thank you. yes. was hoping you would say that. i would say that now we're we're i they're telling me we're done. but but i hope that you come up and meet robby doris and they'll sign for you after this and have a great time at the at the festival. thank you both. thank you. and boy, i just don't think that i sam's just a great book about francis coppola. yes. he's not just the person who peoplea it guys, it's been a crd able day. thank you for being here and it's amazing for me to be with david wallace-wells who is one

of our. his book the unknown earth is a must read. i was just telling him my daughter's in high school and i only read on her own, which is wild for me. but she's recommend they get to everybody. it's a great way to understand, dan, the challenges of climate in our time i'll say a few things the we're going to go back and forth in a sense of of conversation but by saying just moments ago while we were here, the white house announced that john podesta is going to be taking over for john kerry was doing for the last three years as a so-called climate czar, podesta has been a key figure on policy with. barack obama. but more than that, probably is almost done more for public lands, wilderness you know, national forest than anybody. he's been working the new america foundation.

he's a troubleshooter. we know he ran hillary hillary clinton's campaign. but we'll see how elevates climate in. a presidential election cycle. one of the problems with it is where i teach at rice university, the environmental history all students care deeply about climate and i always worry come fall, whatever there are, it gets dropped. it's like a big issue. but then, well, there's a war, there's a gasoline prices, economy, and it never sometimes is able to stay in to the forefront of policy. so i was going to ask you, i mean, what how did you get started focusing on environmental issues? well, let me start by actually picking up on something else you said about the state of climate in our politics. i think that in this cycle it may be to the benefit of climate campaigners that, we are not likely to so focused on climate

change. and that in this election with the ira biden's big climate bill behind us there isn't legislative action sort of on the agenda going forward and. i think when people in that bill passed and certainly in the lead up to it and as talked about climate policy over the decade between the time that obama's cap and trade bill failed and this one passed. you heard a lot of that any democratic led to make real progress on climate was going to produce a backlash that was going to be really political danger politically dangerous the party and remarkably in the aftermath of the ira which is you know compared to everything the us has ever done on climate change and decarbonization, and it just towers above all those efforts. remarkably, there's been very little backlash. there was almost mention of it in the midterms, even though it passed just a few months before the midterms, it doesn't seem to be a top shelf issue right now for republicans in criticizing

biden's legacy, even though it was probably it'll end up being something close to $1,000,000,000,000 bill that really will the american energy sector in the space of a decade and i think you know there's certainly reasons to hope that more can be done particularly on the on the sort of agency action side as opposed to the big, big budget legislation side. but, you know, on some level, kind of happy to see that the climate politics are quiet at the moment rather than flaring up to a boiling point, which is, i think, something a lot of people feared. well, the counter side of that would be how bad biden in the polls right now, and particularly among young people. and they feel betrayed. they're not reading infrastructure and feeling the climate when. then suddenly they start opening alaska public lands. and you're having the big fossil fuel president to. and i think a lot of voters are looking for consistency on climate. they've been hidden, obfuscated

bounced around a little in here. biden, who incidentally had the first climate legislation version, you know, the first bill and has this incredible climate record president. i mean, much better than anybody since we can start recording it. i'm not to showcase it. and that becomes a running politics, maybe even negatively showcase it because, you know, he's also in charge of the highest levels of oil and gas oil and gas production in american history. that may actually be something he talks about more on the campaign. right. his climate record. and then what happens to those young environmentalists. will they show up and they have options, by and large, whenever we call on i never like these terms much, but for simple, say, generation z, college students or zoomers or whatever, i've been teaching history since in 1989, and i've never seen a group of young college students more downcast about an upcoming election in 2024. they're feeling they're worried about age of of biden and trump,

but they're feeling just apathetic about things. and how do we get young that care about climate, really feeling that they can make make a difference and in and part of it when i wrote on the 1960s in sound spring revolution is the idea of david brower of the sierra club is to say is you got to have fun saving the planet on the sixties there was a sense of fun when earth day kicked in it was fun you were starting to log win, win, win. and when you feel you've won something which they did with the big infrastructure bill but where you get more active and so it all build after rachel carson spoke silent spring. in 1962, you didn't get the birth of environmental defense fund in 67 and sue the --. you know, songs like mercy me, the ecology and pete seeger, saving the hudson and supreme

