Earth’s Energy Imbalance I 2.5°C-3°C by 2100 I Will Technology Solve Climate Crisis I COP30

Those of us who had spent years following or invested in the climate movement and thinking that American politics was simply never going to prioritize these issues, these tech oligarchs and the companies that they lead have told us a story over the last five years or so in which they have been brutalized, punished, diminished, attacked by the forces of liberal governments, particularly in Joe Biden's administration. I find a lot of the ways in which those leaders have justified those terms to be pretty disgusting and disingenuous.

Once you make renewables sufficiently attractive, I don't think that we're going to see a full fossil fuel phase out over the course of the next 25 years. They will kind of naturally displace and crowd out the existing fossil fuel system. According to many studies, [we've] killed off something like 60 or 70 percent of insect populations on the planet. How many times am I going to watch a video of somebody driving through wildfire flames? How many times am I going to look at footage of floodwaters carrying cars down a European street? It's not just Donald Trump and Elon Musk cutting off USAID aid to Africa. It's every country in Europe cutting their aid budgets at the same time. But this is a phenomenon that is larger than Donald Trump. Yes. And we often excuse our own behavior and indifference by blaming and scapegoating one figure.

Thanks for having me. Great to be here.

Well, I wasn't expecting a ton, and so I wasn't all that disappointed. I think that climate politics and geopolitics have changed quite a lot over the last couple of years. So much so that even many of the original architects of the COP process and of the ones that produced the Paris Agreement and the Glasgow conference have come out publicly and said that this system is no longer fit for purpose. Certainly not essential for progress on climate, and maybe a little bit of a sideshow when we talk about the things that are really driving the future of climate, of the planet. And I think we saw that in Baku. We saw many fewer world leaders even showing up. We saw quite limited commitments and promises by the countries that were represented there. Not nothing. There was some meaningful progress on, I would say, especially adaptation measures, but nevertheless this was not the blockbuster spectacular climate event that many of these conferences have been in the past. And there are a lot of ways of thinking about that, but for me at least I start by finding it depressing that in the period of four or five years, over the period of four or five years, the community of the world's powerful people and powerful countries have gone from treating climate as a top-shelf political concern, one that interested every person and every party anywhere in the world, to one that could be treated as a kind of a sideshow and niche area of interest for only those truly invested in the story of climate change. I think that's quite unfortunate on many levels. It's unfortunate in the way in which it will expose us to future warming, the way that it will expose many millions of people, probably hundreds or even hundreds of millions or even billions of people, to more punishing climate impacts. And I think it's also depressing on a moral level that, you know, a few years ago, people sitting in places like you and I sit were quite preoccupied with the fate of those most vulnerable in the face of these changes. And these days we tend to be focused more on things closer to home. A little bit, we've grown a little bit more selfish and self-interested and, frankly, turned away from the people around the world who are most in need on climate, as with everything else. So on all those fronts, I find it a kind of a depressing, distressing turn for climate geopolitics. And I would say, you know, it's one of the two big stories that I've noted since I really started working on this area of interest and with great passion. The first was the great rise of climate concern, say starting eight or 10 years ago and kind of crescendoing in 2019, 2020, and now we have a kind of backlash or cessation. Presumably this will lead us to a new future with a new paradigm. But for now, we simply have, climate has sort of lost its grip on politics and geopolitics, and I think the climate movement as a result is a little bit, you know, betwixt and between as a result.

