Part Two: The Uninhabitable Earth, An Interview

We conclude with Part two of our interview with David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Hey, O, this is it could happen here the Daily Show.
This episode is going to be part two of a
interview with author and journalist David Wallace Wells. You have
not listened to part one. You should probably do that first.
But anyways, without a further ADO, let's get this second
interview going. I appreciate the optimism, I guess. I mean

(00:25):
we actually just say, like, you know, two degrees hundred
and fifty million additional people dying of air pollution. It
wance a century hitting every single year. Cities in South
Asia and the Middle East are so hot during summer
that you don't go outside without risking heat stroker death,
hundreds of millions of climate refugees. When I say, like,
we're going to get to our best case scenario, that's

(00:45):
the best case scenario that I'm describing. It's not optimism
by anybody's compactional definition. Is just optimism compared to like
what actually looked possible a few years ago. And you know, ultimately,
I think the only intellectually response able perspective is to
try to hold those two facts in your mind at once.
To say things inevitably will be grim. We will have

(01:06):
to be doing an enormous amount of adaptation to allow
ourselves any promise of human flowers fishing in even the
best case scenario. But also changes have been made and
will be made in the in the next few years
and then certainly in the next decades that allow us
to avert a lot of even bleaker, even grimmer on futures.
And you know, I think both of those things are true.

(01:29):
Whether you tend to, whether you you know your impulse
is to place your sort of emotional weight on the
first fact of the second is really more matter of
personal temperament, I think than it is about um. The
facts on the ground. The facts on the ground say
that you know, basically, if even a few years ago
it was defensible to say we could achieve one point
five degrees, but also a business as usual was four
and a half degrees, we're now looking at a much

(01:50):
narrower window where unless we're really surprised by climate sensitivity,
which may be something we could talk about, also that
we're looking at something like the range of two to
three two degrees to three degrees, and that's like, um,
we have a much clearer idea of where we're gonna
end up. I would say I'm you know, one of
the things when you when you lay out as you
do very very um very well, the what that actually means,

(02:14):
what two degrees means, like what that means in human
cost um. I have to think that there's going to
be an increasing desire to uh punish the people particularly
who were responsible for like the different kind of disinformation
campaigns that have persisted over the last couple of decades.
I don't know how much political attraction I expect those

(02:37):
to get um, but one of the things we do
we are going to be talking about is like the
potential of sort of a climate Nuremberg. And I'm wondering
if you if you think that's even a productive avenue
of thought or is it kind of one of those
there's there's so much is it a situation where I
guess I'm just interested if you if you've thought about

(02:57):
that in any way yourself, or if you think that's
just not a particular the productive line of thought to
go down, Well, I think it's um an intellectually rewarding
way of thinking about the problem. Whether it has practical
real world upside, I'm a little more ambivalent about, but

(03:19):
I would say, you know, there are two sets of
issues that you're talking about. There is, did companies like
Exxon and Shell delay action on climate change by shaping
our sense of urgency around the climate crisis and buying

(03:40):
off politicians in a way that meaningfully change the trajectory
of global warming? If so, to what degree and to
what degree should they be held responsible to me? That
I mean, I think that like those companies should be pulverized,
you know that, like they should be um even just
from a practical perspective, put aside the morality, like we

(04:02):
need to stop producing fossil fuels, like those companies should
not continue to be in that business. I think it's
also worth pointing out that many of the biggest oil
companies in the world are state owned, not private enterprises.
But I also think there's the sort of separate question,
which is countries of the world. The United States has
benefited enormously from the cheap energy produced from the burning

(04:25):
of fossil fuels like that had That explains a lot
of how we became the dominant power in the world.
Um And one amazing thing about carbon is that it
hangs in the atmosphere for at least three hundred years,
which means that every single ounce of carbon that has
ever been produced in the entire history of industrialization is
still in the air heating the planet today, UM, which

(04:45):
means that the climate doesn't care if that coal is
being burned in you know she Jin Pings China, or
Frederick Engels Manchester, or you know Abraham Lincoln's United States,
they are all having the equal effect. And that we
should think about the impact of past emissions when thinking

(05:08):
about responsibility for the crisis, um, as much as we
think about how to shape future emissions. UM. You know,
I think the climate reparations as an idea is very powerful.
I think, um, you know, countries like the US have
profited from this technology is one way to think of it,

(05:31):
that will be punishing, um those in the developing world
who have benefited considerably less, considerably more. Even from a
practical like how do we stabilize the world's system and
our geopolitics point of view, I think it makes sense

