's a poll that's done every year by Yale and they found this past December that 73% of Americans believe climate change is real and happening now. That means that 27% of Americans don't believe that climate change is real and happening now, which is too much for my taste. But 26% of Americans believe that aliens live among us. So this is not, this is not a, you're like, you have some questions about that? No, no, no, no. This is not a voting block that should have a veto power over our politics. To me, the question is why one of our two parties is exercised in that way more than why this fraction of the public believes in climate, is skeptical of climate change. And I think the answer to that is the obvious one. It's that we have a much more corporatized politics than most of our equivalent countries, most of our peer countries in the world. And for a long time, fossil fuel interests have been incredibly powerful in corrupting the Republican Party. In addition, there's been a kind of simultaneous cultural war aspect to the radicalization of that party which demonizes expertise and science. And that has also been really problematic. But to your big question, what's wrong with us? I think we all kind of know the answers. I don't think there's a mystery there. The question is whether we can move forward and take action despite those forces, whether those forces will die away in the coming years as climate awareness grows. And at that point, I'm sort of cautiously optimistic. I mentioned 73% of Americans are concerned about climate change, or 70% of Americans are concerned. 73% believe global warming is real. Those numbers are up 15% since December of 2015. They're up 8% since last March. So that movement is actually quite dramatic. By any political science standard, it's really fast movement. The problem is it's not fast when you're judging by the timeline that the UN has set out for how fast we need to take climate action, but it's still quite dramatic. And I think even when you look at the Green New Deal and the way that that has radicalized the Democratic Party on climate, you see that our politics is even changing quite quickly. The Republican Party is not behaving in a responsible way in response to the Green New Deal. But I think if we're really at a place where 75% of the American public believes in climate change and is concerned about it, I think that we're going to start to see the Republican Party at least soften and perhaps even move somewhat dramatically on this issue. Knowing the people who are leading that party now, it's hard to believe, but if I'm projecting 10 years, 15 years down the road, I would at least like to believe that the GOP won't be quite as fixed in its opposition to action on climate as they have been. And I hope that grassroots movements like Sunrise here in the US or climate extinction, that climate strikes in Europe, I hope that some of those movements can put pressure on actually both ends of the political spectrum to move more quickly. No questions? You in the blue jacket here. Yes, you. Thank you for your talk. My question is that indigenous people in the United States and Canada, like the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, have been doing a lot of important work in raising awareness of climate issues, but in media and policy spaces, their expertise isn't generally looped in. So how could we do better in including different types of communities as expertise and their skill sets in this regard? Thank you. Well, I think your question sort of answers itself, that we should do better, and that means reaching out to those communities and trying to engage them as much as we can. In general, I was sort of talking about this with the question of alarmism versus hope and optimism. You know, I think this story is way too big to tell in any one way, in any one voice, to really come to a solution from any one perspective or one set of experts developing a plan. I think it's a story and a challenge that's big enough that it requires everyone who can be engaged in it, to be engaged in it, and that means taking seriously the expertise and the experience and the concerns of many more people. At the moment, you know, Van was sort of sketching out. I think too much of the policy response already is about protecting the interests of capital and business, and even when those are productive developments, they are exclusionary, and our policy planning, our communicating, our action, our activism, all of that should be, you know, more inclusive, as inclusive as we can possibly make it, because this is, as I say, a story that will affect all of us, and as a result, we can't afford to shut anyone out from the process. All right, more questions? On the end, right here. Adam Siegel. Bill McGibbon went on a journey much like you. New Yorkers started reporting on it, became activists. You're journalists moving to activism on climate. How are you engaging or being engaged by other journalists? What do you think of reporting the impact of your work or your perspective on other journalists in the media? Well, I think that the last couple of years, which is the period of time that I've been really working on this, has been a period of dramatic change in perspective for some of the reasons we talked about. I think that there's much more comfort with being alarmist. I also think that there's much more understanding that there's a public appetite for coverage of climate change, in part because I think there is more public appetite now than there was just a few years ago. I wouldn't want to say that my work has produced that, but it's sort of coasting on the wave of it. It's one of the examples of how that's changed and how different kinds of storytelling can reach new audiences. I would like to see yet more. I mean, I think it's a kind of cliche to say among climate people, but really the fact that this isn't on the front page of every newspaper every day is a problem. It's a misleading depiction