Record Heat Waves Are Preview of Our Future on a Warming Planet: Climate Writer David Wallace

Guests - David Wallace-WellsNew York Times opinion writer and a columnist for The New York Times Magazine. A massive heat dome settled above the eastern half of the United States over the Fourth of July weekend, bringing triple-digit temperatures, disrupting travel and prompting emergency measures for millions of people. At least 25 people died in New Jersey due to extreme heat and humidity, and more than 185 million people — over half of U.S. residents — were under heat alerts over the weekend. This follows a record-shattering European heat wave that’s been blamed for thousands of deaths across Spain, France and Germany. Climate scientists say the burning of fossil fuels is the primary cause of global warming and the reason why heat waves are becoming longer, hotter and more frequent. “Global warming is accelerating past thresholds that we used to consider unacceptable,” says climate journalist David Wallace-Wells. “There are a lot of questions about why we haven’t prepared adequately for these heat waves,” says Wallace-Wells, but he argues that it is still possible to retrofit the planet to mitigate the climate catastrophe. Transcript AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, as we turn now to the record-breaking heat wave that scorched the northeastern United States over July Fourth weekend. At least 25 people are dead in New Jersey due to extreme heat and humidity after a massive heat dome settled over the eastern half of the U.S., bringing triple-digit temperatures, disrupting travel and prompting emergency measures for millions of people. Many of those who died were found in homes with no air conditioning, on the street and in park cars, according to officials in New Jersey. More than 185 million people — more than half of U.S. residents — were under heat alerts over the weekend, with extreme weather forcing the cancellation of Independence Day events in states from Alabama to Connecticut. Severe weather forced the cancellation of the Great American State Fair, a two-hour evacuation of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and delayed President Trump’s Fourth of July speech. Here in New York area, the heat wave shattered records dating back nearly 60 years. Central Park reached 100 degrees, subway stations registered even higher temperatures, while 17,000 customers lost power. This weekend’s North American heat wave follows a record-shattering European heat wave that’s already been blamed for thousands of heat-related deaths across Spain, France and Germany. Climate scientists say the burning of fossil fuels by humans is the primary cause of global warming and the reason why heat waves are becoming longer, hotter and more frequent. On Friday, a team of scientists explained the recent heat wave would have been, quote, “virtually impossible,” unquote, before humans began warming the planet. This is Theodore Keeping, a climate scientist at Imperial College London who worked on the analysis. THEODORE KEEPING: We found that in the last 50 years, since a previous heat wave affected Europe, in 1976, that the chance of a heat wave like this has gone from almost impossible to something that we’d expect to see every couple of decades. And as the climate continues to warm, we will see events like this increasingly frequently. And in a future climate, this may be something that we expect to be commonplace. AMY GOODMAN: For more on the extreme weather here and around the world, we’re joined in studio by David Wallace-Wells, New York Times opinion writer, columnist for The New York Times Magazine, his recent piece headlined “We Need to Retrofit the Planet. The Heat Wave Proves It.” He’s also author of the book The Uninhabitable Earth. Welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us, David. Start off by talking about what’s happening here. And if you can put it in the context of climate change? DAVID WALLACE-WELLS: Well, the planet is now warmer than it has ever been in modern human history, basically since the agricultural revolution 10,000 or 12,000 years ago. We’re already outside the window of temperatures that enclose the entire history of human civilization. And we are warming more rapidly than the planet has ever warmed in its history, including periods where warming produced deaths of 50 to 90% of all life on Earth. So, we’re running a pretty radical experiment, and things are changing pretty rapidly. Just over the last couple of decades, we’ve seen the pace of warming accelerate, and we’ve seen the chances of heat waves like the one that we saw in Europe grow as much as a hundredfold more likely. So, just since the 2003 heat wave, which killed tens of thousands of people in Europe, a heat wave like the one that we just saw in Europe has gotten a hundred times more likely. There are a lot of questions about why we haven’t prepared adequately for these heat waves, and we should be asking them and doing more to protect ourselves in the future. But I think the baseline observation that we