--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Noel King: I'm Noel King.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today, we're talking about climate change. Umair Irfan is an environmental reporter here at Vox. Umair, you're an expert on this topic. I think it's easy to forget these days that the biggest thing that we should be worrying about at all times is the environment.
--:-- Umair Irfan: Yeah, we all live in it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And at the top of the week, we got a report that confirms this, yes?
--:-- Umair Irfan: Yeah, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is a body convened by the UN, put out a major report looking at 6,000 different pieces of new research on climate.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So it was a big international collaborative effort looking at what it would take to keep the world from warming less than 1.5 degrees Celsius on average.
--:-- Umair Irfan: And why 1.5? Well, you may recall that the Paris Climate Accord set out the goal of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius or less, but they had a really ambitious goal of trying to keep it to 1.5 or less.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The idea was that maybe keeping warming at a lower level would have more benefits.
--:-- Umair Irfan: Okay. And they weren't certain one way or the other, so they commissioned the IPCC to look into it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And this is the result of that, what it would take to actually reach this really ambitious goal.
--:-- Umair Irfan: Tell me what the report says.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, in short, it says it's going to be really, really hard.
--:-- Umair Irfan: How bad is 1.5 degrees of warming across the planet? What does that look like?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, a 1.5 degree scenario is about 50% more warming than we've seen since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
--:-- Umair Irfan: So since humanity started industrializing and burning fossil fuels, we've already warmed by about 1 degree Celsius.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And we're already seeing the consequences of that right now.
--:-- Umair Irfan: What are we seeing? Give the people some examples.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We're seeing at least 8 inches of sea level rise since the 19th century.
--:-- Umair Irfan: Intense storms that have higher storm surges that are causing more coastal flooding, more property damage, more frequent and intense heat waves.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Temperatures in Tokyo have risen to more than 41 degrees Celsius. Never has the country seen heat like it.
--:-- Umair Irfan: We're also seeing extreme weather events being exacerbated by things like higher sea levels, which lead to more storm surges from hurricanes, or warmer air holding on to more moisture, which leads to more torrential rainfall.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Sounds like Hurricane Florence. A lot like Hurricane Harvey.
--:-- Umair Irfan: Yeah, these were storms that had pretty strong signals of human-induced climate change.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They count on things like warm water and warm air.
--:-- Umair Irfan: And as the average temperature of the planet goes up, that means that there's a lot more warm water and the air is also a lot warmer.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The warm water temperature is the key fuel for the hurricane.
--:-- Umair Irfan: And then air, when it gets warmer, it can hold on to more moisture, which means that when it does condense in the form of rainfall, you see a lot more aggressive flooding.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So 1.5 is even worse than that? All that we've seen so far, plus another 50%.
--:-- Umair Irfan: Okay. And that's the ideal, that's the best case scenario we're talking about.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Under the 1.5 scenario, we're anticipating 15 inches of sea level rise by 2100.
--:-- Umair Irfan: We're talking about 4.8 million square kilometers of Arctic permafrost thawing out.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's going to have consequences for the local ecosystem, for the people that live there, but it's also going to release a bunch of methane, which is a very potent greenhouse gas, which people say that could lead to a climate feedback that causes the planet to heat up even more and faster.
--:-- Umair Irfan: And there are estimates that show that by 2100 on a per capita basis, global gross domestic product will be a median estimate of about 8% lower under a 1.5 degree Celsius warming scenario.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: All that said, two degrees is going to be all that and worse.
--:-- Umair Irfan: How much worse?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Sea levels would rise by another two inches, which would put about another 10 million people at risk for coastal flooding and other related problems.
--:-- Umair Irfan: And the number of people exposed to extreme heat once every five years under a two degree scenario is going to at least double.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think sometimes it's hard for people to wrap their heads around this stuff because it's happening over the course of so much time?
--:-- Umair Irfan: When we're talking about 1.5, we're talking about 1.5 by 2100 over the coming century.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The current trajectory that we're on says we'll probably hit 1.5 by 2030.