court justice william douglass, stopping dams and stopping it at the grand canyon. it started being fun and building a kind of momentum. and if the option was day as well, we're probably better off don't have fun. just keep it quiet. shush i don't know how you create a kind of cognizant energy to keep fight without to just lowering morale and lowering voter id in young environmental voter turnout. yeah, i think that's a real risk. i think it's a risk across the board with biden. i think that know young voters are disappointed and i think they also don't really know has been achieved. i mean, i don't have the poll numbers off the top of my head but it's something like 70% of americans haven't even heard of the inflation reduction act, which is the big ticket climate bill. and it's probably even higher among young voters. so, you know, i think that especially those who worry about climate should know that a major climate bill and on how you want to count the infrastructure bill in the chips act maybe even three major climate bills were

passed under under biden and they don't that is on some level a problem. we'll see how it all plays out. but, you know, my own view which tells the story of my biography a little bit as well, is that it's not just about fun. i mean, i came to the subject, frankly, out of fear i was a general interest journalist, a magazine journalist. i was an editor mostly at new york magazine, interested in the near future, interested in science, and just started to see coming out of the academic research, a lot of really, really worrying, truly kind of alarming projection for where the world would be with warming the century and the deeper read into that material and the more that i spoke to scientists who are doing it all kind of pieced together to me and made me realize in a way that i never before that this was not like just one issue among many that you can compartmental over here. it really did govern or at least hover over everything that we were doing on the planet because everything that we do on the

planet is, you know, takes under climate conditions. and the changes are happening so quickly there basically is no historical analog for them. they're happening, you know, half of all the damage we've done has been done in the last 25 years, a quarter of all the to the planet's climate future been done since barack since joe biden was elected vice president in 2008. i mean, this is it's quite rapid destruction that we're doing. and we're just starting to see the real of that arriving in real time. the last few years. but we're seeing enough know that many things that we took for granted about the nature and shape of the planet and the human lives that would be lived. it are being shaken up by these transformations. and when i started that in prospect a few years ago, i found it really destabilizing. i was somebody who was born in 1982, grew up in the nineties. i don't remember a time before i knew about climate change, but i thought of it as, you know, a problem that would be solved by a global system that was

evolving towards ever greater solutions to the problems that had bedeviled humanity for many, many decades or millennia. and i just thought, you know, we're probably not going to solve this, but we're going to make progress in a predictable, reliable way along with the progress that we're likely to make on poverty, inequality and all the rest of it. and the more that i started reading about some of the science for five, seven, eight years ago now, the more those basic expectations for the future, i don't want to say i totally threw them out, but i started to really question them and wonder how much, how much we could assume that progress would be made on climate and all these other issues. and i wrote a big article and then i wrote my book from a place of some hope about that. i thought if there were people me out there who could be activated, then presumably we could some levers a bit harder

and change our politics and push them in the direction of climate action. but i also look back on several decades of political agitation about, climate change and didn't see much concrete for hope because it seemed basically like people talked about it occasionally were a little burps and flare ups of concern, but then they disappeared and the meaningful large big ticket action items climate activists were really looking for never really, never really happened. and emissions kept growing. global temperatures kept rising, and i wonder just how much i knew was a political problem. i knew as a social problem, but i wonder just how much we could really achieve. there. and i wrote the book. it came out in 2019, but i finished it in the of 2018 and it was just at a moment of incredible global climate awakening represented kind of embodied by us by greg attenberg, who in the space of a few months from that summer, she started protesting outside

swedish parliament that summer, 2018. through that spring, the spring of 2019 went from being literally a friendless swedish teenager to the global of a entire climate movement inspired, you know, millions of climate strikers all around the world to follow her lead and protest in their own countries even though many of them were underage in non democracy some of them queer minorities you know people who were the you could imagine from halls of political power. she inspired millions of them to come out into the we saw extinction rebellion in the uk sunrise here in the us the election of aoc to talk about the green new deal. all of this was actually powered to some significant by fear and it wasn't the only way that all these people were talking about it and those that stripe, that corner of the climate movement isn't the full climate movement. but i think to the extent that we have an global youth movement around climate, it's not because