of the scale and intensity of the threat that we face. But I do think that media organizations are devoting more resources to the story. Journalists are experimenting. They are telling the story in different ways. I've been especially impressed with the way that The New York Times is. And their climate desk has done kind of ambitious different kinds of storytelling around climate change. But I also think that social media itself is a really, really powerful platform for people who want to tell their story who aren't journalists. I think that with the wildfires in particular, the dash cam footage and the iPhone footage that circulated last year was some of the most powerful work. And I think that journalists can learn from that success to use an uncomfortable word and be more forthright, be more honest, even than they are today, which is considerably more honest and forthright about the science than they were just a few years ago. But again, I don't want to see the storytelling apparatus evolve in only one way. I really want to see everybody telling different kinds of stories. Because in very short order, if we don't change course, I think we will start to see climate change not as a subject, but as the theater in which all of our stories unfold. And that means that in Hollywood, we'll be seeing romantic comedies that are directed and written under the sign of climate change. We'll be seeing disaster tourism, where people go on honeymoon to sites of catastrophe. And many more impacts like that. Our world will be so completely transformed that climate change will become, I think, in the 21st century as all-encompassing, as inescapable, a story as same modernity was in the 19th century, or financial capitalism in the late 20th century. And I think that demands a much more diverse storytelling approach than we've seen so far. But thankfully, I think there's more experimentation than I even thought possible was a few years ago, just a few years ago. All right, more questions? Let's see. In the middle, Paula's hand. Hi. So I'm a member of the Sunrise Movement, and I wanted to ask your thoughts about how the Green New Deal is currently structured and the sort of political movement around that, but also just what your thoughts are about the political climate in the United States around climate change in general. And then a second question if you have time for it. I know you already kind of addressed the fact that we're all in a different place about whether people should be made to feel afraid versus feel like, oh, there are positive solutions to how to deal with these problems. I guess I'm curious on your thoughts as somebody who's taken the position that it's the only responsible thing is to be afraid because that's what the facts require. What do you think about how people sort of on a mental health level deal with that as a constant presence in their lives as this is the scale of the issue that we're dealing with? Yeah. Well, on the first question, you know, I think that the Green New Deal, there are a lot of open questions about it and exactly what it would mean. I think of it as basically a statement of political principles and goals, all of which I support and I'm really excited to see it getting the attention and support in the Democratic Party to the extent that it has. I wish that the Senate vote last week had been a little bit different and fewer people had voted present, but I'm heartened to see as many presidential candidates have sort of signed on to it in some form or another, signed on to it. I think that signals an incredible shift from where we were just a few years ago when cap and trade was considered too radical for the Democratic Party. And, you know, I think there's a sort of, on the left and center left, there's a sort of debate about whether it's responsible to put forward these two simultaneous agendas, the sort of climate agenda and the social democratic agenda. And, you know, my answer to that is totally pragmatic, which is to say the social democratic stuff is more popular. So I don't think that like cutting those two bills apart would be productive. I think it would be counterproductive for climate because it would, most of the climate measures, according to the polling, have sort of slim majority support among the American public and most of the social democratic measures have much more significant majority support. And it gets to what we've been talking about all along, which is how to respond to this crisis in a way that takes seriously the inequalities that it surfaces. I think that it would be morally responsible to not focus on those, but thankfully it's also politically advantageous to do that. And, you know, I think going forward, there may be, as this evolves into something like legislation that could actually be passed into law, there may indeed be some trade-offs between those two value sets. And there may be some cases where there's a more effective climate action to take that doesn't help the social justice value, the social democratic values. And I think my position on that is sort of, we can cross that bridge when we come to it. To me, the most important thing about that that proposal, I guess you would call it legislation, even though it's not really legislation, is that it puts the science front in center. It builds an agenda out of what the UN says is necessary rather than defining our goals through what we consider politically possible, because we're now at a place where we literally can't do what needs to be done if we feel ourselves constrained by conventional understanding of what is politically possible. We need to transform that. I am somebody who doesn't think we need a revolution to achieve that, but I do think that we need a real dramatic reorientation of our political priorities and I'm really excited to see the Green New Deal moving that conversation in that direction and really excited to see movements like Sunrise and political activism like the kind that you're