Well, I would say to begin with that we've gotten a lot better. There's a lot more climate coverage, even in this fallow period that I was describing a minute ago, than there was, you know, five or eight or 10 years ago. There's much more coverage. It's much smarter. It's much more sophisticated. It covers a wider range of kind of political interests. It's not just for a slice of the climate left. And it is a big deal at a place like the New York Times where I work. Not just, you know, I work primarily in the opinion section where I write a kind of column-like newsletter. That in itself is significant, that they had hired someone like me to do that. But they have a large climate desk which regularly, you know, produces ambitious stories requiring lots of institutional resources to document the changes of the planet and indeed the energy transition that goes along with it. All of that is really quite different and quite a bit better than it was five or 10, you know, say eight or 10 years ago. I see similar stories on television. You know, people look at the way that climate narrative unfolds on network news and often find it wanting. But again, if you compare it to 10 years ago or 15 years ago, I think we're making a lot of progress there. I think on some level the thing that the media is missing most now is the degree to which the public does not share the disinterest that I was describing a minute ago among the world's elites. That is to say, something has shifted among prime ministers and presidents and policymakers, think tankers, corporate leaders, you know, figures in the Davosphere, and indeed to some degree, you know, the media elite as well, in which climate has become a sort of parochial, again, a parochial concern as opposed to a universal concern. And when I look at survey and polling data, you know, I never trust those things entirely since they're so sensitive to the questions, but they tell you something, especially when you ask the same question over a period of time. You get a kind of linear series that shows you a trend. And the trend is not that the world is really giving up on climate change or turning away from the issue much at all. Maybe there's a little step down from a peak a few years ago, but it's nothing dramatic. And so we are living in a world in which the population as a whole, in places like the US, in Europe, but truly all around the world, are, you know, by some measures, as committed or more committed than ever to the importance of climate action. And yet there's a kind of a disconnect where the sort of elite leadership in the policy space and the political space, but also in the media space, is no longer talking that same language to them. Five years ago they might have been, but now they're not. And on some level, I think that's maybe the biggest missing part of the story and what the media is missing most out on.

We got the IRA, we're undertaking, it's now been, been, it's been scrapped, but, you know, it matched the efforts around the world to sort of jumpstart an energy transition. We're seeing remarkable renewable rollout almost everywhere in the world, even in parts of the world that seemed much too poor to afford that kind of investment not that long ago. And so on some level we're taking action on climate, but people are still quite worried, people are still focused on these issues, and, you know, in the same way that politicians can get punished for governing only for the elites, I think there's a way in which the media can get punished by speaking only to elites as well, and I think there's some risk of that when it comes to climate.

Well, if we had talked, you know, a year ago, or I guess 13 months ago, let's say, I would have said that it was a pretty remarkable success, that nothing comparable had ever been passed in American legislative history. That the climate movement and the sort of centrist energy world had come together and made a grand compromise that squeaked past the finish line and achieved an absolutely massive amount of public investment in the green transition, at least by American standards. You know, other countries, especially on a per capita share of GDP basis, have prioritized climate more, but America, I think it's important for us all to remember, remains something of a pro-state. And the fact that this happened in America was itself remarkable, unprecedented, and kind of exhilarating, especially for those of us who had spent years, you know, following or invested in the climate movement and thinking that American politics was simply never going to prioritize these issues, or that in any case it would be a huge uphill battle to make that do that. Here we had a Democratic president, a sort of famous centrist, who more or less staked the legislative legacy of his entire presidency on the fight against climate change and the need to pursue a green transition.

Now, I had issues with the way that that bill evolved. There were things I would have done differently about it. There were other packages I might have attached to it to make sure that especially renewable projects could kind of get built much more quickly. And was disappointed, have been disappointed that there's been so little movement on that since. But basically I thought that this was a great success, and I thought that it was also a kind of political success, not in the sense that it built an enormous coalition in support of the IRA, but in a sense that it didn't produce a huge political backlash. And when I thought about the last Democratic president to make a similar push, it was Barack Obama with Obamacare. And the fight against that dominated American politics for a decade thereafter. And we didn't see anything like that with the IRA. It was not a major part of the midterms. Republicans did not campaign against it in those midterms. When Trump was on the campaign trail, he would occasionally, this past fall, he would occasionally talk about it as a boondoggle or about the climate hoax, but it wasn't the main focus of his campaign. And I don't think it was the main focus of his voters. He made a promise to the oil and gas industry that if they gave him, I think he said, a billion dollars, yes, anything that... but, you know, in general, he was not running against the IRA.