climate action has been fun over the last five years. it's young people are really angry and a little bit. and so when i think about the rhetorical tools that are used by climate advocates and climate campaigners, and i really do think of myself as a journalist here, not a not an activist. so i'm at a little bit from a distance, but it seems to me like the obvious answer is different messages appeal to different people at different times and we need a variety of different ways of talking about this challenge. we need that for a number of reasons, including that it's a very complicated story. you can't actually just it one way. it's not just one. it's not just fear, but it's also not just optimism. it's not just it's not you know, it is very, very complicated. runs in a bunch different directions all at once. and we need to of appreciate that the scale of that the complexity of that both in trying to perceive the of the story as it's evolving. and it is evolving, which i hope we can talk about. and also in talking about the

urgency of the problem, get people motivated because there are definitely people out there who want to think we can solve this 100%. and they just point disappointed and even angry if you tell them that something like a muddling through is more likely, there are people who are most turned on by technological advancements and, you know, and social change and really, really excited about the positive side of the ledger. but there are other people who are motivated by other to concern for other people elsewhere on the planet anger about global justice issues particularly it intersects with climate and know if you want to get a big tent and you really want to get like a whole green industrial revolution unfolding, which what we do want and to some degree what we've already achieved, i think that means talking a variety of ways to a variety of different sensitive to all of the of the complexity of the story. yeah. mindful that like, you know, you don't want to talk about the apocalypse if the apocalypse isn't actually happening but not

that, that fear and, and gloom is also a motivating factor as i think the experience and the example of rachel carson shows to the i. so but what's the disconnect to me is why don't you want to be continuing momentum building on a 2024 campaign and you want it to be subterranean? i don't understand why you feel that. well, i'm not i'm not saying that i don't want to have further momentum on climate. i do i'm saying that i think it's that we have not seen the right wing backlash to major climate action that people expected for very long time. and i think there are a lot of reasons for that. we're not getting any republican senators signing on board. there used to be a whole host of republicans or none now. so it's become a partizan issue in the us it depends on what history like how long back in time you want to go but certainly five years ago we wouldn't have gotten any republican senators. seven years ago we wouldn't have

gotten any republican senators. and at time, if there had been a major, you know, the of the obama presidency, there had been a major effort to do a climate bill. i do think that it would have produced a large scale culture war backlash. yeah, which is not what we're seeing today. and i think part of that is because the transfer of the country's energy system is already far enough along and especially far enough along. and a lot of red states that it just doesn't seem like a distant abstract issue which to stage a culture war fight over. and to the extent that we're thinking of it as a lunch pail issue, the numbers are not you know, the numbers point you towards supporting climate action even you're a republican. when you say we you're you're putting on your the activists have when i say we sorry what you just said we said you're part of the activist group you've said when we you mean we the new york times or do you mean who am i speaking? yeah. well, sound like you were part of the group or a movement.

i generally am uncomfortable speaking on behalf of any movement. i when i have friends who activists and campaigners, but i don't myself feel aligned with them so much as watching them. i just mean an observer of american politics half a decade ago or ten years ago would have looked the scale of climate action that we've undertaken as country under joe biden and would have guessed that was going to produce a major backlash. and in fact when the original green new deal proposals out from aoc office you did see like a lot of it was big talking point on fox news it was like it was part of what what people talked about on the campaign trail in 2018 and to me that's just really dissipated and i and some level i wish that a fuller conversion had happened and we saw much republican support for climate action than we've seen to point but i think it counts as some amount of progress that their rhetorically laying down

their and and letting the green transition at least as it's in america electricity sector proceeded how do you feel about the vatican and particularly pope francis's on climate what role does he play, do you think, today in convincing people to think the earth or earth stewardship in a in a different way? well i find his he's done a couple of large high. encyclicals one a few years ago and, then one this year. i find his rhetoric and writing really moving and powerful. i find his example of concern humbling and inspiring. i don't know what the impact out in the world is, in part because he's been a divisive pope a lot of people have you are unhappy with what a political figure he is in that place. but personally, i his leadership

