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--:-- Shamita Basu: This is In Conversation from Apple News Today. I'm Shamita Basu. Every weekend, we're taking you deeper into the best journalism on Apple News.
--:-- Shamita Basu: World climate summits are usually where big pledges are made. But lately, we've been seeing smaller, less wealthy nations use the global platform to plead for their future.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Two degrees, yes, is a death sentence for the people of Antigua and Barbuda, for the people of Dominica and Fiji, and yes, for the people of Samoa and Barbados.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Leaders of the G20, we are drowning and our only hope is the life ring you are holding. Even though we in Africa are the least of the contributors to this phenomenon, we suffer the most.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That is the death sentence to the Maldives. We do not want that dreaded death sentence. And we've come here today to say, try harder, try harder.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Developing countries are bearing the brunt of the worst effects of our changing climate. And in the meantime, the largest, richest nations make promises and set goals and agree to meet again next year.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, it's one thing to talk about how to reduce the amount of carbon we release into the atmosphere going forward. You know, the let's do better starting tomorrow approach.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's another thing to consider how we can remove the carbon we've already put out there. We have a tool in our hands now that will allow us to literally repair the damage of global warming, to take the carbon out of the air so that not only do we stop climate change, but in theory, at a big enough scale, we could undo it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's David Wallace-Wells. He's deputy editor at New York Magazine and the author of The Uninhabitable Earth, Life After Warming.
--:-- Shamita Basu: David isn't the first person to write about carbon removal technology. It's an idea that's picking up more and more traction.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But here's how he framed it in an article for New York Magazine. Wealthy nations should front most of the cost for this technology, and we should think of it as a form of climate reparations.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It is huge and it would be massively expensive, but it gives us, at an intellectual level, a device by which we can calculate the cost of undoing everything that we have done.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So what exactly would climate reparations look like? And how do we even begin doing the math?
--:-- Shamita Basu: We have a pretty clear table of which countries have emitted how much carbon historically. And because that carbon hangs in the air for centuries, at least, and maybe millennia, we also know that it's not going away.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's not leaving the atmosphere unless we do something about it, which means that any ounce of carbon that was produced 30 years ago, but even 100 years ago, even 150 years ago, even 250 years ago by, you know, say some coal miner or somebody using coal in the north of England in the 18th century, that carbon's still up there in the atmosphere.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And it's still causing warming. Globally, we've produced about 2,500 gigatons of carbon. That's 2,500 billion tons of carbon.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And it is amazing just to pause there for a second and remember that even though this is a gas, it is that heavy. I mean, 2,500- That's measured in tons, gigatons. Billion tons, yeah.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Every single flight, every seat, every economy class ticket on a flight from New York to Paris produces one ton of carbon dioxide that hangs in the atmosphere.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And all of that is basically a warming blanket, which is why we are having the problem that we're having today.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And about 500 tons, technically 509 gigatons of that was produced by the US, which means about one fifth of all the damage that's ever been produced to our climate in the entire history of industrial civilization was produced by the United States.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's about double the number two country, which is China. And when you start looking around the developing world in the global south, they've contributed a paltry, paltry amount to this problem.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So sub-Saharan Africa, which keep in mind is home today to more than a billion people, has produced less than 1% of all historical global emissions.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We know that there is a crisis, but a lot of the time it gets talked about as a collective problem, you know, something that everyone needs to be part of the solution for.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Why is it important to reject that framework or challenge that framework and think about it as the global north really bears most of the responsibility here?
--:-- Shamita Basu: We are where we are today because of the emissions of the global north. And those countries have benefited from those emissions.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We have grown. Our economies are rich and we are rich because of the power of fossil fuels, because we have used them in such profligate ways.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, I don't mean to say that all of that use was villainous. Someone buying a gas guzzler in 1950 didn't exactly know the damage that that was going to do in the global south.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And I don't want to suggest that individuals are the main moral actors here. Nevertheless, we are the beneficiaries of fossil fuel powered economic growth.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We owe that growth to some degree to the fact that we have simultaneously been poisoning the planet and our future at some great scale.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And I think a kind of a moral accounting would demand that we repay that to some degree
--:-- Shamita Basu: Let talk about the phrase climate reparations It sounds intentionally provocative So why use it and what does it mean
--:-- Shamita Basu: Well, the word reparations comes from the word repair. And in the context of slavery reparations or any other reparations that have been talked about to sort of undo historical injustices or crimes,
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's the idea, that you take some measure that allows you to repair the damage that was done by whatever crime or sin or injustice was created in the past.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And for a lot of those crimes and sins and injustices, the calculation is pretty complicated. It's a really murky concept. It's useful morally, but practically has a lot of limitations.
