Recode Decode: "The Uninhabitable Earth" author David Wallace-Wells

Decoder with Nilay Patel

Vox Media Podcast Network

Technology, Business

4.3 • 3.2K Ratings

🗓️ 10 April 2019

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Journalist David Wallace-Wells talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about his new book, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. In this episode: How Wallace-Wells got to writing about climate change; common misconceptions about it; “we’ve made no progress at all” on clean energy use; his first story about global warming; the ripple effects and “all-encompassing threat” of warming around the world; today’s storms are literally unprecedented; why Silicon Valley has invested little into solutions; apocalypse bunkers and escaping to space; theoretical solutions on Earth that we could undertake right now; Bill Gates and Elon Musk; “we need a million solutions,” not one; the immediate political implications; how the US and China are contributing to the problem; “we’re not in this situation because of the Republican Party”; the problem with the Paris accords; and why technology won’t magically save us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Sabotage, hired goons and a landfill in Utah.
0:05.0	How Steve Jobs' revolutionary catastrophe of a computer, the Apple Lisa, earned a brief
0:10.7	second life and then was buried for good.
0:14.8	Watch the Verges documentary, Lisa's final act, now on YouTube.
0:19.8	Hi, I'm Cara Swisher, Editor-at-large of Recode.
0:25.3	You may know me as someone with a great apocalypse survival plan, break into PeterTales bunker
0:29.8	and steal it.
0:30.8	But in my spare time I talk tech and you're listening to Recode Decode from the Vox Media
0:34.8	Podcast Network.
0:36.3	Today in the red chair is David Wallace Wells, the deputy editor of New York magazine.
0:40.6	He's also the author of a new book which is getting a lot of attention called The Uninhabitable
0:44.9	Earth, Life After Warming.
0:47.0	It's all about climate change and how things could get much much worse in the near future.
0:51.0	It's not the happiest read and I was reading parts of it on a plane which does a lot of damage
0:55.4	to the environment.
0:56.8	Although we used to talk about global warming as something that would mainly affect the
0:59.9	coast, Wallace Wells says it will hit the poor parts of the world, the hardest.
1:04.4	That's not a coincidence, it's because those parts of the world are already hotter and
1:08.3	are closer to brink of real tipping points.
1:11.6	So by 2050, if we don't change course, many of the biggest cities in the Middle East
1:15.4	since South Asia will be literally unlivably hot.
1:18.4	So some place like Calcutta which I think has about 12 million people living in it, in
	...

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