and find vision of his vision of integrating spiritual concerns with environmental concerns be really powerful and moving. how do you feel? well, i he's my favorite pope. yeah, because grew up catholic. and i really i really appreciate when he speaks up on things. what about in california? what would you be worried about if you were living california on issues climate the most with rising levels or wildfires or, drought or what would put it in a maybe a perspective here in every most people here lived in the state. yeah my i mean everybody everybody worries about different things but personally would be most worried about wildfire and in particular the of wildfire smoke i think you know in general especially people places like california have an understanding of where the where the fire risk is. although i believe it's

something like half of all new in the state since 1990 have been built in high wildfire risk areas. we still like we can kind of navigate and negotiate that terrain. we know where the risk is. and even if it means, you know, having to go back by the door and leaving when an alarm strikes at 3 a.m., even if you didn't expect to when you went to sleep at 11 at 11 p.m. that night, we kind of know how to for most part, navigate the the risk of direct fire, but the risk of smoke is really quite scary to me. it's much more pervasive. it's not containable. it travels across neighborhoods, not just lines, but class lines, other demographic lines, the wind patterns are not necessarily that predictable. and the health consequences are really quite extreme. we know that, you know, air pollution in general, most of it from the burning of fossil fuels, is millions of people all around the world. each year, wildfire is contributing only a very small fraction to that. but we think probably of the

science suggests that the health impacts of wildfire smoke are proportionately worse than most of the other air pollution we have. of the stuff that gets burnt, the stuff that we're breathing that gets gets burned, we know it affects, you know, respiratory diseases of all kinds, kind of intuitively that it affects risk, that affects cardiac health, it affects dementia, alzheimer is it affects adhd, it affects rates of schizophrenia. you know, people end up in the mental hospital more, you know, visits to emergency room in the hospitals more often on days when there is air pollution, it affects cognitive performance. it affects premature birth and low birth weight. such that, you know, when when we instituted easy pass in america, you now that you don't have to slow down at the toll you drive through you don't produce as much exhaust around the toll plaza and the rates of premature birth and low birth weight by like 15% in the immediate vicinity of those toll plazas just. because of the effect of instituting e-z pass. and this is in a country where,

you know, we know that air pollution is actually i mean, compared to the rachel carson you've been writing about way better and by global standards. we have really clean air the u.s. and yet you can still see enough of an impact that, for instance you know some researchers suggest as many as 300 or 350,000 americans are still dying prematurely every year from the effects of air pollution, which is the equivalent number people who died in 2020 from major, big, important point and in six december of 1963, they did the first clean air act, which went stationary pollution. and then in 1970, clean air act, that would deal with automobiles. and then the getting of lead out of gasoline. now what do we do now in 2024, if you like, 25 after the election in a state like california how does one control this pollution from wildfires do we need to have a a federal wild

fire force almost like a new branch of of of government or. and what about it? what's take, i should say, on electric vehicles? there's some people that say if they're having a wildfire coming, they're worried goes out and then they don't can't charge their car. do you think, well, is there any realm that see to that fear that some people have that live in a in an arid part of california? you know, i would think i think that's that should be pretty far down on your list of worries, you know, especially in a place like california, you're talking about a rapid evacuation. you're talking about evacuating, you know, over a span of, you know, tens of miles, maybe 50 miles. and just to put that in perspective, i spent a lot of time in canada this year where they had an unbelievable record wildfire season about three times as bad as they had ever recorded before. the burn scar so large you could fit half the world's countries

inside that just in canada and enough carbon released by this that it was three times canada's annual carbon emissions just from the burning of fires. and i particularly spend time in the northwest territories, which is a remote part of canada. it's about five times the size of california, but it has only about 40,000 residents. and it and in a period of time this summer, every single town and city, the northwest territories, but one was under evacuation orders from wildfire and those evacuating from the capital yellowknife, which was the last big place to be evacuated. and the lion's share of residents there, they had to drive for 18 hours through burning forest to get to safe haven place. so when we think about evacuation in california, yeah, good point. we don't have to travel that far. so if you're going 18 hours and you don't, you can't charge your car, you're in trouble. if you have to drive 50 miles, chances are your car has enough charge to get you those 50 miles and, you know. so that's one. and the bigger picture.

