We just experienced the hottest year on record in 2023. But amid so much doom and gloom, last year was also one of the best years ever for clean energy technology development and deployment. And while we’ve seen incredible strides towards a net zero emissions future, further innovation and policy action is still needed in order to bring to market more low-emissions technologies. Robinson Meyer is the founding executive editor of Heatmap News, a new media company focused on climate change and decarbonization. Meyer is also a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times. He joins WITHpod to discuss the impact of rising fossil fuel emissions, recent inflection points, driving down the costs of clean tech and more.
Note: This is a rough transcript — please excuse any typos.
Robinson Meyer: Fossil fuels actually have been enormous for human flourishing. They have unlocked a tremendous amount of prosperity and wealth and health for people, you know, especially in Western Europe and North America, but all around the world as well. And do you know what? So did the typewriter. So did oil lamps. They were tremendous technologies. They did a ton of good. And then we developed better stuff. And that’s what we need to do in order to fight climate change and in order to get to where we need to be.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me your host Chris Hayes. It’s the new year, it’s January 2024, and we’ve got the data in from 2023 about the global temperature, and you’ll never guess what we learned, which is that it is, indeed, the warmest year on record. Now that is a thing you’ve probably heard before. We’ve had a lot of warmest years on record recently. 2023, we still don’t have all the data in, but looks like it’s going to break the record by quite a bit.
And that’s not surprising given the fact that we have been pumping carbon to the atmosphere since, you know, at the beginning of the industrial revolution, that that carbon is warming the atmosphere and we are on track for warming the entire global temperature by at least probably two degrees Celsius and likely more. And the question of just how hot it gets is the existential struggle, the civilizational struggle of our time. So that’s the bad news. And the bad news in climate is easy to find.
There was also a lot of interesting, I think promising climate developments in 2023 because there have been incredible leaps in both the development of clean energy and the deployment of clean energy. We’re seeing the Inflation Reduction Act’s climate provisions, which are the largest package of climate provisions ever in American history, start to be deployed. We’re seeing the acceleration of the deployment of all kinds of clean tech in lots of places. The Biden administration has recently promulgated new rules for developing hydrogen technology, which most people in the space sort of view as a key fulcrum.
And so I thought it would be a great time to start off the new year with a conversation about exactly what has been the year in climate, where we are in climate, both in terms of what’s been happening in the climate and the struggle to keep the world from, you know, melting down for lack of a better phrase. And I thought the great person to do it is the founding executive editor of a publication I really recommend that I really love. It’s called Heatmap News. It’s a new media company that’s focused on climate change and decarbonization.
Robinson Meyer is the founder. He’s also contributing opinion writer at “The New York Times.” And I should say that we recorded this back in December when he was at the Global Climate Conference in Doha, actually, which you’ll hear about. So this is a few weeks old, but you’ll get a sense of he was sort of right in the thick of it. There’s this global climate conference. This year it was in Doha, which itself was bizarre and surreal as you’ll hear. And I learned a ton from my conversation with Heatmap’s founding editor, Robinson Meyer.
Rob, it’s great to have you on.
Robinson Meyer: Of course. Thank you so much for having me. Big fan of the show.
Chris Hayes: So first I want to just say that I think Heatmap is great and I read it all the time. I guess just a top line question like I find it hard to keep audience’s attention on climate stuff. And when I say that people get mad, like when I pointed this out, people have gotten very mad at me. There’s a mismatch between what people think they want to pay attention to and what they will pay attention to.
Robinson Meyer: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And we all look at the metric. So it’s like the most e-mailed and the most read stories.
It’s like, yes, there’s a reason that the Taylor Swift stuff gets lots of traffic. Like it is what it is. It’s not a moral judgment. Climate can be tricky because it’s big, it can be abstract, it could be anxiety producing. So my first top line question is like, are you guys doing well? Is Heatmap doing well?
Robinson Meyer: We have a path. You know, I think we’re doing quite well. We found there’s an audience that’s out there that wants to read the kind of climate coverage that we’re writing. Of course, we welcome more readers, more subscribers. And you can find us by going to heatmap.news. And what we try to offer is insightful, voicey, authoritative but like your climate friend. It’s almost how we think of ourselves.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Robinson Meyer: Trying to just talk you through the issues, talk you through what’s important and keep climate change in perspective where it is the world’s biggest story, but also where it’s also a nuanced and sophisticated story and you can bring a lot of —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Robinson Meyer: — emotions to it. You can bring a lot of different ideas to it. That’s what makes it so interesting. And I think we’re trying to keep it in a place where it’s interesting for people and not only just emotionally resonant.
Chris Hayes: Well, that segues to what I want to talk to you about largely today, a bunch of stuff. But the reason I think this story has gotten more interesting than it ever has before is because so much is happening in it and there is actual progress. So my experience of covering climate, and I was never a full-time climate person, but I’ve covered it for a long time, is making the same arguments over and over, it getting worse, making them over and over, it getting worse.
It’s really only, I would say in the last five years probably, that you’ve started to see this explosion in the suite of technologies and implementation that you would need if we are going to get out of it. It doesn’t mean we’re on track. It doesn’t mean that like things are fine, we’re on a glide path. It means none of those things, but at least you can see it. It’s tangible in a way that it just wasn’t 15 years ago. And so you guys cover that. Talk about like what you find exciting or dynamic about that space right now.
Robinson Meyer: You know, there have been times as a climate reporter where I like pinch myself that I get to cover this because it’s so interesting and it’s so —
Chris Hayes: Agreed.
Robinson Meyer: — interesting in so many different ways. There are biological aspects. There’s geological aspects to it. You’re like, you have to understand how different Earth systems work, but you also have to understand how political institutions work. You have to understand how key markets that are global, that wrap in all kinds of countries that are very complex, that have their own histories work. You have to understand how breakthrough technologies work, how new technologies like wind and solar work and how they fit into the kind of existing markets and governments and policies that we have.
All of that is part of climate. And It is like a true polymathic topic. I mean, one of the ways I think about Heatmap actually is in some ways when you think about what tech coverage is in a lot of the American press, right, it’s very genre spanning. It’s like sometimes a tech story per se is like an engineering story. Sometimes it’s a business story. Sometimes it’s a policy story. That’s kind of what we’re trying to do for climate where it’s this common base of knowledge. It’s a common set of technologies.