doing help along the way. That's honestly exciting is a kind of weird word to use for it, but it's really amazing to see how much more energy there is around this issue to use a bad pun than there was just a few years ago. And I've gone through that transformation myself, but it's amazing to see how many more people are going through it at the same time that I am. A few years ago I thought that this was an issue, something we needed to address, but it was not at the top of my list of political priorities. I didn't see it as touching absolutely everything I would have wanted our politics to achieve. And now I feel basically like, no matter what you want politics to do, we need to address climate change because we won't be able to achieve any of these other goals without stabilizing the climate. That's how dramatic its impacts promise to be. On the, will you remind me what the second question was again? Oh yeah. I think this is a real problem. I think it's especially acute for activists and advocates. So I think that there are people who are at risk of fatalism and despair and burnout who have devoted their lives to the cause for a long time and don't see yet enough change to feel rewarded. And I think that's a concern. I don't know that there's a good solution to it, but I think that I would say two things. The first is that the best way to deal with despair is through engagement and action. I felt that way myself. I still live through compartmentalization and denial, but I also have been less despairing about this issue because I was able to channel that anxiety into a project that I feel is doing some good. And everyone can do that. You don't need to be an author. You don't need to be a politician to do that. You can do that by voting, by engaging in local activism, by community organizing, all that stuff. And I think that if we're balancing mental health versus the health of the planet, if we're living in a world that is really suffering as dramatically as it is and poised to suffer as dramatically more as it is poised to suffer, we should do what we can to limit the impact on individual wellbeing, but I think that it can't allow us to ignore the state of the world as it is and turn away from what we need to do. It should be a motivation. If we're actually mature, evolved people, it should be a motivation to take action. But I also think politically when I look around, there are those who are on the brink of despair, but there are just so many more people who are too complacent. I just think that complacency is so obviously the bigger problem than fatalism. And I know people who are at risk of fatalism, but I know so many more people, including myself, whose lives are not as devoted to this cause as they should be given the scale of the threat. And especially when I look at our politics, when I look at our culture, I see complacency everywhere. And I think that that's one of the main values of a kind of an honest presentation of the science, which others would call alarmist. It wakes people up from that complacency and makes them think they can't possibly go on living exactly as they live today and expect that the world won't really be damaged as a result. So it's a complicated question. I think that living in a world that's suffering as much as it is, is going to impose a mental health cost on many of us. But to whatever extent we can be motivated and mobilized by that fact, rather than turning away from it, we'll be better off. Pairs, so yeah. And just one question for person, please. Well, you got two, yeah. Right up here. Who seems to be right here? Hi. So earlier you were talking about our ideas of economic growth and different ways that that would have to change to address climate change. The Green New Deal talks about a job guarantee. Can you talk about more things like that that we would have to possibly transition to in terms of economy to deal with this problem? Well, we'll take this one. Did you have your hand up right here? Or okay, let's go right here then. Thanks for a terrific book. I just finished reading it and I'm gonna go back and reread it. Your footnotes, which are not really footnotes, are really worth taking a look in the back there. And one of them is that's a section on economics kind of thrilled me because I've been sensing a big disconnect between how economists look at this problem and how the scientists take it into account. And your very unvarnished view of the science is welcome in my view. The economists have done something called discounting where they sort of make the future seem further away and that's kind of, as you said, they're starting to get a little more realistic about that and I appreciated your citation to the study showing that an aggressive transition to renewable energy would actually have a huge benefit. Most of the economic studies only talk about the cost of climate action and they don't factor in the avoided costs, the benefits of actually the shift. And I just wanted about your thoughts about that and the disconnect between the economic discussion and the scientific discussion, which I think you did a nice job of sort of bringing it up to some level there, but it's really an enormous gulf and it's still not really resolved. And the economists I think are, my organization is the carbon tax network. We are very much in agreement with the economists pointing to the necessity of carbon pricing and yet the numbers that they talk about for carbon prices or the transition are tiny. Well, so the first question I would say, my hope is that we don't need to adjust to a world in which economic growth is much more anemic than the growth that we've become accustomed to over the last decade or two. Although I would say that growth that we've become accustomed to over the last decade or two is considerably lower than the growth that we were used to in the decades before and there's some good and interesting research that that is at least in part the result of climate change. So