you know, i think i there's a lot that we can do to reduce the risk of fire. the first thing we can do is to limit the amount of global temperature rise that we have how much more arid these forests, how much hotter, how much harder they get. we can control that to some degree, but we also have to take action on the forest management side. you know, there's an ongoing i'm sure everybody in california is aware it. and how much of this is due to climate change? how much of it how much of it is due to forest management and fire prevention over many decades, which allowed this huge buildup of what fire scientists call fuel? and the rest of us know as trees to up. and you different people have different positions that personally i think that those who are attributing it large or entirely to forest management are overstated in the case. but both things matter and both things matter going forward and are things that we can do to try to make the forest we have healthier, even under climate conditions that we're likely to get. are you comfortable with the

with moving to vehicles? i mean, ford motor example starting to do electric, you know, trucks they're not moving that well and tesla's hitting problems, is it that what's the what's the has attention on electric are you comfortable. it's it's incrementally connecting and nothing you know walking on water not made in a day and and yeah i'm pro heavy i think that the limitations are very few i think they're heavier which means that in the case of an accident they can be more dangerous people worry about your you know your driving rain you know how long you can drive on a charge but personally i think that's really an overstated problem. and most of these cars are reporting now full battery charge ranges of something like 500 miles. and so the number of times that you were driving 500 miles, you got to get gas, too. so it's really not that different. on top of which, you know, you're plugging the car into your home, which means basically you've got a gas station in your

house. it's not that every time you're going to charge up your car, you have to wait for a half hour, 45 minutes at the equivalent of a gas station. that's going to happen only very rarely when. you're out in the field. most of the time you're returning your home and charging it there and was actually at a few months ago, i was talking to someone who works for ford doing you on a commercial side, not on the consumer side, but doing ev rollout. and he says, you know, when he talks to people about range anxiety he has you know he does a presentation he asks how many people in the last week took a trip of of you know 200 miles or whatever and like everybody has hand goes up and he says, okay, let me look at your cars. it goes into their computers. in their cars was like nobody had driven that far in the last week. in fact, you know, like 1% of their trips over the last month had been that far. so people are worried about that, that restriction. but it actually isn't nearly as concrete problem for our current driving patterns as most of us imagine. and the rollout. it's not as fast as i would like, but you know i think, you

know, we're setting records every year. i think that's likely to get better as the tax incentives the ira are really understood we're not going to be we're not going to have 100% ev fleet by 2032 or 2035, in part because we're still going to have a lot of old cars on the road. but you know, i think when california a california, i think is to not have any new sales of i see is 30, 20, 30. you know think that will be they'll be ahead of the curve on that they may pinch a little but you know if other states are putting in putting in policies like for 2035, i think that's quite manageable. how many hands, how many here have an electric vehicle that's preaching to the converted. yeah, very, very. anybody with their electric experience, a hand. we're not we're not going to demonize you or we won't even remember what hand it was. so you're all happy with it. there you go. and it really connects to what i was talking about earlier, which is these effects.

i mean, the most striking that i've come across about the health negative health effects of the cars that we run today is that if you replace a diesel school bus, which is how most school operate in the us today with an ev school bus, you the rates of asthma on that bus in half like this is such a win win that the people who study air pollution say that we can entirely pay for the decarbonization of the american's electricity and transportation systems entirely just through the public health benefits cleaner air. we wouldn't have to calculate the climate benefits. we wouldn't have to calculate the new jobs or, you know, the investment returns all just about how much less it would cost us with our visits to the hospital and the doctor. how many fewer deaths and how much less illness we would be seeing that alone would entirely pay for the entire decarbonized ocean of the american electricity and transportation sector. and i think that, you know, that's something very few americans really appreciate, that we driving these things around. we are pushing toxic exhaust out

into the air, some of that we're breathing ourselves drivers but also into the neighborhoods and environments that we're circling through. and all of those people are suffering a result we can choose to eliminate that suffering pretty rapidly when we go electric. david we kind of circled around it and along the lines for you want to nail it the how does one i mean i think one of the problems that whenever there's a freakish storm people don't know whether even in the media world whether you're allowed to call it a climate disaster. victims are there have always been hurricanes their part how and then biden has been under some criticism from the environmental community for not declaring things climate emergency the term just again to you know drive point home do you have through all great journalists and investigate story work you're doing do you have an of when do we clear something the climate disaster when we don't. well, i think that it's the