But you can come at it in all sorts of different ways. And as those technologies spread across the world, they’re changing the world. What has happened recently is that a couple big technologies that are going to be the real linchpins of decarbonization, solar, sort of wind. We can talk about that.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, I want to talk about that.
Robinson Meyer: Electric vehicles, batteries, they have reached the point where they are price competitive with fossil fuel generation. And I would almost say even more importantly, where they’re just very cheap. Because at the end of the day, the price competitiveness kind of doesn’t quite matter. It’s just simply the fact that they’re extremely cheap. They’re easy to deploy. And if you want to generate electricity now in a way that doesn’t produce carbon emissions, there’s no premium for doing it in a net zero way, right? It’s just as cheap to do it in a climate friendly way as it is to burn fossil fuels. And that technological change has been the backdrop to, I think, the entire social change and political change that we’ve seen over the past few years.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, that is the key thing that has happened now, right? Like the marginal dollar lecture that you brought online at the same cost, even though there are a bunch of things that are problematic about scaling that.
Robinson Meyer: Yes, exactly. And I’m going to do something very risky for a podcast, which is like engage in new thinking on the air, which is that I think it’s these two, I think two different things changed in, let’s say, a post 2016 world. One of them was that solar and wind got extremely cheap, and it’s really solar wind and batteries because it’s not only ability to generate power and electricity, it’s the ability to store it and save it and put it in a vehicle or put it in an appliance, put it in whatever that is like the key, you know, driver of the decarbonization we’re seeing right now.
But the second thing is there is a political change that has happened, too, and in that it does seem like larger parts of the electorate, especially in the United States, especially in the West, are more concerned about this where they see it as an everyday issue. That’s always a bit of an X factor, right? Like when you talk about why things change that mass opinion is like so hard to measure. But something about coming into the Trump era, something about the starkness of how the Trump administration approached climate change and how that changed, not only how Americans thought about it, but how people around the world thought about it.
And then the new science that came out in the 20 teens that made it clear that not only was climate change kind of a distant threat, but that it was happening now and that it would get rapidly worse within a number of decades. That not only do we want to avoid 2 C of temperature rise, two degrees Celsius temperature rise, we really wanted to come as close as we could to 1.5 degrees Celsius of temperature rise globally. Something about that is the other backdrop here. And between those two factors, we’ve seen the kind of explosive rapid change over the past few years that we had not seen before.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, I think part of it, too, I mean, you want there to be this sort of cause and effect in mass opinion. This is a topic I spent a lot of time on because I just was working on a book that’s partly related to this. I re-read Walter Lippmann’s public opinion, which is great. He’s got all the same complaints, by the way, you know.
Robinson Meyer: That’s what I’ve heard.
Chris Hayes: He’s got a great line about how like that a child should have interest in his father’s business affairs because that’s what’s going to be materially affect him. But he has no interest in that. He has interest in toys and gossip, right?
Robinson Meyer: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And that basically the public is the same way, that they should have interest in the things that would materially affect them. And then his reference is that there was some, you know, extravagant coverage of some royal ball and the dress that was worn there, right? As opposed to like, what happened in Versailles. So all these complaints are the same. They’ve always been the same. But I do think as broken as the sort of cause and effect of mass opinion can be, that like it is appreciably hotter in the world in a way that I just find like part of my life now.
I mean, I was thinking about this the other day where I went for the turkey trot on Thanksgiving and I was running through the park and there were leaves. It was beautiful. It was like everywhere in the park. And I remember being a kid and going to Central Park West for the parade. which is lined with trees and they would be all bare on Thanksgiving day. Now again, is this anecdotal? Yes. I mean, is it a little bit of a sort of, I’m retrofitting some narrative to the data, but there are ways in which you can see it and experience it at a tangible level that I do think is having an effect.
Robinson Meyer: I think it’s funny because when you talk to the political scientists about this, I mean, every time, right, the political scientists say, no, you can’t observe a weather related effect tied to climate concern. Maybe you can immediately in the week after, but it’s just not enduring at all. And yet I also agree that it is omnipresent and unavoidable in a way that is quite different from how it was say in 2010 or 2012.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Robinson Meyer: If you remember Superstorm Sandy, that was supposed to be the big epochal moment where we all started caring about climate change and then there was really no policy that came out of it in the United States. But now we get huge extremely historic weather events somewhere in the United States, seemingly once a month, seemingly every other week during the summer, every week. You know, my version of this that is like where climate change is quite real to me is that, you know, if you step back and think about climate change, like what it does is that it traps, right, what carbon pollution does, what carbon dioxide does, is it traps heat in the Earth’s atmosphere, right?
There are some heat comes in from the sun. It like wants to bounce back out into space. There’s more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It can’t bounce back out. So what you would expect to see is, as climate change progresses from like a purely theoretical level, is that nights get warmer. And indeed, when we look across the world, you know, there’s thousands of new temperature extremes set every year. But what’s really changing even faster than kind of the hottest part of every day is that nights aren’t as cool as they used to be all around the world.
Chris Hayes: Fascinating.
Robinson Meyer: That’s where like we’re moving up the temperature change. Like that’s actually the big driver —
Chris Hayes: Wow.
Robinson Meyer: — of why we’re the hottest here every day. But for me, why I remember that or why this stands out is that my family goes to the Jersey Shore. I’m from New Jersey, Long Beach Island. Shout out. And when I was a kid, it used to get cool basically every night. And again, this is anecdotal. But like the tiny bungalow my family went to had no air conditioning. We didn’t need air conditioning.
Chris Hayes: Right. It was just the sort of ocean breeze.
Robinson Meyer: It was just a fan. Exactly.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Robinson Meyer: And now when we go down the shore, you run the air conditioner all night. Like every room has little window AC and you run it all night because it doesn’t get cool enough overnight to cool you down. It basically stays kind of late evening temperature the whole night. So that’s my, like, just the global phenomenon affecting what even like a cool summer night, like taking away cool summer nights from us.
Chris Hayes: And you know, again, part of this is like we’re doing this sort of narrative construction for our own lives because the story is so big and so aggregate. But I do think more and more people are doing that. And also we should also note, it’s the warmest year on record.
Robinson Meyer: Right.