--:-- Umair Irfan: If you listen to the authors on Sunday when they announced the report, they didn't seem too optimistic.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The pledges that governments have made over the last three years are not enough to keep warming below 1.5 degrees C, even with ambitious and very challenging efforts after 2030.
--:-- Umair Irfan: It seems like people don't really think they can do anything to stop, you know, a force of nature.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But are there solutions?
--:-- Umair Irfan: There are definitely solutions.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That was a big chunk of this report. We're not definitively wedded to this scenario.
--:-- Umair Irfan: There are still some things that we can do. It's just that we don't have a lot of time to do them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So it is a very loud and thunderous call to action that we only have maybe as little as 12 years to act on it which means that we need to make very drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions right away as soon as possible as aggressively as possible
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: After the break, we get aggressive.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram. This is Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's this theory we have in podcasting that if you listen to this podcast, you might be curious about other ones.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So let me tell you about one. It's called Sold in America.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's hosted by someone named Noor Tagore.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Noor is a Muslim American journalist and just 24 years old.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: She's a total badass.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Noor traveled around the country and talked to the real people involved in the sex trade in America, and she made a podcast about it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's a deep investigation into the world of selling sex, both legal and illegal, and an intimate portrait and personal look at all the people the sex trade impacts.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's a billion-dollar industry in the United States, but you can listen to the podcast for free wherever you listen to your podcasts.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Apple Podcasts, Stitcher. It's on Spotify.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's called Sold in America.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Can I tell you a story? Please do.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I was at this bar once in Brooklyn.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I got one of those frozen cocktail drinks.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It was last summer.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It came in a plastic cup.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm fighting the one-man war against plastic.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But I drink it. I don't want to make too much of a fuss.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But then I want a second one.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I come up to the bar again.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Bartender's like what can I get you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm like could I get another one of frozen drinks but could you use this cup so at the very least you know we save a cup.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he goes sure.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he turns around and he chucks the cup in the trash.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he pours the second one with a new cup.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he delivers it to me seconds later.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I was looking at him with this like dropped jaw.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I was like
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he's like, oh, sorry, man.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I just forced a habit.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You're pissing in the wind anyway.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What else could I do?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, that's always the big question.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What can you actually do when you're facing this overwhelming global force?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the answer to that is really not much as an individual other than voting, pressuring your lawmakers to make decisions that benefit you and the world as a whole.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And in that fantasy, what should they do?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So there's basically a two-pronged approach to fighting climate change.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: First, you need the technologies.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Then you need the policy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What kind of technologies?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: These are things like renewable energy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: These are zero-carbon emitting technologies.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Those are things that you can use to replace the heavy polluting technologies like, you know, coal-fired power plants.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A lot of the individual stuff, the consumer decisions of what you buy, things like more efficient light bulbs, electric cars, cleaner appliances, more energy efficient housing upgrades, things like that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And there's the bigger stuff, things like using renewable fuels like biofuels.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Right now in the United States, we do corn-based ethanol.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's one of our largest sources of biofuels, but you can also do it with renewable forests and things like that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Plants naturally suck CO2 out of the air.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the idea is that if they're pulling the carbon out of the air and then you burn it, all you're doing is recycling the carbon.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You're not introducing anything new.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So there's no net change in greenhouse gas emissions.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But according to the IPCC report, all these technologies are not going to be enough.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Even if we do all those things that we're not doing, it won't be enough.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, we need to do all those things and that still won't be enough.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We need to start thinking about going negative, specifically going carbon negative.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: By what?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Like planting more trees?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Afforestation, planting new trees to help suck carbon dioxide out of the air, that's one option.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But, you know, trees take decades to grow.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It takes a long time.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You would need a lot of trees to compensate for it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So that's one option, but we're starting to get into some of the more sci-fi options now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Sci-fi options?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now we're cooking with fire.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But not.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We're cooking with an electric stove.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We're cooking with renewable-based fuel.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: One option that's starting to get traction is direct air capture.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Direct air capture.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is where you take CO2 directly out of the air, liquefy it, and inject it underground.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Take CO2 directly out of the air, liquefy it, inject it into the ground.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This doesn't sound like something I can do on my weekend.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: No, and very likely you probably won't be able to do it at any appreciable scale.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You have to move a huge amount of air through a machine in order to capture just a tiny amount of CO2