(05:53):
for the wealthy countries in the world to support the
poorer countries in their efforts both to decarbonize and to adapt.
There is some amount of that being negotiated now, although
I think it's woefully inadequate, And you know, it's something
I'm working on at the moment, but you you really
can sort of put a dollar figure on exactly what
like the U s O S in this context, because

(06:14):
we know how much it cost to take carbon out
of the air. So if you take a price of
like fifty dollars a ton, then the US basically has
a climate reparations bill of like trillion dollars um, which
is two and a half times what China's does, which
is the second biggest country. And I do think that
that's also really important to keep in mind when people
talk about China. China is an incredibly important player going forward,
but because of the weird timeline bending nature of carbon emissions,

(06:38):
like the US is still much more important that we
The US brought us to the brink. It's just China
that's at risk of pushing us over the brink. And
on the company front, I'm supportive of lawsuits that are
that are already going forward on these issues, and those
lawsuits that are going forward that obligate particular companies to
behave in ways that are in line with the goals

(06:59):
in the Paris Agreement. I think that those are useful
I think I'm a little maybe a little less comfortable
attributing so much responsibility for the current crisis to the
villainy of those companies, although I don't deny that they've
been villainous in the sense that we really have been
voting with our you know, with our dollars on this
for a long time, UM, and I do think that

(07:20):
most people have, you know, or as a society, as
a civilization, we've chosen to continue using fossil fuels basically
because they were they provided cheaper energy than any other option.
That's not to say that there's been no effect, um,
from the disinformation campaigns. I think there has been an effect.
But if you rewind that history and don't engage in

(07:41):
that disinformation, I have a hard time believing even if
you're just like looking at the cost of renewable power,
I have a hard time imagine in the US like
embarking on a major renewable push like in the year
or two thousand, of the scale that's possible now because
of the changing market dynamics there. So, you know, another
way of looking at the same issue is um, you know,

(08:03):
climate denial is I would say it's no longer really
alive anywhere. It's no longer really alive in the US.
But it was much more pronounced in the US in
American politics than any other country in the world for
a very long time, aside from maybe Australia. And it
wasn't like those other countries were decarbonizing much much faster
than we were. Um they maybe we're a little bit

(08:23):
in parts of Scandinavia, um Like Denmark has done a
bit better, the UK has done better over the last
five or ten years in the U S. But like
in general, we're all sort of on the same track together,
Which makes me think that a lot of these dynamics,
at least to this point, are much more the result
of um social and cultural forces than they are direct
fossil fuel disinformation and denial campaigns. But you know, that's

(08:46):
not to say that I think that those people should
be let off the hook, um in the same way
that the cigarette company cigarette companies were held to account
for their decades of disinformation. I just also think, like
the son of a guy who died of lung cancer,
like I don't think that like the cigarette company is
to blame for my dad's death. Like I just don't, um,
like I'm glad that they're I'm glad that they had

(09:07):
to pay those fines. I'm glad that they were, like,
you know, to some degree, push to the edge of bankruptcy.
I'm glad that cigarette smoking is not nearly as dad
a force in our culture and our public health and
it used to be. But I also think that there
is like I don't know, to point the finger neatly
at that, at those like ten big companies or whatever.
I just think it's a little simplistic and lets us

(09:28):
all off the hook. But I do think that's another
big story. Here is the way in which, as the
crisis unfolds, many more people will want to see themselves
as blameless UM and not be willing to really see
clearly that the role that they played or those that
they loved played in exacerbating the problem, even if just
through UM by living in complacency and denial for too long. Yeah. Yeah,

(09:52):
you probably just no, no, no, it is like that.
That's the thing though, it is it is UM. I
can cut again. You can hold two things in your head,
which is that UM, the attempts to mislead people and
alter the public conversation around climate change through bad data,
we're criminal UM. And also that fundamentally the damage was

(10:15):
done by our desire to continue living a certain lifestyle.
And we knew that and and and past a certain point, especially,
we knew that it would continue to like we kept
buying the cars, we kept orienting our societies in such
a way, we kept consuming and putting carbon into the atmosphere.
And it is this question of Okay, if you're saying,
in the United States, I want to hold ex On

(10:36):
Mobile and Chevron accountable, Well, then who who's holding you
accountable for the fact that you, as an American, were
responsible for a vastly greater amount of environmental degradation than
somebody living in Kuala Lumpur. Yeah. I think Also it's
you know, we have this like in part because of
the cultural changes that have unfolded over the last fe years.