Chris Hayes: So the other big thing is that just, we’ve just smashed all the records this year. You know, when you chart it, it’s literally off the chart. There’s like a band of numbers that show global temps and they’re all sort of around each other going up. This one’s like, you could see it popping out from the chart.
Robinson Meyer: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: So this sort of political awareness in the U.S. particularly, which has been a laggard in this sense, the emergence of new technologies. We have the Inflation Reduction Act passed two years ago, which is the, you know, most significant climate legislation. So I wanted to do like a little bit of tour of kind of where we are with these sort of technologies and I want to start on electric vehicles because it probably gets the most attention. Some people say it gets too much attention, which is electric vehicles. And that’s been the focus of a lot of press recently, particularly with Elon Musk unveiling the Cybertruck.
There’s been some controversy about electric vehicles. There’s been some worry that they’re not being adopted as fast as people had hoped. Where do you sort of see things right now and, you know, as we come to close the 2023 and roll into the new cars of 2024 about EVs, the market for it, the growth and the prospects in the U.S.?
Robinson Meyer: Yeah, absolutely. So I think the first thing to hit is that electric vehicle demand is still rising extremely quickly, right? We talk about S curves for technology where there’s this moment where exponential growth takes off. We are like in that moment for electric vehicles and all the hand-wringing is just about the second order kind of implications. Is it going fast enough, right? Do dealers have too many on the lots? What kind of vehicles are selling? All those questions are kind of what the hand-wringing is about.
If you were to just look at the numbers and had kind of no expectation about what this would look like, you’d be like, wow, the biggest story in the car market right now is that electric vehicles are taking off. So just a few days ago, we learned that this year for the first time, U.S. consumers bought one million electric vehicles and that’s cars and trucks. You know, that’s not including any other kind of electric vehicle. This is electric cars, electric light duty trucks. Americans bought 1 million of them for the first time.
That’s like a 45% year over year increase. And we are in the exponential growth curve part of that. What I think, to step back for a second, people are buying a huge number of electric vehicles, despite number one, the infrastructure really not being there yet. So. When you look at countries like Norway, which have had extremely high electric vehicle penetration in the market, like chargers are ubiquitous. And like the good thing about EVs, it is a different experience than driving a gas car.
But one of the good things is you, if you have a charger at your house, you wake up with a full tank of gas every day. It’s also, if you don’t have a charger at your house, but you’re driving around everywhere and if there were to be here, like there is a Norway, ubiquitous electric chargers, it’d be like plugging in your phone all the time. You’d always have it charged. We just don’t have the density of chargers here that we need yet and I think that’s kind of the first thing. I think the second obstacle to EVs in the U.S. is just there aren’t that many models yet. There’s huge gaps in what’s available. So there’s like full size. I mean, if this is my bugbear, but there’s like full size pickup trucks, but no small or medium sized pickups yet. There’s no minivan. There’s nothing really a hatchback.
Chris Hayes: Tell me about it, brother.
Robinson Meyer: Yeah, exactly. There’s no station wagon. We kind of have the basic SUV —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Robinson Meyer: — electric vehicle from a couple makers. We have some sedans, but it is not anywhere close to the variety or diversity of gas burning vehicles that are sold by automakers yet. And I think that’s another obstacle.
Chris Hayes: Let me ask you about that because there’s a little bit of a sort of push-pull question, right, which is how much of that is going to be demand-lead and how much is going to be regulatory push? You know, when you say we’ve sold a million cars, the U.S. sells like there’s like 13 million annual car sales.
Robinson Meyer: Right.
Chris Hayes: So it’s like, again, one of these things where it’s like, the growth is happening fast, 45% increase year-over-year, still a tiny sliver. And I think the concern, right, is that right now we’re doing everything on the sort of incentivizing side. We’ve got a huge credit in the Inflation Reduction Act, but will those signals make the carmakers responsive enough to get us to where we need to go? Or are we going to need more things like California, which just passed a mandate with a target date after which you won’t be able to sell, you know, combustion engines?
Robinson Meyer: That’s right. I think, well, first of all, I’d say on the one hand, that kind of regulation is coming to the United States. So the EPA is working on regulations that will push up the number of electric vehicles that have to be sold in the U.S. that will basically make it so that half of new cars by the middle of next decade have to be EVs or more than half. And so we are going to get regulation. Of course, that regulation is like contingent on the Biden administration winning the next election because if they don’t and then the Supreme Court upholding it. So it’s a little legally ambiguous.
I think, to step back, I’d note two things. The first is that a year ago, we were talking about how there weren’t enough electric vehicles, how consumers really wanted to buy EVs. They were ready to buy them. They were looking for them and they couldn’t find them on dealer lots. Now we’re talking about how EVs are sitting around on dealer lots too long. So some of this is just like when you roll out a new product.
Chris Hayes: Negativity bias.
Robinson Meyer: It’s a negativity bias.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Robinson Meyer: And it’s also that everyone’s trying to figure out what this process is like together. And as EVs take over the market, sometimes there might be too many of them. Sometimes there might be too few of them. And whichever one, people are going to complain about it, right? I think the second thing though, is that this gets at one of the stories that makes decarbonization so interesting, which is to be honest, we really don’t know how much regulation it’s going to take. We e talk about there being carrots in the IRA. We don’t know how many sticks we’ll need too.
And we also don’t know how to smoothly, and right now there’s really no authority trying to plan how smoothly we should like scale up EV manufacturing from automakers and scale down, you know, internal combustion manufacturing from automakers. And that’s a very tricky economic problem. It’s a problem that’s going to be a life or death question for some companies. It’s going to require like either some degree of planning via the EPA, via rules like California has passed or very good business sense, like candy planning from CEOs.
Chris Hayes: Firm level planning. Yeah.
Robinson Meyer: Exactly.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Robinson Meyer: I do think what we’ve seen is that there will be a moment where conventional automakers have to kind of give up on their gas business, where they say all the growth, probably a lot of the profit is in the EV industry. We can see it or at least we can see getting to where this is most of our business. We just want to drop the gas part of our business and move to EVs. That’s something that right now, actually the biggest seller of EVs in the world, BYD, which is a Chinese automaker —
Chris Hayes: Chinese automaker, yeah.