my hope is that we can rather than, there are policies that we can, that will allow us to sort of adapt to the new climate situation, including expanded social welfare programs. Personally, I'm a little less excited about Job Guaranteed and some other people, but in general, I think that climate change does make a strong case for expanding social welfare, especially in a place like the United States, which has such a threadbare social safety net as it is. But I'm more interested in reconceptualizing our economic understanding of climate change along the lines that you were talking about, which is to really make clear to everyone that the cost of inaction is so much higher than the cost of action, and that we often talk about this issue in particular, as you were saying, just in terms of upfront costs, but there are a lot of things we do that are expensive and which we think are still worth doing because we understand them in contrast to the cost of not doing them. Talk about public health, of public education, in many parts of the world we expand expansive public health systems, maintaining the military. These are things that cost an enormous amount of money, but we do them because we understand that not doing them would be much, much worse for us and we need to start thinking of climate in exactly those terms and thinking whenever anyone talks about the cost of shutting down coal or requiring higher fuel efficiency standards, that we talk about those costs in contrast to the cost of not doing anything. I think way too often we let the sort of fossil fuel interests dictate the way that we talk about costs and as a result, our politics is disoriented by fear about rising oil prices and that kind of thing and we need to have a much more holistic view of the economics of it, which really is actually sort of encouraging if we do take action very quickly. And which is sort of connected to the question that you raised, I do think that the economics is catching up with the science, but I do think that there remains a fundamental problem in that there's the discounting rate, which is a problem. There's also the simple fact that for instance, real estate in Bangladesh doesn't cost as much as real estate in Miami Beach. So we have huge amounts of suffering that's likely to happen, huge amounts of economic loss that's likely to happen in a place like Bangladesh, but when the economists add up those figures, they don't add up to nearly as much as even like the coastal flooding of New Jersey, which will be considerably less dramatic to the naked eye, but in a dollars and cents way adds up to considerably more. So there are major shortcomings in a way that even the enlightened economists measure the impacts of climate change and I hope that they develop new metrics and systems that are a little bit more holistic. I do think that we're heading very much in that direction and I do think, as I said earlier, that our sort of new, the new conventional wisdom is very much that faster action is better than slower action. Ed alone for me is reason for progress, but you know, you still see in the same day that the IPCC reported released its Doomsday report, William Nordhaus was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on the carbon tax and William Nordhaus thinks that economically speaking, 3.5 degrees of warming would be an optimal level of warming, 3.5 degrees of warming would mean hundreds of millions of climate refugees, it would mean whole parts of the equatorial band of the planet would be unlivable, it would mean twice as much war as we have today, half as much food, it would mean, you know, just that you go down the line, completely catastrophic impacts and even as our economists are evolving new systems of assessing these costs, they obviously haven't gotten to a place where they're assessing them adequately. All right, two more, let's see, let's go right here on the end, we've had you kind of for a while and we'll go you in the blusher here. The nice shirt. Hello, thank you for coming to speak with us tonight. So President Macron attempted to reduce the carbon footprint and as a result there was mass outbreak and our cake cannot speak right now but there was that movement that happened. What do you think are some lessons that we could take into account as to what had happened? Thanks for the compliment on the shirt fan. So my thought process, whenever I try to think about how we with our government are gonna go back climate change, I always think about the institutional obstacles that come in the way, such as when the country moves left, it moves right in the midterm elections, thereafter in vice versa. So my thought process also involves a right-leaning Supreme Court as well as just the limits of the American presidency, which you mentioned earlier. So I'm wondering what sort of challenges do you see in American institutions that could arise when we have like the first step in combating climate change seriously in a big way and how can we overcome those obstacles as well? Yeah, on the first question, we've had sort of similar experiences in the US, Washington State tried to put together carbon tax in the last election, which was, I mean, that's a really blue state. It's also a really green state. It was in the midst of a blue wave election and the carbon tax was defeated. And in general, I think the lessons of that are twofold. The first is sort of the answer I gave to the previous question, which is we really need to talk about the cost of inaction alongside the cost of action so that whenever we're talking about imposing any kind of burden on the consumer, we need to articulate what it means to not be doing that in a very clear way so that we're not choosing between climate action and economic benefit, but we're choosing something that will reward all of us the more aggressively we act. But the second thing is actually related to the comment that this other questioner made a minute ago, which is that I actually