(10:56):
These are not like the world's richest companies and or
and so like liquidate liquidating them just like simply does
it from just like a like the perspective of UM
finding capital that will help us in this fight, like
liquidating these companies simply doesn't get us nearly as far
as it might have twenty or thirty years ago. I
think that there is a moral case for closing them down.

(11:18):
I think there's a practical place case for literally just
closing them down. UM. I think we should try to
pursue that UM. But I also think that you know,
it's like you take all Bill Gates's money away, like
it's not like people in stuff Saharan Africa are going
to be millionaires. It's just like there isn't that much
money to go around, and the same that's true of
the fossil field companies. But you know, I do think, UM,

(11:41):
I do think there needs to be a kind of
UM mechanism for capital redistribution UM in the service of
decarbonization and UM climate resilience. I think that that is
a very very urgent moral demands that the climate of

(12:01):
the future is making of us, Which is to say,
you know, let's try to treat hundreds of millions of
people living in Bangladesh near the coast like they were living,
you know, on the Gulf coast of the US, and
treat their lives with as much give their lives as
much significance, and UM, do the same level of things

(12:24):
that we would want to do for our distant relatives
to protect their lives and livelihoods there to name one example.
I mean, you know, it's not just like there's one
place to deal with it. But they can't even get
a hundred billion dollars out of the G seven to
you know, to the developing world. I think we're gonna
need considerably more than that going forward. Yeah, I've been

(12:53):
reading the book Disposable City by Mario Riza, which is
about Miami, and like the fact that Miami is doomed
and less things actions are taken in order to make
it survivable in the future. And I kept thinking throughout
that process because it's a very good book, I think,
very well written. But also just like all of these
problems are going to be commen certainly more severe for

(13:14):
people living in huge chunks of Southeast Asia the form
much larger population than Miami, but we will never have
the resources dedicated towards them, and they're also it's also
the case that a lot of the solutions that we
we think of here are not available there in the
sense that you know, there was a big study that
came out maybe six or nine months ago looking at
what it would mean to for land use in the
US to be to really decarbonize the power sector through

(13:36):
wind and solar, and you know, it's it was significant.
It was like it was it was not it's not
like half the country, but it was like, I think
we had to do something like we had to use
like a couple of multiples of the land of North
Dakota um to like get to a total totally zero
carbon electricity sector, and like you can't do that in Indonesia.

(13:57):
They're just that amount of land. And what does that mean?
Is that an argument for nuclear? Is that an argument
for you know, a lot more offshore? You know, like
it's not exactly clear, but we also we have there
are many ways in which Americans thinking about climate change
suffer from a national narcissism and really think that the
whole global problem is our problem. But um, the challenge

(14:17):
is really different everywhere, both on the adaptation side on
the mitigation side, and you know, in a lot of
places it's going to be just tricky to figure out.
And the more that we can do as you know,
those with more, um, the more I don't know, it's
not quite well. I'm sure we're never going to be
behaving in ways that that are actually moral in this issue,
but maybe like approaching some kind of morality, you know, Garrison,

(14:41):
did you have anything else you wanted to get into UM? Yeah,
I can maybe talk about what you think the future
of international coalitions are going to be in terms of
like the different summits UM what you know, the different
ways the u N might try to do stuff. Yeah,

(15:01):
like how how do you see the effectiveness or maybe
not even effectiveness, but like just how do you see
that impacting UM people's perception of what's going to happen?
And then you know, if if you think that has
any chance of making things better at all, well, you
know what. The the examples that I used in the

(15:21):
book I think are still UM. The ones that I
come back to, which is UM the way that the
post World War two international order, which was led primarily
by the USUM, treated the issues of human rights and
free markets, which were never like handed over to a

(15:42):
particular political authority to police around the world, but which
became universal enough values that they could be invoked as
reasons to intervene in other countries, to invade other countries,
to bully other countries in you know, in UM trade negotiations,

(16:04):
and you know, oftentimes they were covers for what we're
basically just national self interest, you know, calling something human
rights issue so that you could open a market or whatever.
But on the whole, I think they did sort of
successfully promote both of those values over the course of
those fifty years. You know, not to say that markets
are unequal a value that we should value as much

(16:28):
as we value human rights. But we saw you know,
globally a changing culture of geopolitics sort of as a result,
and the tools that were used not just by the US,
but especially by the US in promoting that change. We're
really diverse. Like sometimes we did go to war. Sometimes
we just argued about stuff in the u N. Sometimes