Robinson Meyer: — did a few years ago. And it kind of pushed them into being, at this point now, again, the biggest EV maker in the world. It’s, of course, something that no American automaker has done yet. But I think this kind of question about push-pull about disorderly versus orderly market transitions is exactly why a lot of commentators kind of think that the EV-first companies, that the EV-only automakers like Rivian and Tesla might stand a better chance —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Robinson Meyer: — than the traditional OEMs like Ford and Chrysler and GM and Chrysler is now called Stellantis, but whatever. Because those companies will have this much harder transition where they have to phase out assets and bring new assets on —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Robinson Meyer: — while Tesla and Rivian will just be able to scale up the product lines and the manufacturing lines they’ve already made.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: So let’s talk a little bit about solar, which is the other sort of big booming technology. And that, I mean, it’s interesting because it’s really one of the most remarkable tech business stories of our time. How cheap it’s gotten, how accessible it’s gotten. This was this dreamed of technology for so long and it’s sort of been on the shelf and Carter put the panels on in the 70s and Reagan took them off. And it’s like, now we’re 50 years later and it’s just gotten really good and really cheap. My question is like, is it happening fast enough? Here’s the thought that I have. Whenever I’m flying and I look down, I think to myself, there should be a hundred times as many solar panels, parking lots, roofs, like, I mean, just everywhere. It’s like, how do we not have them covering every surface right now? And what will it take to get there?
Robinson Meyer: Where I look at this and say, where they should really be is like warehouse roofs, number one, just like the fact that we have not covered every warehouse in solar panels is ridiculous because that roof space is just sitting there. There’s a single commercial owner. They’d be able to off take the power. They could use it to power their warehouse. To answer the why don’t we have it everywhere yet question, frankly, I think there’s just a lot of frictions in installing it.
Chris Hayes: Right. It just takes a while. Right.
Robinson Meyer: It just takes a while.
Chris Hayes: And it takes a while and it’s a set of individual decisions aggregated over a group of people, right? So it’s like, that’s part of the thing, too. Is it like, there’s a bunch of individual consumers, right?
Robinson Meyer: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: At the firm level of the warehouse, at the individual house level, you can create a cheap good and the incentives, but like the uptake is just takes a while, I guess. But the question is like, is that good enough?
Robinson Meyer: So, the number one predictor of whether you have solar panels on your roof is whether your neighbor has them. They’ve like studied this, they’ve looked at all sorts of different variables. And the number one predictor is whether your neighbor has them. And so to some degree, just people have to install them on their roof so then their neighbor can have them be like, oh, look, it is an achievable project. Like Jim did it, maybe I should do it. That’s at the residential solar level.
In some ways, I think it’s worth kind of splitting solar up into two different groups here. There’s rooftop solar, which is like the solar you have on your house or on a warehouse or whatever. And that’s like, we should be putting solar on the roof of every home when it’s made. You know, homeowners should be installing solar if it makes economical sense for them. But then there’s the utility scale solar, the big, big fields of solar panels. And there it’s a different question. I think there it’s like the friction tends to be quite different.
The friction is, can you get it hooked up into the grid fast enough, or is it too expensive or take too long to plug a giant solar installation into the grid? There another point of friction tends to be permitting, right? If you find a good spot to put solar, does the local government, do local landowners actually let you put it there? It’s like a two-part story in solar, right, where one of them is just this social diffusion story and the other one is there’s bigger obstacles to just plugging in a ton of renewables into our existing kind of aging electrical grid.
And even people who are kind of pro rooftop solar who really like it can be quite antagonistic when it comes to a utility scale solar installation, right?
Chris Hayes: Right. I mean, yeah, there’s a real NIMBY problem with all this stuff, right?
Robinson Meyer: Yeah, exactly.
Chris Hayes: I mean, the place where we really see it, which we should sort of maybe we can segue to, is in wind.
Robinson Meyer: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And, you know, the story of solar has been really encouraging. In many ways, it’s gotten cheaper. We’ve seen, you know, profitable business enterprises getting very good at quick installation. We’ve seen business models that allow people to put it on for very little to really cheap and in many cases, no money down where they sort of like, the upfront cost is taken over by the firm. It’s a sort of financing trick so you can just get it on your roof. You’re not paying any money. They’re sort of taking a share of the savings.
Wind is another fairly mature form of carbon-free energy. We’ve seen it have great success in some places. Iowa, particularly, Kansas, but it seems like it’s been having a little bit of a rough go of it. Like it was sort of a rough year for wind. Can you tell me your sort of top line sense?
Robinson Meyer: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think first of all, the one big obstacle to renewable deployment across the country right now is interest rates. And there’s like a —
Chris Hayes: Of course.
Robinson Meyer: — mechanical reason for this that I think people don’t always necessarily think about when they think about the kind of the role of the low interest rate environment last decade, encouraging a lot of renewables and now maybe higher interest rates now discouraging renewables, which is if you think about comparing a renewable plant, a wind or solar plant, but let’s say let’s stick on wind. A new wind farm to say a natural gas plant. Once you build the wind farm, the wind farm is expensive to build. It has a high capital expenditure upfront, but once you build the wind farm, it is cheap to run. It just blows in the wind, right? And you get free electricity out of the back of it.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Robinson Meyer: A natural gas plant, especially let’s say one that you’ve already built, right, is free. You already have it. You just have to buy the fuel. So it has higher operating expenses. So wind and solar have like very high CapEx, very high capital expenditure, upfront costs and very low operating costs. The existing fossil fuel system has pretty low upfront costs because we’ve already built it, but higher operating costs because you have to buy the natural gas. You have to buy the —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Robinson Meyer: — you know, whatever you’re burning. When interest rates are high, just mechanically, it gets more expensive to borrow money and then it gets more expensive to build the renewable project and it gets cheaper to run the natural gas, whatever you’ve already built, you know, the fossil fuel infrastructure you’ve already built.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Robinson Meyer: And so that is like the giant headwind for renewables right now. And I think it is one of the biggest factors we’re seeing with wind. There’s two other factors with wind I would call out. In onshore wind, I think we’re seeing a growing NIMBY problem. Places that have a lot of onshore wind already installed tend to be very averse to installing more. They feel like they did their part. They feel like the wind developers didn’t treat them well. There’s some degree of urban polarization here where they see wind as being a kind of urban Democrat-coded technology.