short answer is there's emerging field of science called rapid attribution studies, which allows people to identify pretty quickly the space of a few weeks, how much of the intensity a particular disaster was the result warming? how much more likely was made by the effects of warming? this has been led principally by a group, the world weather attribution network, and it's main public figure is a brilliant scientist named frederic otto. and so that's sort of my gold standard. and they'll tell you things like. for instance, the that hit libya in the summer, destroying a dam and i think the death toll was a few hundred the deadliest flood event anywhere in the world this century was made times more likely back by climate change. now, it's also a complicated disaster. a dam collapsed. there are human and political components to that. the dam was not being kept up properly. there had not repair. people were living dangerous

places. but think that that tells us something else about climate generally, which is that they are never or almost never entirely climate powered. it's about the intersection of climate challenges and human infrastructure and human decisions. and we need to think about all of those aspects in planning for a future in which the of those climate threats is larger. but to say, well, we could have built that dam differently or repaired. it is not to say that climate isn't presenting a much larger challenge to libyans than it did ten or 20 years ago. it both things are true. and so i think, you know, while it's rarely the case that you can attribute any single climate event, any single natural disaster just to climate, i think we are living in a world in which all of these threats have been intensified, and we need to prepare for that future and just to give brief little spiel about that, you know, in the really big picture, the world is already warmer than it has ever been when when humans

were around to walk on it. so we've exited the window of temperatures that enclose all of human history and all of the expectations that we've built for infrastructure, but also for our politics and our social interactions, our psychology, our sense of seasons and, you know, all of the complicated human activities have risen up from human civilization many millennia. all of that is to some degree, the result of climate conditions, which we've already left behind. and we are figuring out now how to live a new set of conditions, but we know that they are much more demanding and challenging. and i actually when i think about these changes, i actually think about the example of houston, which was hit by five, 500 year storms in five years, recently. and that term was always a little bit squishy. and, you know, but it reminds even just at a vernacular level much the world has changed because it we invented the term to tell us, this is a storm that we would expect to hit about once every 500 years, 500 years ago, there were no europeans in

north america. so we're talking about a storm that we would expect to hit once during that entire from the arrival of europeans the building of colonies, you know, the waging of a genocide against native people, the fighting a revolution, the building of a slave empire, the fighting of a civil war or emancipation, industrialization, world war one. world war two. the cold war. the of american empire the end of the cold, the end of history. september 11th financial crisis 19. we're talking about a storm that theoretically, according to this vernacular standard, we would expect to hit once during that entire history. and houston got five of them in five years, which literally means they got millennia of extreme weather in half a decade. and that's that reminds us that among things, it's possible to think about climate change as having pulled us into a sort of mythological place out a place of history. and we're going to be dealing with challenges of the scale on the other hand, houston still standing. it's not like when you walk down the streets, you drive the streets, you think, well, this a

wasteland. and that's a reminder that climate change is not the whole of our destiny. it's just the natural landscape on which are going to build that future. and what choices we make about how we build that future are going to be incredibly consequential because those challenges those impacts, those threats are only going be growing almost certainly throughout all of our lifetimes. this room and we need to be much, much smarter and, much more serious about navigating that future to allow future generations to navigate that landscape comfortably and happily is just to put a bow on it is there a referee that we can trust? is there a way for the country to get a deck which looks we are doing categories of, you know, hurricanes or one or two and three? is there an ability, something we could all trust to say this should constitute a climate disaster? where do you think that kind thinking is reductive doesn't help and just puts the president

in a hard position have to declare hawaii as a climate emergency. on the other hand, you know how of these five year houston events you know does it take can we create an eight and a referee maybe named one that you're could one that the american people believe in be created? i think i think the science is solid, which means it's a matter of institutionalizing and giving it the imprimatur of, you know, political and social buy in. but i think definitely possible from my from an analytic perspective, the distinction is not that important. the world that we're living in today is defined. climate change, everything that's happening in it is shaped by it. and so saying this is this isn't is, you know, in some sense splitting rhetorical but at the you know at the level of public communication and advocacy i do think it's valuable to remind people that, yes, we just had a deadlier wildfire in hawaii than we had in more than a century.