And I thought this was a sign of progress. It's the same sign that we were seeing in parts of the US where even in red states you had huge amounts of renewable deployment and a kind of backlash to the backlash, where any politician who was opposed to renewables was getting pushed back by the interests of their constituents who said, "No, I want cheaper energy. This is the cheapest energy available. It's making the grid more stable in the face of blackouts. It's lowering our prices. We don't want to, even if we're right-wingers, even if we believe deep in the heart of oil country Texas, even if we believe that these things are, you know, who we are as Texans, nevertheless, I don't want to stand in the way of renewable deployment because it's helping me in my pocket." And for all of these reasons, I thought that this was a somewhat durable legislative accomplishment, and it has proven not to be. Among the first acts that Donald Trump took in office was to try to unwind many of the subsidies that the IRA contained. Not all of them, but basically the subsidies for all the best stuff. And that has left a kind of a shell of the bill in place, and I don't think there's much chance we're going to get anything like it anytime soon in the US over the next several legislative cycles.

I mean, we will see how it all shakes out. I'm curious, open-minded, and unsure about the way that the electricity price, data center buildout, AI demand story will unfold over the next few months, few years, few political cycles.

You do hear a lot of politicians now talking about the need to drive prices down, drive electricity prices down, make electricity, you know, expand electricity more rapidly, expand the grid, etc. Now, they are rarely talking about those priorities in terms of their climate impacts. But if they were to achieve those goals, if they were to, you know, build out electricity rapidly using the cheapest, fastest-to-build sources, what we would end up with is much more green power on the grid. And if we built out a grid that was much more capable of transmitting electricity, again, that would have huge benefits on the emissions side in addition to, you know, the other benefits we're talking about. Now, I don't know if that'll become a major cause that organizes any coalition or indeed any real legislation going forward. It may be a kind of boutique interest coming out of big tech in particular, but we'll see. I think a lot of that is quite unsettled and may take sort of clearer shape over the next six months or so. For now...

Yeah. Well, just to pause on this for a brief moment. You know, we are now entering into a moment in which the cost of electricity is becoming a more and more central political issue. We don't know exactly how it's going to play out down the line, but like people are talking about it more. They're worrying about it more. Voters are complaining about it more. But I think still often in quite simplistic terms. You still hear right-wingers saying, you know, we can't afford renewable buildout because we have, you know, this will drive the cost of electricity up. You still have, you know, climate leftists saying the cheapest available electricity is renewables and all we need to do is build more solar and that'll drive prices down. You have people blaming data centers, you know, when that's a share of the explanation but not the dominant driver. And the truth is there's hugely varied inputs to these prices and they vary geographically, they vary locally. In California, I know one of the major drivers of California's quite high electricity prices is that the public utilities there, you know, have to pay out for these wildfire disasters, then spend money investing hardening their infrastructure so that in the future they don't create more wildfires and insure themselves in the event that they do create those wildfires. So one of the major contributors to the country's most notoriously high electricity prices is in fact an impact of climate change already biting, and yet we're talking about it in this sort of, you know, muddled, mixed-up way.

We can't expect everybody to know every detail about electricity prices, but, you know, it is a complicated story to really get to the bottom of why these prices are going up. And while I agree that like more renewables will be better, there are also a lot of other things that we need to do because at this point, given the price of solar power especially, you're seeing the, you know, the share of power generation, the degree to which the cost of power generation is determining the final price of electricity, that's actually shrinking. Like it's now the transmission cost, the infrastructure cost, the market structures, all of those are doing a lot more to shape the final price. And so if you're building solar as opposed to natural gas, that may give you some cost benefit, but we probably should be focusing on all these other aspects of the cost tabulation if we're really trying to get prices down. Now, that has nothing, very little to do with climate, but just a sort of a side note about...

Well, I do have faith in technology. I have less faith in big tech, and I have less faith even than I used to have in big tech. You know, five, seven years ago, I had complicated feelings about the big companies, the big Silicon Valley companies and their leaders. I thought, you know, in certain ways they were forces for good, that they were, you know, corporations with consciences and worried about climate change among other issues. I was admiring of the plans that they rolled out to suggest that they were going to pretty rapidly eliminate their carbon footprints for their electricity use. Now, it's easier for them to do that than people in some other industries since all they need is electricity. They don't need, you know, industrial heat. But nevertheless, it was important, remarkable, and I think inspiring to see so many of them commit to that and some pretty fast timelines. Commit to some pretty fast timelines, but they've all walked away from those timelines in the interim. And not only have they walked away from those timelines, many of them have made political movements that I find quite objectionable and even heinous around, you know, the general political economy of the United States. I find a lot of their, you know, sort of cozying up to Trump quite horrible. And I find a lot of the ways in which those leaders have justified those terms to be pretty disgusting and disingenuous.