(16:50):
we you know, put sanctions on countries and refused to
trade with them because we consider them, you know, to
be behaving immorally. Sometimes we finance clandestine wars like where
our CIA agents trained. You know, we did a whole
lot of different ship in the name of those values.
Um and I sort of suspect we're likely to see
the same thing unfold with climate, where it becomes a

(17:12):
sort of first order value of the global system. And
that doesn't mean that there is a independent climate change
authority with you know, some kind of you know that
that can like throw leaders in jail for behaving badly,
that I can go into Brazil and arrest jar Balsonaro
or something. Um, I don't think that's all that likely.
But I think that we start, we start to talk

(17:33):
about power dynamics um as in ways that are inflected
at least with climate considerations. And I think we're already
starting to see that. You know, the way that the
EU is talking about um it's border adjustment carbon tax.
There's a similar proposal now in the in the US
really suggests that we're already embedding climate values in what
were once quite coldly calculated trade deals. You know, there

(17:56):
was a couple of years ago there was that back
and forth about the fires in the amaz On where
where Emmanuel mccron threatened to pull out of a major
trade deal with with Brazil over the fires and like
you didn't totally come to pass. But um, that sort
of power dynamic I think is quite um, you know,
quite present on the world stage already. Now. The question

(18:17):
is ultimately like who's doing the policing, who's empowered to
enforce these values and one of their own what's their
own record? You know, at the moment, the US, I think,
is not really in a position to lecture anybody. And
to some degree, you know, in a certain light, China
has a certain amount of um, you know, moral authority

(18:41):
here because they've they've invested so aggressively and um green technologies.
But they also have the opposite problem, which is that
they are still wearing a ton of coal. And I
don't really know, you know, there's been a lot of
I don't really know how that dynamic will play out.
I just think it's hard to imagine a geopolitics going

(19:02):
forward that doesn't center climate change in the same way
that some of these other values have been centered. But
what I do think is very clear is that the
U N based treaty framework is probably at most a
partial component of this dynamic and not the whole of it.

(19:22):
Um you know, all of I mentioned this earlier, but
all of the net zero pledges we've seen over the
last couple of years, all of them have been done
totally outside of the you know, the Paris Framework and
the UN framework. It's not the US are China going
around and telling India that they need to up their
ambition at all. It's you know, all of these countries
coming to the realization that it is in their self

(19:44):
interest to decarbonize, and that is I think a likelier
path forward than one in which these things are negotiated
country to country. And I think it's frankly a lot
healthier because for a long time, climate diplomacy was conducted
under the anxiety of UM the collective action problem, which

(20:04):
is to say that, you know, the US goes to
zero carbon tomorrow, functionally, its climate will go will be
unchanged over the rest of the century, even even a
huge amount of like the US UM compared you know,
if nobody else does anything. And so everybody's just sort
of waiting around, waiting for someone else to to act,
because they think the cost of acting nationally or locally

(20:27):
is born nationally and locally, but the benefit of acting
nationally or locally is carried around the world. Now, I
think that is no longer the paradigm. I think that's
the reason why we're seeing all of these new nation,
new national pledges outside of the framework of paris UM.
I think that's in part because we have a clear
understanding of the damages of climate change. I think it's

(20:47):
also really we're having We're getting a much clearer sense
of the burdens of help from air pollution, from the
burden of fossil fuels, And so when you're doing your
even like your crudest um cost benefit analysis, it seems
really obvious that decarbonizing is worth it independent of the
climate benefits. And you know that's true in the US.

(21:08):
Dru Sian dell Is, this great professor at Duke, has
calculated that the health benefits of decarbonizing the American electricity
sector would entirely pay for themselves. It would entirely pay
for the project. Um. You don't have to factor in
any climate benefit at all. It's just like through cleaner air,
it would be paid for by itself. I think many
more countries around the world are seeing things that way,

(21:29):
and that's why they're beginning to move more quickly. And
even though that's like a a sign that the geopolitics
is abandoning some of its moral pretense um and returning
to something that amounts to a more naked, even quasi
like capitalistic um mercenary set of values, I also think

(21:53):
that it I have a sort of easier time trusting
the progress will happen in that context, if every country
thinks that, um, they're people will be better off if
their economy is greener. I don't think we're gonna do
it fast enough, but I think the progress is is
on the way. The last thing I wanna maybe discuss
a little bit is the future of carbon capture and

(22:15):
geo engineering, specifically with you know, Bezos and Mosk and
other people doing more space stuff. Um, and just yeah,
seeing how the likelihood and how much you think it
will affect things when they start messing with the atmosphere
or if you think they're going to go that route,
because I know Basos talked a bit about that in

(22:37):
terms of like moving stuff into space for like pollution
and stuff. Yeah, I mean your chapter on g on
geo engineering was really good. Um, in my opinion, I
thought that would gave a really good overview of the
terrible double edged sword that that is. And yeah, with
with all the space stuff, how do you see those
kind of things coming to pass the next few years.