--:-- Shamita Basu: When it comes to climate, for most of the history of, you know, talk about climate reparations, which goes back now a couple of decades, there's been a similar problem.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We knew that parts of the world were going to be hit harder. We knew that certain countries were much more responsible for the problem.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But while countries of the world, especially at climate conferences, often talked about needing additional support from countries in the rich world to respond to climate change and to ease their own transition to green energy,
--:-- Shamita Basu: Those figures were not really about repair. They were about responding and adaptation and what's called mitigation in the climate community, which is to say doing what we can to put less carbon into the atmosphere so that future generations have less difficulty to deal with.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But over the last few years, the technology has arrived and is working to take carbon out of the atmosphere.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This brings us back to that innovative idea we were talking about earlier, technology that removes carbon from the atmosphere.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One kind is called direct air capture. Which basically sucks carbon, and it does the whole industrial process in reverse.
--:-- Shamita Basu: If the industrial process is like we mine coal, we burn it, turns into smoke, it goes up into the atmosphere and heats the planet.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This is, we take that smoke, we sort of collect it using giant fans, we run it through a filter, we condense it into something that is actually quite like the coal, and then we bury it underground again so it'll never dissipate into the atmosphere on its own.
--:-- Shamita Basu: David argues this technology could be a major game changer for our planet, but only if it's done on a huge, huge scale, which would be really expensive.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Globally, we're talking about $250 trillion to undo all of the damage of carbon pollution to this point.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's a huge amount of money. It's also an unbelievably large-scale engineering and infrastructure project.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I think most people imagine, you know, we're sort of trained by Silicon Valley to think that technological progress can be kind of instantaneous because really what it amounts to is downloading like a new app on your phone.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But in the real world, these things really take time and money and effort and come up against resistance when you're trying to really build new stuff.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So we're very, very far from realizing carbon removal at any large scale.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The UNIPCC, the scientific body that makes recommendations and studies the state of climate science and puts out periodic reports, they want us to cut carbon emissions by 45% by 2030 to give the planet a 50-50 chance of avoiding what they call, what has been called catastrophic warming, two degrees.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That, I think, is not going to happen. We're not on track for that.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But even assuming that we did do that, and we did cut in half, more or less, our carbon emissions over the next nine years, the UN says, in order to give ourselves a decent chance of avoiding catastrophic warming, would also require so much carbon capture that a new plant would have to be built every single day between now and 2050.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And now in the world, we have one operational plant. A single plant. One single plant. One plant.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There are others that are sort of, you know, tech, like they're laboratory scale experiments. So, but there's one commercially working plant out there today, and we would need to do one every day between now and 2050.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And that's not to undo the damage of the last 150 years. That's just on top of the rapid decarbonization they say is necessary and which may be impossible to allow us to avoid catastrophic warming.
--:-- Shamita Basu: To do even more than that, to actually remove carbon from the atmosphere at scale rather than just sort of limiting the damage that we're doing going forward, would be an even bigger undertaking.
--:-- Shamita Basu: What we're talking about when we're talking about carbon removal at a scale of climate reparations, like I'm sketching out in this piece is really what scientists often call planetary scale.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It does mean meaningfully rebuilding the surface of the planet in order to make this job one of our biggest priorities, along with food production, for instance.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And that is not something that most people are contemplating.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Are there any wealthy nations that have adopted or embraced the language of climate reparations in this way, talking about carbon removal and their own role and responsibility in it?
--:-- Shamita Basu: The short answer is no.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The connection between carbon removal technology and climate reparations is relatively new because the tech is so new.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The language that has been used by most developing nations in calling for support, they've used the word reparations but not connected to carbon removal.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And they often talk about loss and damage, which is to say that they want payments to help them deal with extreme weather and natural disasters they've seen already and the ones that they likely to see in the future
--:-- Shamita Basu: That language has to some degree filtered up into the rhetoric of wealthy nations
--:-- Shamita Basu: And if you look at all of the speechifying at Glasgow at the climate conference in November there was much more rhetorical support among global leaders from the global north for the conceptual proposition that vulnerable countries need more help.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We in the developed world must recognize the special responsibility we have to help everybody else.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And so that on some level is progress. But the concrete commitments that were made were, I think, quite laughably small.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In the last major climate conference in Paris, the rich countries of the world promised $100 billion in annual funding to the countries of the global south through what's called the Green Climate Fund.