have to make is that things are moving incredibly quickly, and that makes it incredibly hard for us to change our ways. AMY GOODMAN: I think Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1776 at the signing of the Declaration of Independence that it was 76 degrees on July Fourth. Of course, in this area, it was over 100 degrees, triple digits. Your piece is headlined “We Need to Retrofit the Planet. The Heat Wave Proves It.” I was upstate New York, and trees, there was a kind of — I called a torrential tornado. It took down trees in the Catskill area all over, and yet was hardly talked about afterwards. And yet it was in the midst of this heat wave that happened over, like, 30 minutes. How do you retrofit the planet? DAVID WALLACE-WELLS: Well, I mean, there are a lot of pieces to it, but, unfortunately, a lot of the natural world, like the tree landscape that you’re talking about, it’s going to be quite difficult. The human-built environment is a little bit easier, but it still requires something like — you know, take the European heat wave — building in air conditioning for 300-400 million people who don’t have it today; reimagining the way that buildings are built, so that they don’t retain heat, which is what they were designed to do, but actually repel heat, which is what Europe’s going to need in the decades ahead. It also involves different kinds of urban planning. I think about the way that L.A. has been rebuilding in the aftermath of its fires, resisting a lot of fire codes that might help future — might help neighborhoods, you know, be more resilient in the face of fire in future decades, and instead the local communities are fighting those restrictions. So, you know, we have an enormous landscape of the built environment the world over which was designed and erected to survive climate conditions which we’ve left behind, and we basically need to reimagine all of that to survive new climate conditions, which are going to get considerably hotter, even just in the decades ahead. AMY GOODMAN: Can you compare the U.S. and Europe’s approach to climate change to China? DAVID WALLACE-WELLS: Well, you know, China is a kind of a complicated story. They’re both the world’s biggest emitter — they’re responsible for almost one-third of all carbon emissions in the present — and also the source of the greatest hope for climate change, because they are producing something like 70 to 90% of all the world’s EVs, solar panels, batteries. So, they’re both contributing the most to the problem and contributing the most to the solution. In the U.S., we’re not producing nearly as much of that technology. We are building out our green energy infrastructure relatively quickly, but we’re not doing nearly enough to bring emissions down into line with our targets. And that means that we’re heading up against some really terrifying climate thresholds. AMY GOODMAN: What has the Trump administration done? DAVID WALLACE-WELLS: They’ve gone to war with clean energy and tried to undermine it everywhere that they could. They’ve literally bought off wind projects, so that those will not go forward. They’ve taken an ax to Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which was essentially a climate bill, and tried to undo all of the tax incentives that were in it to subsidize clean energy. And they’ve done very little to help the problem of interconnection and the grid, which are so essential to the buildout of clean energy in America. They haven’t totally succeeded. Last year, 90-plus percent of new energy infrastructure was green. But they’re doing everything they can to put their hand on the needle and change the direction of policy and make America more like a petrostate and less like the electrostate that China is trying to be. AMY GOODMAN: So, how can the U.S. be a leader on green energy? DAVID WALLACE-WELLS: Well, we need to spend considerably more particularly on these technologies, the grid and interconnection, so that the developers who are willing and ready to build out solar farms, in particular, can build them quickly and can install them and make them — make that power available to American citizens. When you saw something like that happen in Australia over the last couple of years, they’re now offering their citizens three hours of free electricity every single day, because the buildout has been rapid and the infrastructure alongside it has been so successful. AMY GOODMAN: And talk about what’s happening with Africa, the effects of countries that are least responsible for climate change bearing the brunt, even though many, thousands of people, are dying around the world, outside of Africa, because of the heat. DAVID WALLACE-WELLS: Well, this is one of the cruelest features of climate change. It is a universal threat. It tells us that we’re on this planet together, and we have one shared fate, but it also tells us that the same inequities that horrify us about our society, in general, apply when it comes to climate change. Those with the least are the most vulnerable. They are the least responsible, and they’re heading for