David Wallace-Wells is the deputy editor of New York magazine. In July 2017, he wrote a long-form essay about the dire prospects for human civilisation caused by the climate crisis. It became the most read article in the history of the magazine and led to a book, The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future, which is being published in paperback next month.
The Guardian: The first line of your book states: “It is worse, much worse, than you think.” If you were sitting down to write the book again, would you be inserting another “much” into that sentence?
David Wallace-Wells: I still think the public aren’t as concerned as they should be about some of the scary stuff that’s possible this century. But I do think things have changed quite a bit. And I also think the politics have changed quite a lot. When I turned in the book in September, nobody had heard of Greta Thunberg. Nobody had heard of Extinction Rebellion. In the US, very few people had heard of Sunrise. And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had not even been elected.
Photo: Reuters
The Guardian: In the US, you have a climate crisis denier as president, yet areas of the country are experiencing frequent flooding, more forest fires and rises in average temperature of more than 2°C. How do you explain this?
DWW: Actually, it’s quite striking how many Americans do believe climate change is happening. [Democratic presidential nominee] Jay Inslee says 75 percent of voters want action, compared with 63 percent 12 months ago — that is remarkable. There was a piece earlier this month in the New York Times about how for many young Republicans, it is their top issue.
The Guardian: There seems to be a division in the US Democratic nomination race between candidates who advocate wholesale system change such as the Green New Deal and others who favour a more incremental progress because they claim that’s the only way to get laws passed. Which is the most effective approach?
DWW: The science demands a quite systematic response; incremental policy simply isn’t going to be adequate to avoid really terrible levels of warming. But ambitious legislation has to go through the Senate and I don’t think there’s a scenario where a Democratic president takes office in 2021 with more than 60 Democratic votes [a three-fifths majority].
On the other hand, the last few administrations have gotten quite creative in how to use what’s called “budget reconciliation”, which you can use to pass stuff through the Senate with only 51 votes [a simple majority] by defining legislation as essentially budget-based. That’s one reason why you see so many of the Democrats’ plans are essentially investment programs.
Inslee has been more ambitious in putting forward details about how he would regulate the fossil fuel business but some of the other campaigns have basically just put forward a sort of Green New Deal or green Marshall Plan — a massive spending programme directed at green energy projects.
The Guardian: You’re hopeful that technologies like geoengineering and carbon capture will play a significant role in mitigating temperature rise. Some environmentalists and scientists argue that these unproven methods can’t bail us out, and that they give licence to the fossil fuel industry to carry on polluting?
DWW: I look at the science and say if we’re defining a comfortable world [as] staying below two degrees of warming, I just don’t think that there’s any way we can achieve that without a really quite dramatic amount of negative emissions.
But I’m also very mindful that there is a pervasive techno-optimistic view — especially among wealthy Americans — that we can just invent something and it will solve the problem.
The UN says we need to halve global emissions by 2030 to avoid catastrophic warming. We’re really deeply deluded about how quickly new technology can scale and can be deployed. We’re far from having a 747 flying on a zero-carbon fuel.
The Guardian: We can agree to decarbonise — rethink our agriculture, aim for a meatless diet and so on — but we don’t live in a global, centralised command-and-control economy. Every country has its own political interests. How do you make the world take collective action?
DWW: That’s harder than the technological problem. There are many cases of what I think of as climate hypocrisy, for example, Canada declaring a climate emergency and then the very next day approving a new oil pipeline .
Each individual nation could be quite aggressive in their decarbonisation and yet be living through the exact same climate that there would be if they took no action unless the rest of the world followed suit. No major industrial nation is on track to meet its commitments under Paris.
My own hope is that I see almost half of our global emissions being produced by two countries — the US and China. Maybe it’s naive, but I hope a cooperative pact can be reached between the two countries like the nuclear non-proliferation agreements that were made between the US and Russia in the cold war. The two nations remained rivals but were nevertheless jointly committed to protecting the planet from an existential threat.
If the US and China really took aggressive leadership on this issue, the collective action problem would become less important — the world’s most powerful countries have a way of bending the will of the less powerful.
The Guardian: Some environmentalists argue that we need to rethink economic growth — we need to reorient our expectations of the conveniences and luxuries of modern life?
DWW: I don’t yet have a firm perspective on this. My intuition is that we don’t need to abandon the prospect of economic growth to get a handle on climate change.
I look at the case of the US and I see that if the average American had the carbon emissions of the average EU citizen, the country’s emissions would fall by 60 percent. And I think most Americans would be happy with those lifestyles.
The American electricity grid loses two-thirds of all energy produced as waste heat. We discard something like 50 percent or 60 percent of all of our food. So we could achieve some quite significant emissions gains.
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