--:-- Shamita Basu: They haven't yet made good on that promise. They've gotten sort of close. If you count in that figure, a lot of loans that those countries will have to pay back, you can get close to 100 billion, but they haven't actually met 100 billion.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And the only promise that was made this time at Glasgow was that, okay, now, in fact, we are going to get to 100 billion, which is, of course, the same promise they made in 2015.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The developing countries of the world, in the meantime, have dramatically upped their ask.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And depending on which diplomat you talk to, They would say the figures are now, the requisite figures are something at least on the order of $750 billion a year, maybe a trillion, maybe $1.3 trillion to help them both deal with the inevitable impacts and to help them transition more quickly into their own green economies.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So we're falling far, far, far, far, far short.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We're starting to talk like this is important, but it's not clear exactly what that means or whether these leaders in these rich countries are essentially paying lip service to an idea so that they don't actually have to pay up themselves.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Just the term reparations on the political stage is met with backlash by conservatives in the U.S.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And I'm curious, you know, given that reality, why use the term reparations for climate? Does it ultimately hurt the goal?
--:-- Shamita Basu: I think wherever we look on climate, we have been constrained in the past by plotting our hopes from the basis of what we considered politically possible and not from what we understood from the science to be necessary.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And I think that has been a real failing, and it is a large part of why we are today where we are so close to this threshold that scientists have been warning us about for decades.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I think that the question of carbon removal and reparations, and even putting aside the carbon removal part of it, just the reparations part of it, is similar.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We know there will be more warming than there is today. We know the developing world is already ravaged by today's warming.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We know that that future warming will impoverish them further, expand rather than shrink the gap in resources and well-being that today, really, if we looked squarely at it in the global north, should embarrass us.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That gap is only going to expand.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And we know that doing nothing to help them transition and adapt means subjecting billions of people to much harsher lives full of much more suffering than they would be subjected to if we did help them.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Whether that project is politically palatable in the immediate present tense of domestic politics in this or that country, I think is less important than asking readers, Americans, citizens of the world to think about this challenge in moral terms and invite them to think about what they could do and what their polities could do to alleviate the suffering of those who are expected to suffer most.
--:-- Shamita Basu: David is speaking with a sense of urgency, but he's also very clear-minded about how time could actually be on our side here.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And that's not something you hear a lot in conversations about the climate crisis.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The beauty of carbon removal as a policy of climate reparations is that you don't have to do it over the next decade.
--:-- Shamita Basu: When we talk about what we need to do to keep temperatures to 1.5 degrees, cutting our emissions in half by 2030, that's a rapid, rapid project.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We're talking about spending $50 trillion to suck carbon out of the air. We're not talking about doing that by 2030.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We're talking about doing that by 2130. And that makes the bill much, much smaller in a year-by-year way.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In fact, it could be considerably smaller because by that time, presumably the technology will be a lot cheaper.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It also allows for that expansion of the timeline of imagination, which to me, at least, as someone who's lived very closely with climate over the last few years, it makes me feel a lot less claustrophobic.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's not just this year is critical, this year is make or break, which is a lot of what the language around Glasgow was, it's okay, this is a really big project.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We need to get going soon. We need to do as much as we can as quickly as we can. But there's not like a deadline at which point all is lost.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And that deadline is certainly not 2030.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And that's, I think, really useful.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Beyond all that, I do think that this is a bigger problem that is not simply related to climate.
