Joe Rogan | The Long Term Effects of Climate Change

But yeah, if it gets hotter, they're fucked too. Because it's just like in the summertime in Houston, you know, when you're dealing with 100% humidity and it's 115 degrees outside, you can't even explain to people what that feels like. You're getting cooked. There are places in the world that are going to be, they're going to literally cook you by 2050. So cities in India and the Middle East, you won't be able to go outside during the summer without being at risk of dying by 2050. By 2050, like what kind of temperature are we talking about? Well, it's a combination of heat and humidity. But usually the heat will be like up around 130, combined with some bad humidity. But you know, we've already broken that threshold. Like there have been temperature records set every year, but last year broke 130 in Oman, I think. But like the scarier parts are not some of these crazy desert places that have gotten really hot. It's the cities. It's like Calcutta has like 12 million people in it. And you may not be able to live there in the summer in just 30 years. And then you just think about where all those people are going and how much that's going to destabilize everything. You know, I've talked to people who are terrified about this and I've talked to people who are nonchalant. Where do you sit? Are you terrified? Are you thinking that you're going to be physically in trouble yourself? Or do you think that with proper planning and just not being tied to one spot, you can move to another area? I mean, I have different feelings about it at different times of the day because it's that big a story. It's like going to affect everything, I think. You know, I think civilization is not going to collapse. I think there'll be people around even living like kind of rewarding, prosperous lives forever. And the question is like what shape those lives take and where they are. So me personally, you know, I'm like a relatively well-off person who lives in America, in New York. I think I'll be able to do okay. I think my children will be able to do okay. And when I imagine their future, I think it's a reflection of all of our kind of like cognitive biases and emotional reflexes that when I imagine like my daughter's future, I'm imagining a world that seems a lot like the one that we live in today. But when I look at the science, it paints a really, really bleak picture. So you know, the question of like optimism and alarm, I think it's really all a matter of perspective, right? So we're at 1.1 degrees Celsius right now. I think there's basically no way that we avoid two degrees of warming, which is like this UN calls catastrophic warming, the island nations of the world call genocide. And that's when we would be making these cities in the Middle East unlivable. It would mean like some ice sheets would start a permanent collapse, which could all of them melted eventually bring 260 feet of sea level rise. And we're on track for four degrees of warming. So that would mean $600 trillion in climate damages by the end of the century. That's twice as much wealth as exists in the world today. It would mean there'd be parts of the world scientists say where you could be hit by six simultaneous climate disasters at once. There'd be at least a few hundred climate refugees. The UN says the low end estimate is 200 million. The high end estimate is a billion, which is as many people as live in North and South America combined. Can I stop you for a second? Yeah. Six simultaneous natural disasters at once? Yeah. What does that mean? Like flooding, hurricane, famine, you know, some public health issue, like malaria. It's like every category of modern life can be affected by this. And there aren't that many that could be hit by six, but like already right now in Australia, there is a crazy heat wave. It's like over 120 in lots of Australia. They're also dealing with like epic floods in other parts of the country. And that's kind of the problem actually with wildfires in California. It's not just that it's getting hotter, it's that it's also getting wetter. So more rain means more growth means when it gets hot again, that growth gets baked and then becomes, you know, fire starter. And that's the, you know, it's not just, it's not just a temperature. It's like higher temperatures mean crazier extremes in all directions. And you know, that's why I think sort of looking big picture, there's not a life on earth that's going to be untouched by this force like over the decades ahead. But that's not to say that we're all be destroyed by it either. I think like we will find ways to live and adapt and mitigate. It's just a question of how much it's going to screw up our politics, how much it's going to change the way we think of history. You know, like I'm an end of, I'm a 90s kid. I grew up end of history thinking the world was going to get better. The world was going to get richer. Globalization was progress, etc. What does it mean if like climate change completely eliminates the possibility of economic growth, which probably won't be the case for the US, but there are huge parts of the world where that is going to be the case if we don't change course now. So like at the end of the century, if we don't change course, the economists studying this, say global GDP could be at least 20, possibly 30% smaller than it would be without climate change. 30% is twice as big an impact as the Great Depression. How did you get involved in this? How'd you get involved in studying this? And what was your perception before you got involved? And how did it shift? So I'm a journalist. I'm an editor, mostly actually at New York magazine. I'm interested in the near future. As a result, I read a lot of scientific papers, read a lot of obscure subreddits and that kind of thing. And just in 2016, I started seeing a lot more of the news from science was about climate, and a lot more of that climate news was really scary. And when I looked around at the other places that we think of as our competitors, newspapers, TV shows, I just felt like the scarier end of the spectrum was just not at all being talked about. Most scientists talk about this two degree threshold as the threshold of catastrophe. And I think most lay people think that that means that that's kind of a ceiling for warming. That'll be the worst it could get, but actually it's functionally the best case scenario. And yet we hadn't had any storytelling, any discussion around what the world would look like north of two degrees. And I just felt as a journalist, I was like, holy shit, there's a huge story here. The way that this world could be completely transformed by these forces is not something that anybody is writing about. In parkas, it's a long story, but scientists and science journalists were really, they were really focused on making sure that their messaging was hopeful and optimistic, and they were reluctant to talk about their scariest findings. And so I was terrified by the science. I looked at it and I was like, nobody's talking about