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay That why you need these massive machines these giant essentially fans that run air through them and then filter out the CO2
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You don't want to use more energy to get the CO2 out of the air than it took to put that CO2 in the air in the first place, because otherwise you're making the problem worse.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So it's not so sci-fi.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: People are doing it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There are actual pilot scale plants.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's a company called Carbon Engineering in Canada.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's a company called Climeworks in Switzerland.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And they actually have plants that are pulling CO2 out of the air.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How does this work?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Have you seen it?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I've actually seen a plant that does that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There is a facility in Iceland.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's called the Helshidi Power Plant.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's a geothermal power station.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You went to Iceland to see this thing?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, take us with you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What was it like?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Iceland is this volcanic island in the middle of the North Atlantic.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's stark.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's barren.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And almost everywhere you go, you can smell this sort of egg smell, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that's hydrogen sulfide.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's commonly associated with geysers, with a lot of geologic activity.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But even though geothermal energy is renewable, it's not necessarily carbon neutral because there's CO2 that's underground that's being pumped to the atmosphere.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So there's all this hot water and pressure and steam that builds up underground, and that's what helps run the generator.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But alongside that, there's CO2.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And what they do is they filter out the CO2, and then they re-inject it underground, and then it gets permanently sequestered as it turns into rock.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So it's like reversing climate change or something.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In a very, very small way, yes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's like creating rocks from air instead of burning rocks into the air?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I guess if you could think of coal as rock, then yeah, but you can't burn that basalt rock.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But there are proposals as well out there to kind of get at what you're doing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Rather than turning a fossil fuel into CO2 and water, which is the net result of burning it, you can take CO2 and water and build a fuel.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What's that?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's an approach called reverse combustion.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Reverse combustion.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So if you take, you know, the octane in your gasoline, for example, the hydrocarbons will break apart.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They'll make water and CO2 if you burn it in just about a perfect way.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If you take the CO2 and water, you can reassemble that molecule and then you have a fuel.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is anyone doing that?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The U.S. Navy is looking into this right now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Their idea is like if we've got like an aircraft carrier in the middle of the ocean and we need to fuel our aircraft rather than having a ship come in and bring oil to fuel the airplanes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What if we could generate that fuel ourselves?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, these sci-fi ideas, Umair, they're impressive, but like they weren't that sci-fi to me.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I feel like what's like the craziest moonshot Futurama drop a giant ice cube in the ocean to cool down the planet idea you've got?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Ever since 2063, we simply drop a giant ice cube into the ocean every now and then.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Of course, since the greenhouse gases are still building up, it takes more and more ice each time.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thus solving the problem once and for all.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Once and for all!
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Right now, there are some proposals on the table to deliberately tinker with the whole planet's thermostat.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That falls into a broad category of approaches called geoengineering.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Engineering.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It doesn't exist just yet.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In fact, even getting the research funding for that is difficult, but it's hugely controversial.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is the break glass in case of emergency type option.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: One of the approaches is basically injecting sulfuric acid into the atmosphere to produce sulfur compounds that reflect sunlight back into space.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the idea is by reflecting that sunlight, you will deliberately cool the whole planet.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We've seen that happen in nature.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Volcanoes, when they erupt, emit a whole bunch of sulfur compounds into the atmosphere.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And we saw that after the Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines in 1991, the whole planet's temperature fell by about half a degree Celsius for roughly two years.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So we know that this is a thing that can be done, or we've seen the consequences of it play out.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: To do it deliberately, that's hugely controversial.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But some people say we really need to have this option in our back pocket, that we really need to be studying how to tweak the planet's thermostat.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And what would we do?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is this like a spray can or something?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How do you pump this stuff into the atmosphere?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There are different ideas, but some people have suggested, you know, literally flying airplanes that spew out sulfuric acid, things like, you know, hot air balloons or things like that, that essentially spread this in the sky.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is there potential there for unintended consequences?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Sulfuric acid doesn't sound friendly.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, the sulfuric acid will react.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so it's not the acid that you're really worried about.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But you right to think about the unintended consequences