--:-- Shamita Basu: As I was hinting at earlier, when I said that we tend to view the developing world in these terms already in a way that we should feel as an indictment of our moral imagination.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You know the IMF a few months ago calculated that it would cost billion to vaccinate the entire world for COVID
--:-- Shamita Basu: They estimated that the return the economic return from doing that by 2025 was trillion
--:-- Shamita Basu: So they said, put $50 billion in now.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And even putting aside the humanitarian benefits, the diplomatic benefits, and goodwill that you would produce, you would have a 200-fold return on your investment within four years.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And we haven't done it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Let me clarify what David is saying there. In May of 2021, the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, put out a $50 billion proposal.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's the number they said it would take to get the majority of the world's population vaccinated, distribute medical equipment, fund health campaigns, and effectively end the pandemic.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But instead, we've watched countries keep the focus inward and spend massive amounts of money on national stimulus plans.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's kind of like the ultimate failed marshmallow test for the wealthy nations of the world.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Yeah. I mean, 50 billion is literally like Bill Gates himself could spend that money.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Elon Musk himself could spend that money.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, I don't want to put it on those people when our governments are failing.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Government is the entity we have to make capital allocations like that. That's what it's there for.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But $50 billion just for the U.S. is a drop in the bucket in terms of public investment, let alone when you start thinking about bringing all the members of the G8 or the G20 in.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This is a tiny investment that would pay back the IMF, which is no lefty progressive organization.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The payback would be enormous in such a short amount of time.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And yet we haven't bothered to even explore that possibility.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You've been writing about climate for years. And I mean, I remember when The Uninhabitable Earth was first published in New York Magazine in 2017.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And just, I mean, I remember in my own social circles, at least it felt like a million alarm bells went off.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I think that was a real wake up call for a lot of people and that you eventually turned that into a book.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But I also know that you have, in your writing, been sort of cautiously optimistic about the future, not saying it'll be easy, but that it's at least plausible to achieve a better future for a planet.
--:-- Shamita Basu: How do climate reparations fit into your forecast and fit into your, I don't know, your understanding of optimism?
--:-- Shamita Basu: Well, I don't think that the relative optimism that you're describing depends on a large-scale embrace of climate reparations.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So at a global level, you know, a few years ago, I think it was plausible to imagine the planet warming by four or even five degrees Celsius this century.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And that would have been absolutely catastrophic.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, I don't think that it would have meant like civilizational collapse. I'm not like one of those people, but it would have put a lot of stress on a lot of particular societies, produced a lot more famine and drought and suffering and hunger and indeed death than we have today.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And that landscape has really changed over the last couple of years.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's not because of stuff we've done exactly. It's because of how much cheaper renewable energy looks now than it did a little while ago.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So almost all of the forecasters looking at our energy trajectories now see a much faster transition to renewables, a much more immediate end to coal than was thought possible even just a few years ago.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And as a result, we're looking at a future of somewhere between two and three and a half degrees and maybe on the cooler end of that, between two and two and a half degrees.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, two degrees is still hellish. It would still mean 150 million additional people dying of air pollution, 150 million from the burning of fossil fuels.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It would mean storm and flooding events that used to hit once a century would hit every single year.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And it would mean all across South Asia and the Middle East during summer in many cities that are today home to 10 or 12 million, 15 million people.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It would be so hot that you couldn't go around outside. You couldn't walk or work outside without risking heat stroke and possibly death.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's two degrees. I think that's about our best case scenario.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, the way the carbon removal and reparations come in on top of that is twofold.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The first is it lowers the floor. If we don't really have a hope of staying below two degrees without carbon removal, with carbon removal, we do.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Which means we could get under 1.5 degrees. We could even get under one degree.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Theoretically, we could get all the way back to the pre-industrial climate if we had this at enough scale.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And as I said, we talked about, huge scale, hugely expensive, but it's conceivably possible.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I don't think it's a coincidence that we're heading probably for a temperature level that will be difficult but manageable for the wealthy countries of the world.
--:-- Shamita Basu: and yet absolutely punishing for those in the global South.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I think probably, you know, a lot of people would have predicted that that was the quote-unquote optimal policy point.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But I think that it would be a moral failing if we looked at that dynamic and said that that was an acceptable outcome.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I think we need to understand our obligation to others, not just because they are fellow humans, but because they are suffering because of what we've done, how we've benefited, and ultimately because of how rich we are.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In theory, we want to extend those same promises and opportunities all around the world.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But a first step towards that means protecting them from the collateral damage that we have already imposed.
--:-- Shamita Basu: David, thank you so much for this conversation. I appreciate it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Thanks for having me.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Great to talk to you.
--:-- Shamita Basu: David Wallace-Wells' article for New York Magazine is available now on Apple News. You can find the link on our show notes page.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Thank you.
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