The Planet Sent a Bill. Here’s What We Owe.
Notes from America with Kai Wright
WNYC Studios
4.4 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 17 August 2023
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming calculated the cost to fix our climate. It requires us to reconsider what needs to change and who’s responsible. He talks to Kai about some of the ways we can rethink the history of climate change and one way forward.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's Notes from America, I'm Kai Wright. |
| 0:11.5 | It has been a summer of extreme heat, right the way around the globe. |
| 0:15.8 | July was the hottest month on record worldwide, thanks to a warming climate caused by human |
| 0:21.5 | behavior. |
| 0:22.5 | We know this much. |
| 0:24.0 | But I only recently understood the extent to which those of us living today and the |
| 0:29.8 | United States are uniquely responsible for the ongoing damage to the planet's climate. |
| 0:36.2 | I spoke to science writer David Wallace Wells about this fact back in late 2021. |
| 0:42.4 | After he wrote an essay in New York magazine that offered some back of the envelope math |
| 0:47.7 | about the debt that we as a country owe the rest of the world for our emissions. |
| 0:54.3 | I've been thinking about that conversation this summer and I want to share it again now. |
| 0:58.2 | David put it out that half of all carbon emissions ever produced by humankind have been |
| 1:05.6 | put into the climate since 1996. |
| 1:08.6 | So well within my adult life. |
| 1:12.1 | Yeah, I think we often conceptualize climate change as a legacy of the industrial revolution, |
| 1:17.1 | which means that we think of it as something that started in like 1750 or 1850. |
| 1:22.0 | But well, first of all, the industrialization of the world as a whole really didn't begin |
| 1:25.3 | until the middle of the 20th century. |
| 1:27.0 | So up until 1850, the lion share of all global carbon emissions were produced by the UK. |
| 1:33.6 | And from a perspective of the present, basically all of it has been done since World War |
| 1:38.0 | 2. |
| 1:39.0 | I think to figure something like 90% of all carbon emissions ever produced in the history |
... |
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