You know, when I hear Marc Andreessen talking about how the Biden administration was a period of Democrats going to war against achievement and particularly technological achievement, I genuinely don't know what he's talking about. Yeah, a couple of antitrust actions targeted at a few particular companies, some action to crack down on crypto, but, you know, honestly, like, what is crypto adding to the world, Marc? You know, and they talk about it like we're in this... Andreessen in particular often talks about it in explicitly, you know, terms explicitly drawn from Ayn Rand, as though there's this revolt against greatness and achievement, and the government is going to war against the builders of the future. And I just can't look at federal tech policy from 2021 to 2025 and see any justification for that narrative at all. Not to mention these are all companies that got massively more profitable over this period, led by people whose personal wealth grew astronomically over this period. We are not talking about confiscatory taxation or anything like that. And we are living in a world where, yes, there is some skepticism of billionaire wealth. Some of these people are the least popular people in America, which I think is worth pointing out. But, you know, broadly speaking, we are not a culture that has turned against achievement and greatness. We are a culture that worships wealth, worships fame and accomplishment. We are not a culture that is, like, devoted to the project of proletarianizing our value set at all. It's like, this is a grindset culture. It's an entrepreneurial culture. It's people showing off on social media, you know, because they built their own companies from scratch, working the equivalent of four days in a single day, etc., etc., etc. That's the dominant cultural narrative here. And it elevates and valorizes people like Andreessen and Musk and, you know, Zuckerberg and the rest of them.

Now, it's interesting, like, Americans really love Amazon. They use it, like, all the time. They trust it. It's like up there with the US military in terms of trusted institutions. But they actually hate Jeff Bezos. And I think that what that tells you is that, you know, one of the core, and I think recently somewhat undersold, features of our political economy is just how offensive to the average American income and wealth inequality really is. We had some taste of that coming out of 2008 into, you know, Occupy, the Tea Party, feeding into, you know, Bernie and Trump in 2016. But once the Trump and anti-Trump culture wars really began, it's almost like we forgot that inequality was such a big deal to us. Yeah. At least at the, again, at the kind of the elite discourse level, and it's still there. In fact, it's probably worse than ever in many ways. And the tech oligarchs are the symbols of that. And when I hear them, again, when I hear them talking, when I hear Mark Zuckerberg complaining on Joe Rogan about how, you know, our corporate culture has gotten too feminized, it's like, if you don't like the corporate culture that you presided over, is that liberals' fault? Or is that your fault?

Now, I don't even, I don't want to endorse his description of the workplace. I think it's been quite good that the American workplace has gotten more feminized. I think, you know, that's what happens when women start to work at higher levels of companies, and that's to the good. But even taking his critique seriously, it's like, how is that some, you know, social justice activist in Brooklyn's fault if you don't like your middle managers and how they're talking to you and confronting you in HR meetings? Beyond that, I think he was really, really disingenuous in talking about the way that the Biden administration handled disinformation, misinformation during the COVID pandemic, which is a subject I've written a lot about and talked a lot about, but it's probably not all that germane to this conversation. To say quite briefly, you know, he basically said that there was a kind of a censorship regime forced on Facebook and the other social media companies. And that just isn't true. The Biden administration made some phone calls, you know, flagging some stuff that was circulating that they thought was going to harm public health. Didn't threaten legal action. They didn't try to bully any of these companies. They just flagged these issues for the consideration of those companies. And that's what happens in media. You know, the New York Times gets calls from the Pentagon asking them not to publish stories about national security issues all the time. And the New York Times can decide to go ahead or not depending on how they value and balance those considerations. Social media companies were in the same position during COVID. It was a subject of great public importance. The government had a particular vested interest in promoting a certain set of, certain kind of information about the vaccines in particular. And they raised those issues with the social media companies, who were then free to do as they would like to do with them. Yes. And all of the lawsuits that have been brought in the aftermath of this have been thrown out by the courts because there is no basis for saying that the government was punishing them.