People in places where there’s a lot of wind potential are getting kind of antagonistic to wind and political friction to installing wind is becoming a larger and larger issue. Offshore, there is still that issue. There’s still the NIMBY problem.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Robinson Meyer: But the biggest issue at all, the biggest issue offshore right now is it’s getting more and more expensive to build wind turbines. And inflation hit a number of core component, core inputs to offshore wind really hard, including copper, including steel tubing, all those things that you need to make an offshore wind farm.
They got much, much more expensive since 2020 and all the kind of offshore wind projects that the government had planned along the northeast coastline, the northeastern U.S. coastline had bid in, they had signed contracts with states or with governments with utilities before the 2020 inflation, before the pandemic inflation, and those rates were locked. And then when everything got more expensive, suddenly the project didn’t pencil out anymore. So it’s this mix of like inflation and then the thing that we’re doing to stop inflation, which is having very high interest rates, that is the big friction for wind right now.
Chris Hayes: Well, the NIMBY thing, too, it seems to me, there’s also a concerted political effort. I mean, I know there’s like political organizing and like —
Robinson Meyer: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — right-wing interests and, you know, fossil fuel adjacent, if not the actual fossil fuel industry —
Robinson Meyer: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — really putting money and organizing an effort into building local community, quote, unquote “grassroots opposition.”
Robinson Meyer: That’s absolutely right. And it’s a combination because well, yes, number one, that’s absolutely right. And for instance, if you go, let’s talk about the Jersey shore again. I went to Cape May, which was very opposed to a wind farm that was being, you know, there was a huge political movement in the Jersey Shore over the past year to block a wind farm that was going to be constructed off the coast of New Jersey.
The wind farm was canceled. Although, the company that was developing it, says that was for inflation reasons, not for political opposition reasons. Although, it did become more and more politically tenuous while they were building it. I have never seen so many road signs and so many signs in the windows of businesses. And even like the ad, the banner tailing behind the plane, right, like the plane. And now, of course, that was paid for, by someone but in terms of the road sign —
Chris Hayes: Saturday nights, DJ Pauly, ladies drink free.
Robinson Meyer: Exactly.
Chris Hayes: Stop the Cape May wind farm.
Robinson Meyer: Literally, those were the banners being dragged across the Cape May sky for everyone on the beach. And of course, the language was not stop the wind farm. It wasn’t like stop Democrat wind. It was save our shore.
Chris Hayes: Right, of course.
Robinson Meyer: Call your Republican Representative Jeff Van Drew.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, right.
Robinson Meyer: But I’ve never seen really any part of New Jersey so activated, where it’s just house after house, after house activated by a political issue. And so it’s tricky because on the one hand that is a result of absolutely the fossil fuel industry agitating it. And we can see, you know, there’ve been studies and they’ve been able to see that some of the folks who kind of led those efforts are connected to the same kind of fossil fuel funded organizations that denied climate change for a long time.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Robinson Meyer: At the same time, it is resonant, right. The conservation message.
Chris Hayes: Yes. Totally.
Robinson Meyer: The save our short message is resonant with people due to the 50-year legacy.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Robinson Meyer: The successful legacy of environmentalism itself.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Robinson Meyer: A good movement, right? So it’s —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Robinson Meyer: — complicated what I think the next kind of place to think there is. And a spot where, I don’t know that anyone has figured out exactly how to handle this yet, is that the environmental movement created all these ways of blocking, right, fought for and won all these ways of blocking projects. And number one, if we now have to build a lot of new infrastructure to fight climate change and to stop putting carbon in the atmosphere, but number two, if the fossil fuel movement is going to hijack all those policies that were put into place by environmentalists to slow down and block projects, if it’s going to hijack those policies to stop the good kind of projects we need, that poses quite a difficult —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Robinson Meyer: — political question. And I don’t know that anyone has figured it out yet.
Chris Hayes: Well, that gets us to the sort of one of the big questions that lurks over this year, again, it’s like my sort of top line hottest year on record, you know. No one is hitting their Paris climate targets, really. Some are but they’re very small countries.
Robinson Meyer: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Some really encouraging tech breakthroughs and S-curves happening in lots of places on these sort of net zero tax (ph). A general sense that like at least we have the roadmap, which is we got to get stuff on the grid and then we got to, you know, make the grid renewable, right? And then there’s like, that’s the lowest hanging fruit, then we got to figure out —
Robinson Meyer: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — like what we’re going to do about steel and you know, industrial processes, which are actually a lot of carbon emissions.
Robinson Meyer: Yes.
Chris Hayes: So, this general framework, like we can conceptualize a path forward. It’s got a lot of challenges, both political and technological and economic, but there’s some vision of what it might look like, right? Then, there’s this question of the incumbent fossil fuel interests and what their future is. And you attended, I’m talking to you while you’re actually at the COP 28, which is the sort of global climate conference.
Robinson Meyer: Yes.
Chris Hayes: It happened a few weeks earlier than people were listening to this podcast. It was in Dubai, which raised a lot of eyebrows because, you know —
Robinson Meyer: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — it’s like having like your, you know, the big PETA conference like in the middle of a big KFO in Nebraska.
Robinson Meyer: And not only is it in the middle of a big KFO in Nebraska, but the head of a big beef —
Chris Hayes: Like Tyson Chicken.
Robinson Meyer: Of Tyson, exactly, of Tyson is the president of the PETA conference.
Chris Hayes: Yes, it’s welcoming everyone.
Robinson Meyer: Yes, exactly.
Chris Hayes: We are so glad where here the world comes together for, so yes, it’s sort of this ludicrous thing. You’ve got this, you know, this sort of Gulf oil dependent monarchy in the middle of this sort of region of the world that is obviously incredibly invested in the incumbent fossil fuels, you know, beneath their surface. And there’s this real question of like, what is the future of fossil fuels?
Robinson Meyer: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Is it getting phased out or are they going to figure out some way to keep it going? That is going to either melt the planet or like there’s enough carbon, like, you know, there’s technologies brought online enough to take carbon out of the atmosphere. They could keep doing their thing, I don’t know.
Robinson Meyer: Being in Dubai has been really bracing. I mean it’s like really kind of grim but it’s also like grimly fascinating —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Robinson Meyer: — is how I would put it. This may reveal my naïveté or lack of world traveling. I’ve never been to a non-democracy before.