this, it's scary. Gotta like spread the word. And I wrote a big piece in 2017 that was very focused on worst case scenarios. So I mentioned before, I think two degrees is about our best case scenario, four degrees is where we're on track for now. This piece was looking at five, six, eight degrees of warming. So things were not likely to get this century at least. And it was a huge phenomenon. It was read by a bunch of million people, the biggest story that New York magazine had ever published. And I just thought, man, I guess there are a lot of people like me out there who have intuitions about climate suffering and terror, but aren't seeing it in the way people are writing about the story. So I decided, there's more to say. And even beyond like telling the bleak story, telling the really dark, talking about the really dark possibilities, I just thought there are all these categories of life that we haven't even thought about how they'll impact us. So we know about sea level rise, but that's like, as I mentioned before, that makes you think if you live off the coast, you'll be okay. But the whole planet is going to be touched by this. Some places are going to be hit harder than others. It's going to be hit by like 29% of all global climate impacts of the century. But everyone's going to be affected in some way. And the way that changes our politics, the way it changes our pop culture, the way it changes our psychology, our mood, our relationship to history, how we think about the future, how we think about the past, what we expect from capitalism, what we blame capitalism for, what we expect from technology, what we think technology can do, can technology save us, can technology entertain us while the world is burning? These are all these kind of like humanities questions that I felt really had not been talked about. And so the book does like, it's a tour through what the world would look like between two and four degrees. But it's also, which is a kind of hellscape. But it is also, you know, about half of it is about, we're going to live here, we're going to survive in what form? What will it mean? You know, myth at the mythological level, what will it mean at the personal level? What will it mean, the way we think about our kids and their futures and all that stuff? And, you know, my big picture thinking about it is, yeah, it's really bleak. And I think there are some possible ways that we could avert some of these worst case scenarios. I mean, there is technology that can suck carbon out of the atmosphere already. It hasn't been tested at scale. It's really expensive. But if we really, if we can over the, you know, the next decade or two, really like build like global plantations of these carbon capture machines, then not only can we like stop the problem from moving forward, we could actually reverse it a little bit. Yeah, I've seen those before. I've seen the designs for those where they have these enormous like apartment building sized air filter things. Yeah. I mean, it's basically like... But only in theory. They do exist in the real world, but only either kind of like in laboratories. They don't exist at anything like the scale they need to. But there's a guy at Harvard named David Keith who has tested his machines. They're able to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere at a cost of $100 a ton, which would mean we could totally neutralize the entire carbon footprint of the global economy. We wouldn't have to change anything. We could suck out all the extra carbon we're putting into the atmosphere for a cost of $3 trillion a year, which is a lot of money. But there are estimates for how much we're subsidizing the fossil fuel business that are as high as $5 trillion a year. So if we just redirected those subsidies to this technology, in theory, we could literally solve the problem immediately. There are other complications. It's like in order to store the carbon, you need an industry that's two or three times the size of our present oil and gas industry, and where that goes and next to whose homes and all that stuff is complicated. But we have the tools we need. It's just a matter of deciding to put them into practice. And I think we're pretty like that. Recent history shows that we're not doing that fast enough. So one of the big points that I'd like, I'm making the book, and it sticks in my head so strongly is we think of climate change as this thing that started an industrial revolution like centuries ago. But half of all the carbon that we've put into the atmosphere in the history of humanity from the burning of fossil fuels has come in 30 years, the last 30 years. It's since Al Gore published his first book on warming. It's since the UN established their climate change panel. It's since the premiere of Seinfeld. So like you and I have lived through the lion's share of all of the damage done to the climate in all of human history. Whoa. Yeah. And the next 30 years are going to be just as consequential. So we brought the world from the basically a stable climate to the brink of total climate catastrophe in 30 years, one generation. You have about one generation to save it. To me, that's like, it makes me uncomfortable to use this language, but it's basically a theological story. We have the entire fate of the planet in the hands of these two generations. What happens 50 years from now, 100 years from now, will entirely be up to the way we act now and what we do. And the time scale is so crazy because you have this really compressed, we must act now to avert these worst case scenarios time scale. But also the impacts will unfold if we don't do anything over millennia. So like we could have, you know, if we really bring into being the total melt of all ice sheets, that means that eight centuries from now, 12 centuries from now, people will be dealing with the shit that we're fucking up today. We will be engineering problems for them to be solving 800, 1200, 1500 years from now. And that damage will be done if it is done in the next 30 or 50 years. So we are, I mean, we are really writing this epic story about earth, humanity and our future on this planet in the time of a single lifetime, a single generation. And that is on the one hand, it's sort of like overwhelming, but it's also empowering. You know, like all the climate impacts that I talk about, all the climate horrors that are really terrifying. If we make them happen, we will be making them happen. The main input in the system is how much carbon we put into the atmosphere. There are feedback loops that people are worried about. There are things about climate that we can't control. But at least at this point, the main driver of future warming is what we do. And so we could, if we get to a four degree hellscape with hundreds of millions or a billion climate refugees, that will be because of what we are doing. It's not some system outside of our control, even though we are often kind of, we find it kind of comforting to think that it's outside of our control because that means we don't have to change it.