So in all of these ways, these tech oligarchs and the companies that they lead have told us a story over the last five years or so in which they have been brutalized, punished, diminished, attacked by the forces of liberal governments, particularly in Joe Biden's administration. And I just think that that is a fantasy of persecution which allows them to feel like John Galt, even though what they have been giving us, what they've given us over the last decade or two, are mostly apps that, you know, distract and depress us. And I'm not somebody, you know, I have, I'm not somebody who thinks the world is going to end because of social media. I have actually a relatively nuanced and skeptical perspective on all that. But, you know, it's really strange to be living in a moment where we're being told by these people, Americans have given up on technology. We need to renew their faith in it. The government has been too hostile against these forces. When in fact, the main way that people have interacted with big tech over the last decade has been, you know, scrolling TikTok and feeling like glazed over and inattentive and depressed.

Yeah. And, you know, I think that we are on the AI question in particular, we have, as normal consumers of the news, we're probably preoccupied with the question of basically of chatbots and how they're going to affect our future. But the truth is that AI has a lot of applications. You don't have to train them on the full corpus of human knowledge. You don't have to even make them all that human-like. And in fact, this is what machine learning researchers have been doing for quite a long time. And there actually, there's been enormous, enormous benefits to the climate community, to the energy community, to the medical community. You know, there's been a lot of really powerful and exciting research that has been produced at least in whole or in part by machine learning techniques. And I don't, so I don't want to dismiss the whole prospect of this being helpful or productive, but the structure of the system that is being built by these large companies around the prospect of, you know, some sort of like chatbot AGI, I think is really, really unfortunate, as I think you do, and is sucking money from potentially much more productive areas of investment, distracting us into thinking that the economy is thriving when in fact it's, you know, just being inflated. And yeah, and I think unfortunately when you look at the kind of climate commitments in particular, which is how we started talking about this, you see very clearly that companies like Microsoft and Google, which, you know, five years ago were among the clearest, strongest corporate commitments to net zero in America, have completely abandoned them without much fanfare and without any sense that they will pay a social or economic penalty for doing so. And they may be right in that, but it's still a kind of act of climate cowardice.

Well, let me answer this question in a couple of different phases. The first phase I would say is it looks to me that given the conventional modeling that five or eight years ago we were using to say the world was heading to four or five C using...

That same modeling and applying, you know, an evolving understanding of the energy mix of the present and the future. I think we have to say that we're in a better position than we were in five or 10 years ago, and that actually the progress has been quite significant. You know, those same models which used to tell us business as usual was going to bring us to four or five degrees of warming by the end of the century, they now tell us that we're heading to somewhere between two and a half and three degrees of warming this century. Now, not all of that is because we've made rapid progress with renewables, although that's part of it. It's also because we've adjusted some of our assumptions about the way that the world's going to evolve. And in any event, these are all models which are, you know, shrouded in large degrees of uncertainty and which we should take with a grain of salt. And that's the second point that I would make, which is personally I've become much more preoccupied with and focused on how little we know about the future.

You know, five or eight years ago when I was really first digging into all of this material, I felt like I could look at these charts and that they gave me a pretty good sense of what to expect. I could say if we end up on this emissions trajectory, we'll end up at this temperature level. And that temperature level implies this amount of additional heat waves and this amount of additional droughts and this amount of additional crop failures and flooding and wildfire and all the rest of it. And I feel like each of the steps along that intellectual pathway I'm much more cautious about making now than I was then. Um, I don't really know how much we can trust any of these particular emissions pathways. A lot of them have social and political assumptions built into them, which I didn't fully appreciate at the time, which are, I think, quite hard to defend now. Um, you know, things like massive population growth with no economic growth, or the inverse, um, you know, famously the high-end business as usual scenario was, um, a 21st century completely dominated by coal. And anyone who really knew the energy system even, you know, six or eight years ago would have told you that that was quite, um, pessimistic as a projection for the 21st century.