Chris Hayes: Oh, huh, yes.
Robinson Meyer: And having photos of the rulers just illuminated by the side of the highway or in every hotel lobby —
Chris Hayes: Oh yes.
Robinson Meyer: — and doctor office, right? Is kind of a new experience for me.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Robinson Meyer: And you can feel it. Like you can just feel that you’re not in a democracy, which is like —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Robinson Meyer: — a bizarre thing to say, but —
Chris Hayes: No, no, it’s very, very tangible.
Robinson Meyer: You walk around and it’s, you know, there are some freedoms in there that you have, and you don’t have others.
Chris Hayes: Here also, I should note, like it’s a very particular kind of non-democracy, which is a Gulf monarchy.
Robinson Meyer: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Which is like it’s own category.
Robinson Meyer: Yes, that’s absolutely right. That being said, I am weirdly kind of glad they did COP here.
I don’t think it was very productive diplomatically. I mean what we learned a few days before COP started is that the President of COP, according to leaked documents, he denies these, but there are the documents. You can go look at them was like who is, and the President of COP, Sultan Al-Jaber, was both the CEO of the Emirates National Oil Company and also the CEO of the Emirates Renewable Company, so.
Chris Hayes: Nice work if you can get it.
Robinson Meyer: Yeah, exactly. He was using COP diplomacy. He was using his official meetings as the President of the United Nations Climate Conference —
Chris Hayes: To make oil deals.
Robinson Meyer: — to make oil deals. Yes, exactly, going around the world he was like, well, I’m in Brazil. So, let me just like work this one out while I am here.
Chris Hayes: Let me take out, which side of my jacket has which business card? Hold on a second, wait —
Robinson Meyer: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — one second, this one, here we go. Actually, we got some leases coming up.
Robinson Meyer: And I think it’s, I will add one thing more, which is I think the President of COP is like this indecipherable title, if you’re not deeply immersed in COP world. The way to think about the president is he’s like the DJ of COP. He is like, he welcomes everyone. He kind of holds all the meetings. He’s supposed to make last minute deals come together. He knows what everyone believes. So, this is not like a ceremonial role.
Chris Hayes: No.
Robinson Meyer: It’s actually quite an active diplomatic role in how this COP is going. That being said, what you do realize in Dubai, and this actually gets at a point you were just mentioning, is that right now the world largely lives in middle income countries like China and India. And actually a lot of South Asians have come here to Dubai to work. We can talk about labor rights in Dubai, but let’s just recognize there’s a large South Asian population here because it’s a very rich place.
The world is going to insist on developing and the world outside North America, outside Western Europe, outside, you know, several East Asian countries that have developed explosively over the past two to five decades. You know, Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, those are right now places where there’s enormous economic potential. And people in those countries are going to insist on developing. They’re going to —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Robinson Meyer: — insist on getting access to energy. And if we don’t have cheap decarbonization, you know, cheap zero carbon technologies for them to use, they are going to burn fossil fuels because this is an existential question for governments. This is, you know, the central topic for governments all around the world. And why I’m glad to be here in Dubai is it’s like a very visceral reminder —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Robinson Meyer: — that there are billions of people all around the world who do not live with energy right now, the amount of energy that we use in the United States, who live with very low incomes, who are going to be experiencing a huge amount of economic growth over the next century. And if we don’t have technologies ready for them, we will wind up in a world like Dubai, which is very unequal, very, very hot, dry. People drive everywhere. It’s extremely car dependent but like it’s kind of rich. I mean, it’s rich.
Chris Hayes: Yes, right.
Robinson Meyer: There’s a really interesting study that just came out from the Rhodium Group, which is an independent energy and climate research firm that looked at a probabilistic estimate of emissions through the rest of the century. You know, when we hear about what emissions have to do, what climate pollution has to do, what we have to do with the energy system, we usually hear about like, well, we have to do X, Y, and Z, if we want to hit net zero by a certain year.
This study said, we’re not going to look at this. We’re not going to look at a question like that. We’re going to look probabilistically. Given what we know about countries, how they develop, how their economies develop and also how climate policy develops, what probabilistically would we expect the temperature to be in 2100? And the answer is like 2.5 degrees Celsius, like quite warm. Not good.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Robinson Meyer: What was, I think, most interesting about their study is that since 1990, when the whole COP process really was just about to begin, the rich developed democracies. The OECD countries, you know, Western Europe, America, Canada, Japan, plus China have emitted 55 percent of carbon pollution. And the rest of the world has emitted 45 percent from now until the end of the century, and this is, again, according to their model. This carbon has not been polluted yet. This has not these countries right yet.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Robinson Meyer: But from now until the end of the century, it’s actually the rest of the world that will generate 60 percent of emissions. And the kind of rich world, the rich developed world and China will shrink down to being 40 percent of emissions over the next century. And that’s because even if you look at right now renewables blowing up on the grid, right, that we build renewables as fast as we can, even if we, you know, switch over to EVs as fast as we can, there’s still all these economic processes, as you were mentioning steel, chemicals, agriculture that are very carbon-intensive right now.
And just simply economic demand from the rest of the world is going to blow our carbon budget in those sectors. Even if you assume those countries have like switched to cheap renewables, switched to EVs, just like making steel, you know, in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa is going to be a huge share of emission, big and concrete. And that’s why I’m oddly glad, oddly appreciate that this conference was in Dubai because I think it’s a reminder that a lot of the dynamics that we talk about, especially in the United States, just don’t matter, right.
You might be able to shame Exxon or Chevron out of certain actions, maybe. You might be able to get regulators in the United States to do something about these large international oil companies and fossil fuel companies. But 40 percent of the world’s oil comes from national oil companies that are tied to governments and shame will not work there.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Robinson Meyer: Right. You cannot shame the government of the Emirates into not selling oil.
Chris Hayes: No. And what the hell are they going to do?
Robinson Meyer: Exactly, right.
Chris Hayes: Other than that, what do they got?
Robinson Meyer: And so we need cheap technologies, right, that can decarbonize and actually allow these countries to develop without ever following a carbon-intensive path.
