David Wallace-Wells talking:
The Holocaust analogy is especially interesting, because we are already, today, killing 9 million people a year globally with small-particulate pollution. That’s not directly an effect of climate change, but it happens because we’re burning fossil fuels. Nine million people every year. And that is more than died in the Holocaust. If we get to 2 degrees of warming, predictions are that we will have killed 150 million people from the small-particulate pollution alone.
It’s a paper by a scientist named Drew Shindell. It just looked at the difference between air pollution at 1.5 degrees and air pollution at 2 degrees. So, just in that gap, we’d be killing 150 million people. That’s the equivalent of 25 Holocausts. And 2 degrees is functionally our best-case scenario for global warming, which means that our absolute best-case scenario is suffering of the scale of 25 Holocausts, which puts this guy’s comments about—you know, his comparison in context, yeah.
And it’s interesting additionally because the Department of Defense and the national security state have been a really interesting source of far-reaching projections about climate change within the U.S. for a long time. They are among the more conservative parts of the federal government, and yet they’re also very hard-minded and realistic and concerned with the fate of American power in the world. And so they’ve been very clear in their projections for what is possible, not just the flooding of Navy bases and other military bases, which is a big part of it, but also just how totally the global map will be destabilized by the forces of warming.
So, in many parts of the world, whole societies could be torn asunder, pushed into civil war. Nations that had been living sort of uncomfortably aside one another could be pushed into conflict over resource scarcity. There are scientists who believe that much of the unrest that we’ve seen in the Middle East over the last 25 years is actually the result of global warming, because this is part of the world where warming has hit first and hit hardest. And the people studying the relationship between conflict and warming suggest that for every half-degree of warming, we’ll see between 10 and 20 percent increase in conflict, which means if we get to 4 degrees of warming by the end of the century—which is not my projection, by the way; that’s what the U.N. thinks where we’ll be if we don’t change course—that we’ll have twice as much war or more by the end of the century.
Climate change is an all-encompassing threat. It touches every aspect of life on the planet. And many of those impacts are going to be damaging, so there’s a cost to economic growth. Economists believe that if we don’t change course on climate change, we’ll have a global GDP that’s at least 20 percent smaller, and maybe 30 percent smaller, than we would without climate change. There’s the cost of public health. There’s the impact of drought and agricultural yields. Again, if we get to 4 degrees by the end of the century, we might have grain yields that are half as bountiful as we would without them, which means we’d have to feed 50 percent more people and have half as much grain to give them. And all of these things impose a burden on any society. Some societies are wealthy enough and adaptable enough to endure and find other ways to, say, feed their people and take care of their sick. But others are not. And many of those societies will likely fall into conflict as a result of global warming.
So, the people who study this most closely are careful to say that most wars that we see aren’t the direct cause of warming, but that warming is a factor in many conflicts—for instance, the Syrian civil war. Libya—sorry, not Libya—Lebanon had a similar drought, and they were not pushed into civil disarray, but the Syrian civil war was the result of a drought, and it produced a refugee crisis that has completely destabilized European politics and, through Europe, global geopolitics. That was 1 million refugees who came out of Syria and went into Europe. There were more refugees that were produced, but only 1 million made it to Europe. And we’re looking at, according to the U.N., a climate refugee crisis that could be 100 or 200 or even a thousand times as big as that crisis.
I’m in awe of Greta. I think she’s done an incredible service to the planet. And I think she’s not alone. All of the children who are mobilizing on this issue, I think, have an incredible moral stature that shames us grown-ups, their parents and grandparents, for what we’ve done and are continuing to do. I think the activism that she’s inspired is thrilling, actually exhilarating. And you see it not just in Sweden, but all across Europe. I think you see it with Extinction Rebellion—it started in the U.K., and it’s now spreading in the U.S.—and all of the activism that’s pushed the Green New Deal here.
I think things are actually, on the ground, changing quite rapidly. The sort of gold standard measure of public opinion in the U.S. on climate is this Yale study that comes out every December, and the numbers there are that more than 70 percent of Americans believe global warming is real and happening now, more than 70 percent are concerned about it. Those numbers have jumped 15 percent in just a few years; they’ve jumped 8 percent since March. So, things are moving quickly. The question is whether our policy will move quickly enough to respond.
My own story is, you know, I’m not an environmentalist. I’ve been an urbanite my whole life. I’m a kind of child of “the end of history.” I was a teenager in the 1990s in America, in an affluent part of America, in New York. And I believed that while the promises of globalization and neoliberalism were imperfect, I also believed that history told a story of progress and that, over time, the world would be getting better, more prosperous, safer, cleaner, more just—again, that those stories would be erratic, but they would unfold over time.
And just over the last few years, really beginning in 2016, when I started seeing much more alarming reports about climate change than I had seen before, and also noticed that those reports were not showing up in our newspapers or television accounts of climate change, that there were some really quite bleak possibilities on the horizon, and so profound in their implications that they would really unbuild or reverse those intuitions about the future of the world that I had had as a young person growing up when I did, that the cost to our society could be so great that we really did stop thinking of the future as containing a more prosperous possibility for us, and started thinking of the past as some more perfect time.
it destabilizes absolutely everything about geopolitics, so states are destabilized, the rivalries between states are destabilized. It changes the calculus of where resources are that are valuable. It transforms shipping routes. It transforms the front lines of battle. So, for instance, the Arctic is melting. That means that there’s new territory to fight over. There’s already rivalry there between the U.S. and Russia. China is involved.