Um, you know, I would say now, um, you know, when it comes to many of these, when it comes to these models, we have to say, okay, to the extent that we put inputs in, yes, they're telling us we're in a better place now. We're probably looking at something more like 3 degrees rather than four degrees. To some degree that deserves, um, celebration. Um, but it also reminds us how far we are from the goals that we set for ourselves not that long ago when we were aiming for 1.5 to 2. Um, and in fact the global political awakening that happened in the late 2010s was in part powered by precisely that, um, difference in temperature levels. And this is something I try to return to again and again just to remind people if you are aware of the climate strikes and Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion and Sunrise and, you know, AOC, you know, jumping into Nancy Pelosi's office and the Green New Deal. That whole era that came about because the world read reports about the difference between 1.5 degrees of warming and two degrees of warming and decided we have to do everything we can to avoid two degrees of warming and stay close to 1.5 degrees of warming. There was a particular UN report that came out in 2018, but a lot of scientific research, um, surrounding it, all of which was showcasing just how dramatically different those two worlds were. And to the extent that you remember that climate awakening, maybe you were a part of it, it was because you were probably, because you were motivated by that precise scientific question: how much better and safer and habitable and just the world would be at 1.5 degrees than two.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And actually, a lot of those curves are not linear. So it may be a lot better than four and five, but it's also a lot worse than two or one and a half. And we told ourselves that we were going to do everything we could to avoid two degrees of warming not that long ago. We've done a lot. We've moved quickly, but we are woefully and hopelessly failing to meet that target. Beyond that, two other big things to keep in mind. The first is to the extent that we are getting a clearer sense of the last bit of that story I told, the story of climate impacts. Generally speaking, what we are learning is that more intense impacts will be arriving sooner.

And they will be impacting us in more intense ways than we expected 5 or 10 years ago. Which means even if we end up at 3 degrees of warming, it may be fair to describe that world as almost as transformed as we had previously expected a world of three and a half or four degrees warming. That's a blanket statement. It's a little, you know, it certainly doesn't apply in every case, but it is true that science in general is telling us that lower warming levels are more dangerous than we thought, and we're also rushing towards them faster. And that brings me to the last point, which is that I am quite concerned that these models are kind of fundamentally misunderstanding the trajectory that we are on. Um, I wouldn't say that I am, um, I would like cosign the work of Jim Hansen and his colleagues who have been so focused on this question over the last couple of years. Um, but I take it seriously enough to really worry about it. And the central proposition there, as your listeners, as your audience may know, is that, um, essentially reducing a lot of complexity to a simple point, essentially we are measuring the wrong thing here and we should be focused on the Earth's energy imbalance, um, not the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, in part because we are basing our assessment of how much warming there is in every unit of carbon on a combination of factors. And it may be the case that both that carbon is a more powerful warming agent and that aerosols pollution is a more powerful cooling agent than we had anticipated. And as a result, in a future where we have much less pollution, which separately, very good thing, air pollution is killing millions of people a year and that is a larger number than will die anytime soon from climate change. So it's very good that we're cutting it out of the atmosphere. Nevertheless, it may be reducing the amount of warming that we're seeing now and fooling us into thinking that we're on a shallower trajectory towards lesser warming than we really are. It may well be the case that on an emissions trajectory that conventional science tells us is going to land us at 2, 2.5 or 3 degrees, we may well end up, that may well end up producing warming of four or even 5 degrees. Now, I wouldn't say myself that that's how we need to, like, that's the, um, we need that as the new baseline, need to expect four or five degrees out of that. But I think that there is enough ambiguity and uncertainty about this system that we have to take it seriously as a possibility. And I think there's been a little too much, I've participated in this myself, there's been a little too much triumphalism about the emissions progress to say, okay, we've gone now from 4 1/2 degrees to 2 1/2 degrees. That's massive. But it's like, what do those numbers even really mean if both of them are the product of some confused science which is giving us, um, a sort of foggy picture of the future. And I think ultimately all of these things point us to the need to, you know, take seriously a much wider range of possibilities at a planning level, at an urgency of transition level, and also at a kind of emotional, interpersonal, political level. Like, you know, we may well be seeing, um, quite dramatic warming even if we've reduced our emissions at what would have struck most climate people 10 years ago at a remarkably rapid pace.