(23:01):
I think it's gonna geo engineering in particular, and solar
radiation management, which is the sort of most common way
that people talk about it, which is suspending soultware in
the atmosphere that reflects on that. I think that that's
going to become a much bigger part of the conversation UM,
And personally, I would like to see more research. I'm
not of the I'm skeptical of this as a useful solution,

(23:24):
but I think it's worth testing and steeing. And I
don't think you know, at the moment, there's still basically
like a global gag order on even figuring out what
it would mean. And I think that that's really counterproductive actually,
that we should have a clearer sense of what the
costs and benefits of doing it are. UM. The people
who I admire most, who are supportive say this isn't

(23:50):
a permanent solution. If we imagine a century from now
or seventy five years from now, technological advance is sufficient
to remove carbon from the atmosphere at scale being run
cheaply and efficiently, and I don't think that's a crazy
thing to imagine on that time scale. What we really
need to do is sort of protect ourselves for a

(24:11):
period of time, for a generation or so, until those
things can come online and really make a difference in
the in the atmosphere. That seems like a plausible argument
to me. Um Like, I'm certainly not ready to endorse
it because I think we really just don't know actually
much of what the effects would be. Um But I

(24:31):
think any you know, it sort of depends on what
you're hoped for goal is. But any project of decarbonization
or just say climate action that is built entirely around
wind and solar power is not going to get us

(24:54):
to stay below two degrees UM. And if you think
that living a two degrees is going to be really tough,
maybe there are some other ways to make it a
little less tough. Now, I think I'm sounding at the
moment more supportive geo engineering than I really am. But
I just think in general, like this problem was too
big to dismiss any partial solution out of hand. On

(25:17):
carbon capture, I'm you know, I'm more supportive at the
theoretical level, and my objections are primarily practical, which is
to say, you know, at the moment, we have these
machines that do this. You know, they can do this already.
It's kind of expensive, but it's not impossibly expensive. But
to use them to even counteract the emissions that are
today produced by the hardest to de carbonized parts of

(25:40):
the economy, namely heavy industry and jet travel would require
through these machines, would require something like a third to
a half of today's global energy production. On top of
which we need to find a place to build these
huge industrial plantations. We have to find a find a
place to store all that carbon um. You know, estimates

(26:01):
suggest we might need an infrastructure two to four times
the size of today's oil and gas business. And that's
not to like make it so we can drive gas
cars longer. It's literally like the hardest. If we decarbonize
as rapidly as the i p C says we they
want us to cutting in a half our emissions, they
say we're still going to need a carbon capture or

(26:23):
at least a negative emissions infrastructure as much as four
times the size of today's oil and gas business. And
of course there's no market for that that carbon at all, um,
which means you would have to be entirely state funded
unless someone comes up with a with a market for it. Um.
So my, you know, on top of that, there are
objections to land use. Um. They're sort of likely nimby

(26:45):
issues um. And while it's tempting to turn instead too
you know, natural negative emissions with a far station. It's
estimated that to do the same just again for this
sort of sliver of emissions that are the hardest to decarbonized,
would require land being used something like the scale of
between five and fifteen times the size of Texas UM

(27:06):
just for this purpose. So we're talking about like in
either of these cases, either like sucking, like sucking up
a huge chunk of what today's energy system produces, or
using an enormous amount of the planet's land in order
to deal with only a tiny sliver of the problem
through either of these technologies. Now, my hope is that
fifty years from now, seventy five years from now, hundred

(27:27):
years from now, UM, we'll have a lot more options
for how to take carbon out of the atmosphere. Um
we can, we'll be able to do it much more efficiently,
both in terms of energy and in terms of land use.
And I think there are some things that are encouraging
that are sort of early stage m R and D
that we're at sort of early stage on R and
D on but the scale of the problem is just
so large that we can't believe that they're going to

(27:49):
do our work for us. It really will be like
over the time scale of our lifetimes, it will be
a marginal solution that allows us to um decarbonized really hard,
to de carbonized sectors a little more slowly. UM and
maybe on a time scale of two centuries, it'll that'll
allow us to like revert to an earlier climate and