the darkest climate outcomes. One of the more optimistic things that’s happened in the last few years, though, is that countries in the Global South, across sub-Saharan Africa, across South Asia, have actually taken decarbonization into their own hands and started building out new green energy capacity on their own, even without help from the Global North, which was long assumed to be necessary. They’ve done that in part because that technology is so cheap, coming from China, that they’re able to afford it themselves. And you’ve seen some of the most rapid uptake of solar power, in particular, in the world’s developing countries, much faster even than in the Global North, where we expected it to be the fastest. AMY GOODMAN: The Manhattan Project developed the U.S. atomic bomb. What would a Manhattan Project for renewable energy look like? DAVID WALLACE-WELLS: Well, the interesting thing about the energy sector is that we have the technology that we need to get a lot more progress than we have right now. Solar and wind and batteries are most of the solution. They’re not the entire solution, but geothermal needs to be promoted considerably more. The things that I’m more worried about are heavy industry and agriculture, which are big parts of the carbon emissions puzzle, which we don’t yet have quite satisfying solutions for. And in fact, some of the things that we thought were going to be quite successful, especially in agriculture, have proven much less useful over the last few years, not panning out like we hoped. So, I think we need considerable R&D in those areas, and money just flowing into the system on the renewable side to make sure that the technology that we have today actually gets implemented at scale and pace. AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain what meteorologists are saying when they talk about a heat dome, this large high-pressure system that traps hot air on the ground? DAVID WALLACE-WELLS: Well, it’s part of the explanation for the European heat wave. It’s part of the explanation for the East Coast heat wave that we just lived through. And it seems to be arising, an even more spectacular one, in the American West right now, which means that over the coming weeks we’re likely to see quite scorching temperatures west of the Mississippi, which is especially scary because those are fire-prone parts of the landscape that have been dealing with drought, and we may see some really dramatic uptake in wildfire activity in the west. But in general, these are weather patterns that intensify the heat waves that we might otherwise be seeing, making them last longer and more punishingly than we would have expected in the past. AMY GOODMAN: What about divesting from fossil fuels? What would that look like? DAVID WALLACE-WELLS: Well, I mean, it would mean depriving some of these companies with their operating — some of their operating capital, and, I think, even more significantly, signaling the political unwillingness to participate in the system of destruction that these companies are leading. I think both of those goals are worthwhile. But we do need to do a lot more than just pull our money out of fossil fuels. We need to supply clean, cheap, healthy energy to the world, which is going to require a lot of additional investment, not just disinvestment. AMY GOODMAN: When you were doing research for this piece, “We Need to Retrofit the Planet,” and for your book, The Uninhabitable Earth, what shocked you most? DAVID WALLACE-WELLS: Well, these days, what worries me most is that global warming is accelerating past thresholds that we used to consider unacceptable. Not that long ago, 2018, the U.N. published its 1.5-degree report that showed the difference between 1.5 degrees of global warming and 2 degrees of global warming. And the difference between those two levels was considered so significant that it terrified the world into action. That’s why we had the climate awakening of the 2019, 2020 period, with Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion, the Sunrise Movement. All of that — the climate strikes — was the result of fear about reaching that 2-degree threshold and the intensity of the urgency of trying to limit warming to 1.5 degrees. Now we are basically already at 1.5 degrees right now, and because of the effects of El Niño, we may see something close to 2 degrees of warming as soon as next year. And that’s not a long-term average, but in the long term, almost certainly, we will be blowing past that 2-degree threshold, which, again, in 2018, 2019, 2020, terrified the world. Now we’ve made that future inevitable. AMY GOODMAN: David Wallace-Wells, we’ll link to your piece in The New York Times Magazine headlined “We Need to Retrofit the Planet. The Heat Wave Proves It.” Coming up, a New York City Council employee has been released after five months in custody at the U.S. immigration jail in Newark, New Jersey, known as Delaney Hall. We’ll meet him. Stay with us. [break] AMY GOODMAN: “Children, We All Shall Be Free” from the album Songs of Slavery and Emancipation. Media Options