And the exact nature of these dynamics is shifting with the effects of change. So, Russia was a country that a few years ago we thought of as a kind of—you know, a second-rate power. But climate change actually promises to benefit them in a couple of ways, in part because they benefit from the burning of fossil fuels—they’re a petrostate—and in part because their economy is one of the few in the world that’s far enough north that it will actually benefit from some additional warming. The relationship of temperature and economic growth is complicated, but there are some countries that will benefit, and most who will suffer, as a result of warming. And Russia is poised to benefit, which means that, along with everything else we’re seeing, Russia could play a bigger, more dynamic role of rival in the future.
And the same is true of China. The way that they’re approaching the South China Sea and building new islands in that sea suggests that they are trying to establish new footholds in a theater that had been essentially dominated by the U.S. military since World War II and which their own footholds are—where their own footholds are at risk of disappearing, because many of those islands are going to be underwater by the middle of the century.
I think that Trump is less of a denier than someone who sees as an opportunity in slow-walking action on climate. So, I don’t think he really cares whether climate change is real. I just think he sees an advantage in American inaction, in opening more coal plants and letting the rest of the world clean up the mess. That’s how he’s operated as a businessman. I think that’s basically how he’s operating as a president.
But what’s one of the really interesting new news from science, from economic research in particular, is that while his view had been a kind of conventional picture of whether we should act on climate or not—that is to say, 10 years ago, economists would have said that action on climate was quite costly and would involve forgoing real economic growth—all of the recent research suggests that faster action will be better for us economically. We could save $26 trillion in the global economy just by 2030, which is a very fast return, if we decarbonize quickly. I don’t think that information has yet percolated into the minds of our policymakers, especially like Donald Trump. But once that logic is clear, that faster action is better for the economy, I think that we may start to see a kind of sea change in our public policy towards climate. We’ll see.
“You might hope to simply reverse climate change. But you can’t. It will outrun all of us.”
That’s especially true with regard to the melting of ice. So, if we pass tipping points of ice melt in the Arctic and Antarctic, those processes will take place over centuries, and maybe even millennia, but the scale of the impacts that they will bring are enormous. So, we could see at least a hundred feet of sea level rise, possibly as much as 260 feet of sea level rise, if we melt all of the ice. And that would completely transform the map of the world.
But I think it’s also important to understand that climate change is not a binary system. It’s not a question of whether it’s happened or not. It’s not a question of whether we’ve passed a threshold of catastrophe or not. Every tick upward makes the impacts worse, and every tick upward we avoid will make them better. So, at 2.5 degrees, we’ll be considerably worse off than we were at 2 degrees; at 3 degrees, worse than two-and-a-half degrees. And while the scale of some of these possible horrors is, therefore, a kind of almost paralyzing horror show, it’s also a reminder of just how much power we have, and will always have, over the climate. If we get to 4 degrees, it will be because of action we take now. And if we—but that means that we can avoid getting there if we take action quickly.
the U.S. has the lion’s share of historical emissions, and so there’s a strong argument that we should be a true moral leader on this issue. At the moment, China is the biggest driver of emissions and, I think, going forward, will be the main driver of the future climate of the planet, because American emissions and EU missions are falling, although not fast enough, and Chinese emissions are growing.
I think that the scarier, uglier moral calculus has to do with the impacts, which is to say that it’s the Global South that’s being hit hardest. That’s already the case, but it will certainly be the case in the decades ahead. You see, you know, projections that many of the biggest cities in India and the Middle East will be lethally hot in summer as soon as 2050, which means you really won’t be able to go outside during the summer without incurring some risk of heat stroke. Obviously, Bangladesh is at risk of flooding about half of its landmass. And it’s especially grotesque when you think that those two countries were for so long the colonies of Britain, who invented the Industrial Revolution and built an empire off of fossil fuels.
“[T]wo-thirds of American energy is wasted. … [And] Americans waste a quarter of their food.”
I think that climate change, in a certain way, is an easy problem to resolve, if we just had policy that was focused on it and enough muscle behind it. But, yeah, absolutely, everywhere you look, there are solutions like that.
So, there’s a lot of talk now about lifestyle choices and consumption, and particularly diet, as it relates to climate change. I personally feel that basically all the talk of lifestyle choices is a distraction from policy and the things we need to do at that level. But there is research that shows that if you feed cattle seaweed, their methane emissions fall by as much as 95 or even 99 percent, which means that if we legislated that all cattle farmers fed their cattle seaweed, that we wouldn’t have to worry about the impact of eating beef. We could just eat beef guiltlessly. Or, if we invested aggressively in lab-grown beef and didn’t involve animal suffering at all, we would still be able to have the pleasure of those meals without imposing any carbon footprint on the world.
And there are really those kinds of solutions almost everywhere you look. There are some sectors that are a little harder to decarbonize—for instance, air travel, some sectors of industry. But there is exciting, interesting technological movement on those fronts, too.
The short answer is, for hyperbole. I think that we need people to be alarmed. And while I think true uninhabitability is vanishingly unlikely, it is conceivable. And the fact that we’ve brought it into view at all is a huge indictment of everything we’ve done over the last few decades.
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David Wallace-Wells
deputy editor and climate columnist for New York magazine, author of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming.
— source democracynow.org | Feb 21, 2019