was the wildfire in lahaina in maui, the deadliest wildfire in more than a century. and it's part of a growing trend of you can't even really call them wildfire because they're not in the wildland, they're in densely residential neighborhoods. this was basically of from the time of the great chicago fire, all the way through 2070 and 2018. and then we started to see it and we saw it in santa rosa in california. the fire isn't going from tree tree. it's going from house to house. we saw it in paradise, california, same we saw it in boulder, colorado and now we saw it in l.a. we've also seen it in parts of canada. a lot of climate scientists i know talk about as the return of the urban firestorm. it's not even the wildfire per se that's worrying. it's the urban. when the fire starts and then jumps into town and uses the built environment as fuel, we used to think the built environment was resistant fuel in part because of how it was was resistant to burning, in part because of how was built.

but these fires are now often burning so much more, so much hotter and more intensely that they'll pull up much more as fuel burning such so intensely that in california i've had the scientists at cal fire tell me it burns so hot that it turns the silica in the soil into glass just by burning through it creates huge weather systems. parakey minimalist clouds, which are basically fire storms, which then start new fires miles away in canada this year, fires jumped a lake was two and a half miles across. and the embers were so big, so hot, flying across that lake that they showed on nasa satellites. so you can't trust a two and a half mile body water to protect you from a fire you know, you're in it. you're in a tough spot. and that's sort of the future that we're heading into, is where we're going to have to start thinking a new way is about our own vulnerabilities and risks and not take for granted things like, oh, a modern building won't burn, or a giant was going to protect us.

all of these rules are changing and we're just starting to kind of wake up to that in that regard. may be calling that climate emergency works mean the cost of a visual component that if 1969 you know cuyahoga river on fire people see a river on fire and vote photography it wakes you up. santa barbara oil spill color television. you know, all of the gook in the goo are killing paradise and santa barbara. can we start? what i'm suggesting is maybe if we know that that's a climate emergency, it just might stimulate a new group of people. think it may, you know? yeah. i mean, the way that think about it is actually related to our earth hour. so i'm somewhat disagreement about the politics of climate change earlier, which is unfortunately a lot of the language of climate change has just been so gotten so loaded. yeah. that you talk to pretty conservative republicans and you talk about, oh, the weather

patterns are changing. you talk about their flood risks. you talk about the effect on their crops. they'll agree with you. but when you bring in the language of climate change, it makes it a little bit. that's very true. but i would put the question back to you, which is, you know, learning from especially the lessons of the early environmental movement of the 1960s, learning from, you know, rachel carson, the cuyahoga river, you know, the foundation at earth day, the epa, all that history, what marks that period as different from ours in terms of the public receptiveness? i think book your books done as well as without and elizabeth kolbert but books had a different credence in a book like silent spring can move needles or ralph nader unsafe at any speed or. you know, edward abbey's desert solitaire, they're in a different kind of way. i think it's a visual sense, an inconvenient truth? it's a visual medium. doris goodwin, i don't know if she's here right now, but dawson, i would go see president obama quite a bit.

i did the oral histories, the climate people from the obama administration for columbia, and we would work. yeah, but we in president obama would constantly be worried about the visual component. like it's so big for all the things taught. how does one in a visual aid it and you know he ended up going to alaska and holding a fish or you're showing an a glacier, a melting. it's such a large problem. i just don't i think that in the sixties, you can still get away with the documentary film a little bit, the books. so that's what i mean. maybe pop culture has to lean in. i'm not convinced if joe biden this climate record that not getting the climate activists to say don't quit saying he's too or something combined combined in at a biden rally and say we're going to he did do that nuts and we're going to move the kind of the political needle a little forward. but while let me ask you, in our

very limited about climate action in the term and environmental justice issues. so tell me about the who's the worst in your mind brought of what's going on now it the in the world even but who is going to be profoundly affected where somebody might have a house that gets here but they can move there say a you know resources and most of the work that's been done in this area shows that the country in the world that is expected to be hit hardest by climate damages. is india. and what's most striking about this is that the calculations are mostly done by economists and. they're tallied up in dollar figures, and that matters because value of property and indeed the value of life is not nearly as high in india as it is in the us. so when talk about india towering over the damages we're going to experience, you really have to multiply that many times over if really getting five