think the carbon taxes, the way that they've been talked about are really quite, are likely to be really quite ineffective even if they were put into policy because they're so small. The UN says that in order to have a global carbon price that would reliably keep us below two degrees of warming could require a carbon price as high as $5,500 a ton. Now there's no carbon price anywhere in the world that's one one hundredth of that today. And in a lot of the places where there are existing carbon tax policies, emissions are still growing. In part because the profit margins on oil are so large that the companies can absorb quite a lot before even passing that cost onto the consumer so that the response of the Gilles June in France is actually kind of irrational because it's unlikely that they'll be dealing with the extra cost of the gas pump. It's much more likely that the suppliers will just be eating up the extra cost themselves. I spoke to an economist, Jeffrey Heal, a few months ago at Columbia who told me that across the industry the profit margin is 90% on every barrel. The reason that cigarette taxes were effective in changing public behavior is because the profit margins were really small. So really quite immediately those taxes got passed on to the consumer. Functionally I think that in order to have carbon taxes or carbon prices that are high enough to make a difference they might even be approaching outright bans. And as a result I'm more interested in other kinds of policy approaches policy solutions. Although I do think that it is helpful to put a price on carbon so at least we understand the cost of doing business with it. I think this is one of the things that we'll really start to see over the next few years and decades. Walking down the supermarket aisle we're likely to see things advertised as carbon free in the way that we now see them as organic. And I think all features of our life are going to begin to be kind of labeled with a cost, with a climate cost. And that will start to open everybody's eyes about really how interconnected and how responsible we all are for the future. Which is maybe actually a response to your question too. I think that the more that the public understands this as a growing existential problem and the less we understand it as a series of kind of bureaucratic and technocratic debates over particular details of particular policy. I think the less our politics will respond in kind. The less that they'll throw up roadblocks of the kind that you mentioned. I think that we live in a political system that has many roadblocks by design and that makes action a lot slower than we would like it to be. But I also think that if you have real, this is gonna sound so hopelessly naive and even as I'm saying it I don't entirely believe it. But if you take the UN analogy of the World War II seriously there are certainly examples from our past when like we can make quite dramatic changes to our political culture and indeed our entire society in relatively short order. And we have to, even if we don't trust those analogies we have to sort of be inspired by them and pretend that they still hold. You know personally I think the Supreme Court has a problem on climate as it is on many other parts of our politics and I think that the fact that we have our gerrymandering and the sort of particular advantages that the climate denial or climate skeptical party has on our legislative bodies is a real problem too. I think we need to address those problems from like for democratic reasons as well as for climate reasons. Thankfully those values are aligned and any reformation that we can put into place for the sake of good government will also I think be better for climate policy. But in the sort of short term I don't think there's much really we can do if the Supreme Court as it's established now is going to make judgments against climate action. I think that we could reform the way the Supreme Court is constituted but that is at the very least action that is gonna wait until 2021 at the very earliest. In the meantime we have the system that we have and that means that I think most of the important work is going to be in developing things like the Green New Deal into really actionable legislation that could be theoretically we can move forward with very quickly in the context of a new administration. That's not nearly as hopeful an answer as I'd like to give but I think it's also important to keep in mind the US is only 15% of global emissions. We have a moral responsibility to lead on this issue because we are historically responsible for the lion's share of global emissions but going forward the climate future of the planet will not be written by the United States. It will be written by China, India and sub-Saharan Africa and there's a sort of a reasonable perspective and a sort of center right that the best thing we could do is invest in R&D because that intellectual property and those innovations can then be distributed much more equally around the world than some of the more like direct regulations and carbon tax proposals that are being talked about. I personally, I've taken all of the above approach. I think we do need massive investment in renewables, massive investment in all these kinds of areas in part because they can help other countries in the world but I also want to see much more aggressive regulation in the US in part for the reason I mentioned that we have a moral obligation to lead not just follow some of these other countries forward. All right, well that's all the time we have and I thank you all for coming and for your really great questions and thank you, David. Thank you for having me. It's a conversation. It's a conversation. It's a conversation. Yeah. And please join us now. We have refreshments and there was a book signing about 50 books available from Solid State Books so stick around, thanks. That was good. Thank you so much. Great to talk to you. Great to talk to you. Yeah.