Chris Hayes: Yes, I saw like, this is everything you’re saying is both, I think, true in a descriptive sense and also kind of grim, right. Because it’s just like the inertia of sort of legacy technology and the impetus for economic growth and the desire and need and right really, fundamentally for energy equity, right. That like people have a right to like —
Robinson Meyer: Yes, exactly.
Chris Hayes: — have hot water and electricity and all the things that we take for granted. Like they have a right to have that. And it’s also like from a justice perspective, it’s like, we burned all the fossil fuels. We created this problem. There’s just no way to turn around and be like, sorry, like, you got to really, you guys got to cut down there, you know, in Congo. So, like all of that’s true. I mean, I saw this one story that gave me this little glimmer of hope and it doesn’t like it’s not scalable.
But it was just about, I think it was in Southeast Asia, where like the tuk-tuk like classic two-stroke diesel motors for like how people get around. And these like little scooters, in India, they’re called motor rickshaws. There’s millions of these two-stroke. They they’re the worst engine in the world. They’re the kind that’s in like the leaf blower and you know, and they’re the worst like just in terms of not even carbon pollution, like air pollution. They’re the stuff that makes like even worse than cars.
Robinson Meyer: Yes.
Chris Hayes: They make that fog over, you know, the smog over a city.
Robinson Meyer: It’s like even noise pollution is awful from them. Like people who spend all their time with them.
Chris Hayes: Yes. One of the worst technologies and they there are millions of them across the middle income and developing world because they are cheap and easy way to get around through scooters. And I saw a piece that was about the enormous growth in E-scooters and battery electric versions of these, which are now quite cheap in those places. Super cheap, there’s so many startup companies across Asia and China that are making these things and there’s tons of startups.
And it was one little glimmer of hope of like here’s a great example of like a leapfrog technology, which is like this going to make people’s lives better. It’s cheap enough now that it doesn’t cost more. We’re retiring these terrible things, which are bad for everyone, anyone in the air breathes. And I was like, that’s at least, a little proof of concept of what a kind of win-win can look like in this part of the world.
Robinson Meyer: Totally. Bloomberg New Energy Finance actually thinks that those vehicles, precisely these electric tuk-tuks, the two-and three-wheeled small electric vehicles, mostly in South and Southeast Asia are averting 2 million barrels of oil demand a day, which is a lot.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Robinson Meyer: That’s like 2 percent of global oil demand because we burn about —
Chris Hayes: Wow.
Robinson Meyer: — a hundred million barrels of oil a day. The example that people use a lot is cell phones.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Robinson Meyer: That in Sub-Saharan Africa, in China, there was never the construction of a landline —
Chris Hayes: Of the landline, yes.
Robinson Meyer: — infrastructure. People just like cell phones existed and so that’s what people use, right. They didn’t need to build telephone lines everywhere. They could just use cell phones for everything. That is the challenge of the rest of the century, in some ways, is creating a low carbon development pathway —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Robinson Meyer: — so that, you know, countries all around the world in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa can simply skip over the carbon-intensive part of the development pathway that the U.S. and Western Europe and China pursued and go directly to these low carbon alternatives. And I think the thrust of climate policy in the West then should really be, well, what can we do as individual American consumers, as the American government, as kind of the whole coterie of rich Western democracies around the world to make that possible and to make that easy for places so that in 2040 and 2050 when we’re no longer just talking about China and India, we’re talking about Indonesia, we’re talking about Vietnam, we’re talking about Nigeria, they have options that will not cost them any more money, that will be as cheap as going with fossil fuels, but won’t pollute the climate.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Robinson Meyer: There’s one more point I would make about all of this, which is we talked about how steel making is hard, how agriculture is hard, how chemicals making this hard. And there’s a term that we used in climate world, which is like these are the hard to abate sectors.
But I think an important corrective there and like important corrective kind of everything we’ve been talking about for the past few minutes is like, those are the hard to abate sectors, sure. But what they really are is like the sectors we haven’t tried to abate yet more than anything else.
We know there’s chemical reasons that they’re hard, where there does need to be like a direct carbon atom or hydrogen atom given by the fossil fuel, in some cases, to whatever the product that we’re making is. We know that’s a possibility but, you know, for example, over the past 10 years in the U.S., we used to think the power sector was really, really hard. The power sector was the biggest source of emissions in the U.S. Then cheap wind and solar happened and very rapidly and we switched frankly from coal to natural gas through a lot of the country.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Robinson Meyer: And very rapidly power sector emissions fell. And then the big world of climate people started looking at transportation and then EV prices fell and transportation became the most polluting sector of the U.S. economy. Well, what’s about to happen in the next few years is that transportation is going to fall to second place and industry will be the most polluting sector of the economy. And what I suspect will happen is that just happened with the power sector, just happened with the transportation sector, once industry is the most polluting sector of the economy and people really start to focus on it, we’re going to see all these EV to evade emissions that we just haven’t really noticed yet. And we’re going to get rid of them really quickly.
And so to some degree, steel chemicals, ag, these are huge challenging problems. On the other hand, they’re challenging problems because we just haven’t paid attention to them yet.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: Let’s finish up on carbon removal because I think I saw you write about this the other day.
Robinson Meyer: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And it’s a huge issue. I mean, I think, you know, increasingly it’s clear to me that we’re going to have to have like enormous, if we’re going to make it in some sense, we’re going to have to have enormous carbon removal technologies.
Robinson Meyer: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Now at one level you think, why would you not be psyched about carbon removable? It’s like, and I think, you know, to give a little metaphor, if you’re trying to get a friend to quit smoking and they’re like, they’re working on this pill and you just take it once a day and it gets rid of the deleterious effects of smoking. And like, I’m just waiting for that to happen. Like it does disincentivize —
Robinson Meyer: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And of course, the fossil fuel folks and the Dubai guy, they’re all talking, they love carbon removal. Exxon, that’s like their favorite thing in the world. They’ve been talking about it —
Robinson Meyer: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — for 20 years, clean coal. We are going to burn coal and then you are going to capture the carbon and put it underground. So, this has been used as this like incredibly insidious propaganda tool by incumbent fossil fuel interests who want to keep bursting fossil fuels and then have some other magical technology that takes it off the board. That said even given that insidiousness, it is also the case, I think, and I think is largely the consensus, we really do need to scale up.