times as mda is, getting on some human calculating dollar terms. on some level that means they're getting 50 times as much damages as we're likely to expect. and in fact you can can trace this with some pretty systematic clarity the biden epa recently instituted a new version, what's called the social cost of carbon, which is our estimate for the damages that are imposed on the world by every additional ton of carbon we put into the atmosphere under obama it was valued about $40 a ton. trump cut it to eight. biden bumped it back up to 50, which is basically just inflation adjusted 40. and then he raised it to official 190. but it's an outdated so it's like $220 per ton right now. and what that means is that every single right now american emissions are doing almost. $1,000,000,000,000 in damage. this is not some fringe

advocacy. this is literally the position of the biden epa that our carbon emissions are annually imposing $1,000,000,000,000 of damage every year. and almost all of that depending on how you want, push it up maybe even more than all of it is imposed elsewhere. so it may be the case that the us is still in an aggregate level benefiting global warming because more places are heating and that are cold than are hot. whatever. but generally speaking, the lion's at least of the damage that we're doing in the world is imposed elsewhere. and the biggest suffer is is india and probably secondarily across sub-saharan africa. and you can put a dollar figures on this and they are really quite so. some economists i know, including who work have worked in the biden administration recently put out a paper in which they said that the us already owes. well over a or hundreds of billions of dollars in climate damages to india and as next few decades unfold, that number will grow well into the trillions where we have just a bit of time

so we'll kind of write a lightning round, a couple of quick things. so we can have a kind of quick answer on a few if possible, coal is it something that we should be just getting rid of in the united states? yes. and everywhere and everywhere for everyone and people that get power from coal, one person dies every year from air pollution. we're as a we're a reporter for the new york times, you finding people doing the most interesting climate related research either a think tank university where you can press well i think the world weather attribution people are doing really important work tying events immediately to climate. i think that the work on air pollution that's being in the city of chicago and climate impact lab and also at harvard is really, really powerful and then i think there's a lot of economic work that's really important because it's so close to public policy that's being done at stanford and berkeley and hopefully has already shaken the economic consensus of a decade ago that the transition

will be burdensome and expensive and showing the world that in fact we will be more the faster we move. policy doesn't yet quite show that, but the fact that we're moving as quickly as we are now to decarbonize shows that more and people are waking up to that reality. and i think that's largely to the credit of some climate focused economists. you at a book festival, you work for the times and you wrote a book that a standard must read honestly please get but but yeah truly but i'm curious what books influenced you on your environmental journey and once that what did it start with bill early bill mckibben or how did start really navigating to at the point where you're at as a with literature writing. yeah i mean it's funny, i came to this late so it's, you know, i worked with you as i was an editorial assistant at times books when they were doing the president series. i also worked with bill mckibben in that same job as one of my first job out of college, and one of his books that i called

enough and, you know, i'd heard of the end of nature then, but i hadn't read it. you know, that was those books were very important, obviously very important to me. but i actually came to the subject more from humanities and i want to wondered if this is truly, you know, metanarrative of our time that touches everything in the same way that say, you know, human rights governs geopolitics coming out of world war two or neo liberalism governs the dynamics of the markets. after the end of the cold war and climate change is sort of a force like that shaping. how do we develop a new of analytic tools that are not derived from the legacy of environmental writing? as important and powerful as that, but are derived from other fields, helping us think about what it means to live psychologically a time we perceive as apocalyptic, even if it's not truly apocalyptic or how we think about ethics. you know, in a time of dramatic climate change, what we owe people elsewhere in the world and. in that sense, i think i'm indebted as much as anything to people like peter singer who

really emphasize the common humanity of everyone who's alive on the planet and teach us to or suggest, i think that we should be thinking of climate change. a moral tutor reminding us that the life of someone living in sub-saharan africa or in bangladesh or india is not worth less than our own, just because they are distant from us in fact because we are in many ways the most prosperous country in the world, responsible, the most emissions historically to some degree, we are imposing burdens on directly and we should be thinking about that obligation, that responsibility, and ultimately that guilt in a much more direct and profound way than, i think almost any american does today. the brilliant wayne and thank you so much, andreladies and gei