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean we don't know what will happen if we start deliberately trying to cool the planet
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: On the other hand some scientists say that you know we already tampering with the planet thermostat by pumping out greenhouse gases
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, that's effectively what we're doing right now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So why not do it in a more measured and controlled way?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then sort of to bring it back a little bit, though, there are other controversial options that aren't so sci-fi.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The big one being nuclear energy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But isn't nuclear dangerous?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean nuclear has some scary consequences things like meltdowns and a lot of people think of accidents like Chernobyl or three mile island right Fukushima
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But the fact that you can only name a handful of nuclear accidents is actually a point in its favor according to nuclear advocates
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But those are some gnarly accidents man
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But there's only a handful of them
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Think about how many coal plants we have coal plants regularly you know have coal ash spills or they regularly put out pollution.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Right now, the big problem with wind and solar is that they're intermittent.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You don't have solar energy when the sun sets, and when the wind stops, you run out of wind power.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But nuclear power, it produces power at full blast 24 hours a day, and it does it without emitting greenhouse gas emissions.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A lot of advocates will say that there's really no good solution to climate change that doesn't involve at least keeping the current reactor fleet online and perhaps building a new generation of power plants.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So while this country as a whole isn't necessarily taking this seriously, though various institutions are, which countries are?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It sounds like you mentioned Canada, you mentioned Iceland, you mentioned Switzerland.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, truth be told, lots of countries are doing little piecemeal things, but on the whole, very few are actually making any big, meaningful steps.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Germany, for example, had one of the largest deployments of renewable energy in the world.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But they're on track to miss their greenhouse gas targets.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Similarly, Canada is also a large fossil fuel producer.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They also generate a lot of their fossil fuels from tar sands, which is one of the dirtiest sources of oil and gas.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They're importing it down here too.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Exactly.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And similarly, like Norway, for example, like they're one of the largest purchasers of electric cars, but the whole country as a whole, I mean, they got rich by extracting oil.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do we have any idea how much this kind of climate change might cost countries over the long term?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Something like 1.5 degrees, 2 degrees?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's a metric called the social cost of carbon.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that's how much a ton of CO2 will cost on a dollar value for your economy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There was a study that came out last month that found that India is going to likely pay the highest social cost of carbon in the world.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Who's second on that list?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The United States.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Oh, yeah?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Which shows that climate change is going to cost our economy dearly as well.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But it also shows that we have a strong incentive just in our own self-interest to fight climate change.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If we don't, it's going to start costing us.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Like a lot of money.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: One estimate says that climate change over the last 10 years has cost the U.S. economy about $240 billion per year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But that doesn't include things like disasters.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Last year, we saw a huge natural disaster year, and scientists say that climate change made some of those disasters worse.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We're already starting to see sort of an internal refugee problem.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: People are being forced to evacuate from the Gulf Coast and also from some of the barrier islands in Alaska.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The water levels are rising, and that land is literally disappearing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So people have to move, and the government is now paying for those people to evacuate.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is there a chance that this report has any impact politically?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, given the response to past reports, I'm not optimistic.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Me neither.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This report doesn't present any new findings.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It takes the existing research that's out there and puts it together in one sort of devastating list of impact.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And says, here's what you got to do.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, it doesn't say, well, here's what you have to do.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It says, here's what it would take to accomplish this goal.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Right.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It takes a huge economic lift.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It takes a huge political lift.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It takes a global coordinated effort to fight climate change.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Given how fractious the entire climate change debate is right now, and the fact that global greenhouse gases are still going up, that the United States is backing away from the Paris Climate Agreement, it seems unlikely that this is really going to move the needle.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What it does do, though, is it kind of eliminates any excuse.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's no room left for wishful thinking on climate change.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The science shows us that it is going to impact us.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's no avoiding it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Every country is going to be facing the consequences of it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And there's no easy solution.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We're not going to invent our way out of the problem.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thank you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram. This is Today Explained.