Throw everything we have at this problem for carbon removal, but it’s tricky because what it means for a place like Dubai or Exxon thinks about their future. Because if they think they’re going to have to not burn any more fossil fuels, that’s a different 30-year plan than, yeah. We’ll just burn fossil fuels and then you’ll take the magic pill.
Robinson Meyer: Yes, exactly. There was a really interesting report that came out early, during COP, during the UN Climate Conference that, it was called 10 New Insights in Climate Science. It’s kind of meant to be like incremental update to the big IPCC, you know, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports that come out every few years. Just like, hey, here’s kind of our takeaway from the most recent climate science as a group of scientists. And it had two-big takeaways and I thought they were really interesting or two big takeaways from the 10 that I thought were really interesting.
The first was we have to phase out fossil fuels almost entirely if we want to make the 1.5 degree Celsius goal. We’re going to overshoot 1.5 degree Celsius this century. We know that within a few decades the Earth’s average temperature will be higher, will be 1.5 degrees Celsius or about 3 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it was during the pre-industrial time. We can bring it back down by 2100, but that will require phasing out fossil fuels extremely quickly. And we need to scale up carbon dioxide removal extremely quickly, if we want to make that 1.5 degree goal, too.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Robinson Meyer: So it’s that we need fossil fuel phase out and we need carbon dioxide removal. The way I think about carbon dioxide removal is that, you know, a few years ago there was a study that looked at the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. And it found a quite a alarming result, which is that if sea level rise and continues at the path we think, and especially the oceans get warmer at the rate that we think they will, they will destabilize this huge chunk of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and set into irreversible motion, extremely rapid sea level rise.
We’re talking about like inches of sea level rise a year, which is feet in a decade, just amounts that would destroy New York, destroy coastal cities around the world within a decade or two, and be impossible to adapt from. The study said, this is going to happen. There were a few more studies. And they said, okay, well, we’re actually not quite sure if it’s going to happen. And we really won’t know until we get another few decades down the line and kind of see how climate change is going. But there’s going to be this period between like 2045 and 2060, where we’ll know whether this process has started or not. Because we know the process happened in the past. We know it’s happened in —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Robinson Meyer: — deep (ph) time in Earth. The question is whether it’s going to happen now. And they’re like by 2045, 2050, we’ll have a really good sense about whether this kind of high end disastrous process is happening. And then we’ll have until like 2060 or 2065 to stop it, to stop it before it becomes completely irreversible. It just goes in motion. We get feet per decade and that’s that.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Robinson Meyer: My way of thinking about carbon removal, these sets of studies were quite brain reshaping for me, I would say, because the way I think about this is, man, by 2050, we are really going to want carbon dioxide removal ready and ready to have it scaled.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Robinson Meyer: Because —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Robinson Meyer: — if we realize in 2050 that this process has started, we’re only going to have about 10 years to scale CDR, carbon dioxide removal, fast enough to avert it by 2060 or 2070. And you can fudge those numbers a little bit. You can say, well, maybe won’t be the 2060 —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Robinson Meyer: — that we know. But like by the time that, you know, our kids are in middle age by not that long from now, just a few decades —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Robinson Meyer: — we’re going to want that technology ready to go and ready to be scaled massively across the Earth. And the only way we can get there is if we invest money and time and attention now, so that we can bring it down the cost curve, figure out the easiest and cheapest and best ways to do it. So, that by 2050, 2060 we know exactly how we would be able to scale it, if we needed to scale it.
Chris Hayes: That would be a fun thing to be working on if I were an engineer.
Robinson Meyer: The great thing is that it lets you kind of work. I’ve been in climate reporting for long enough that I, unfortunately, like now find oil and fossil fuels also extremely interesting which is —
Chris Hayes: Yes, oh totally. Oh, I do, too.
Robinson Meyer: — is just crazy they exist on the Earth in the first place.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Robinson Meyer: The cool thing about CDR is you get to work on all those same topics, but in reverse.
Chris Hayes: Yes, right, yes. No, I mean anytime that the great Steve Coll book about Exxon, I mean —
Robinson Meyer: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — the level of human ingenuity resource and labor and capital brought to bear on the question of like, how do we get this stuff out of the earth, wherever it is, is so awesome in the like —
Robinson Meyer: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — literal sense of the word. Like it’s just shocking that humans, and it just like, yes, if there’s enough money in it, people do it. And man, we’ve like figured out some wild ways to get that stuff out of the earth. And you hope, you know, you have some process at the other end of this that does the same for the Earth’s health.
Robinson Meyer: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And that’s sort of the trick.
Robinson Meyer: My brother is an engineer. He’s a college student and we talked about this all the time actually. But man, it is a real shame that fossil fuels cause climate change.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Robinson Meyer: Because if not, they would be so interesting. They would be so cool.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Robinson Meyer: What a fascinating business. I mean, a nightmarish business as well —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Robinson Meyer: — as has been well attested by the many experiences I’ve had here in Dubai, but just a completely fascinating human endeavor that, unfortunately, causes, you know, the biggest environmental problem that we’ve ever faced as a species. I think the one thing is that in some ways that’s maybe the right way to think about all of this.
And a way that gets us past some of the conversations or some of the ideas that can kind of hang around the climate conversation, which is fossil fuels actually have been enormous for human flourishing. They have unlocked a tremendous amount of prosperity and wealth and health for people, you know, especially in Western Europe and North America, but all around the world as well.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Robinson Meyer: And do you know what? You know, so did the typewriter.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Robinson Meyer: So, did oil lamps, they were tremendous technologies. They did a ton of good and then we developed better stuff.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Robinson Meyer: And that’s what we need to do in order to fight climate change in order to get to where we need to be.
Chris Hayes: Robinson Meyer is a Founding Executive Editor of Heatmap News, which is a new media company focused on climate change and decarbonization. You should check out their work at heatmap.news. He’s a contributing opinion writer at “The New York Times.” Robinson, thanks so much.
Robinson Meyer: Of course. Thank you so much for having me.
Chris Hayes: Once again, great thanks to Robinson Meyer. You can email us at WITHpod@gmail.com. Get in touch with us using the hashtag #WITHpod. You can follow us on TikTok by searching for WITHpod. You can also follow me on threads @chrislhayes and on Bluesky where I’m also chrislhayes.
“Why is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the Executive Producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to NBCNews.com/whyisthishappening?