(28:12):
stabilize things back at you know, something like parts per million,
although who knows how possible that is. Briefly on that note, UM,

(28:32):
we want to talk about the like the actual long
term impacts, like how the pollution that we're doing and
the emissions that we're doing now is gonna impact stuff
three years from now. Do you have anything to say
because like that that that's stif aspect. He's not talked
about as much because of how urgent it is for
people who are living now. We have a lot of

(28:52):
problems to deal with the fact that you know, we
don't talk about, you know, the farther future. It's something
I worry about a lot, because all of our models
are basically to the hundred and nothing goes beyond them. UM,
And I think there is some reason to worry that
we're not really capturing some slower processes and feedbacks that
may add considerably to our level of warming, even if

(29:12):
we get to zero emissions sometimes this century. Of course,
the impact some of the impact are essentially irreversible. You know,
the term tipping point gets used a lot. I think
often it's used a little misleadingly because it's not like
you're gonna wake up, you know, on a Tuesday and
the planets is going to be completely different than it
was on that Monday. But what it really means is that,
like we're going to enter into a new state with

(29:33):
a variety of these impacts that we won't be able
to return to the old one. Um. The melting of
the ice sheets is probably the most dramatic of those,
and you know, it's based it's estimated that somewhere north
of two degrees we we probably lock that into inevitability.
And that means over time, you know, something like two
d two hundred feet of sea level rise. UM. Now,
we don't expect that would take place even on the

(29:55):
time scale of centuries. It would probably take millennial or more.
But it means that the choices that we're making now
are really going to live on for an incredibly long time,
I mean thousands of years and UM That's another reason
why they're so consequential. You know, some of the ecosystem
loss um that we're going through is irreversible. You simply

(30:15):
can't recreate those things by design. And you know, even
thinking about wildfires in the in the in the West,
the fire scientists I talked to, you know, they're they're
all really reluctant to talk about fire even in the
second half of the twentieth century because they expected by
so much of the region will have burned, and they

(30:36):
don't know what kind of plant life is going to
grow back in that, you know, among those ashes, so
they don't know how to model it. It's like, is
it this kind of a tree, is that this is
a eucalyptus? Is an ash? You know, it's like um
And that's kind of amazing to think about, just like that.
You know, when we think of the landscape as permanent
and human intrusion as possibly transient, but we are engineering

(31:02):
changes to the land um that will make many of
the things that we think of as you know, the
iconic features of a place like California totally disappear within
the space of our lifetime. And you know, perhaps the
most dramatic of these impacts would be if if the
Amazon were to enter into a divec state and turn
into something like a savannah, which is you know, some

(31:26):
scientists think is quite possible, maybe even in relatively short
time scales. But more importantly, as you know that there
would be no time scale for recovery, that we would
have lost it forever as a as a rainforest, and
with it a huge capacity for carbon absorption and a
lot of the world's oxygen. So yeah, it's it's it
gets it gets scarier when you look past, even though

(31:46):
what's happening the century is scary enough. Yeah, that's all
I wanted to talk about. Yeah, that's the I'm planning
a trip down there in the not too distant future,
and it's kind of hard to overstate the importance of
not reaching that point, and also the difficulty of knowing

(32:06):
if we already have not good news coming out of
that region right now. I mean the slightly positive, slightly
good or part of the news is that what we're
doing now. I mean, there's a big report a couple
of weeks ago those you know, more carbon's coming out
of the Amazon and going into it, which is terrifying.
But that is because we're deforesting and burning. It's not
because of Yeah, theoretically, if we change policy there, we

(32:30):
could you know, we could stop that. Um. There is
a point though, at which the climate changing itself will
be producing similar effects and that will be considerably more alarming. Well, David,
you've been incredibly generous with your time. Thank you very
much for talking with us today. Now my pleasure great
to talk to you guys. And with that, that is

(32:52):
the end of our interview with David Wallace Wells. You
can find him on Twitter at d Wallace Wells. You
can find his book The Uninhabited Earth and you know
probably probably some local bookstores. I know you can get
it online that's where I got it. Um. And you
can follow this podcast of Happen Here pod and Cool
Zone Media on Twitter. UM. I think we have Instagrams

(33:12):
for those two, but I don't use that. You can
follow me at Hungry bow Tie and you can follow
Robert at I Right. Okay, thanks for listening. Stay tuned
next week for more It could Happen Here daily