wesley morris

You and I try to live good, environmentally ethical lives.

jenna wortham

Oh yeah, we do what we can.

wesley morris

I, you know, try to keep my footprint no bigger than like, a kittens.

wesley morris

Maybe a bat.

jenna wortham

Yes, more realistic.

wesley morris

Does a bat have a footprint?

jenna wortham

A wingspan.

wesley morris

That’s how small I want it.

jenna wortham

Got it. You’re good.

wesley morris

And you know, in reality, I’m sure it’s like the size of the Grand Canyon, but whatever. Like, I’m trying to keep it kitten sized.

jenna wortham

You’re mindful, that’s what matters.

wesley morris

But every Wednesday I kind of lose it a little bit when I come home and I see what’s waiting for me on my stoop. [MUSIC PLAYING] It’s a little plastic bag, sometimes it’s three stuffed with a circular.

jenna wortham

Oh, you mean those things that look like the Sunday paper—

jenna wortham

—but they’re just stuffed full of coupons that aren’t even coupons? It’s just like, news about what’s on sale at Rite Aid or Food Town? I get those too, they drive me up the wall.

wesley morris

Well, what do you do about it?

jenna wortham

Well, I usually just nudge them off the stoop— [LAUGHTER] —into the trash can. It was just directly to the right of my stoop. And so as I’m walking up, I just kind of scoop them into the trash. But I feel so guilty about it. It’s like, unnecessary guilt I didn’t ask.

jenna wortham

What else can you do? [PHONE RINGING]

jenna wortham

You call every week honey?

wesley morris

Yes. [MUSIC PLAYING]

jenna wortham

Is this why you wake up at 5:00 AM? Is this part of your morning routine? Like, don’t you have other— I know you have other things to do. I know how busy you are. You have important things to do.

wesley morris

I know. But this makes me so mad because it’s such a breach of the deal that I’ve made for myself about the kind of person I want to be in the world.

wesley morris

And to me, to walk up to my step—

wesley morris

—and see this white plastic bag. Again, let me just restate, sometimes three—

jenna wortham

Yeah, yeah.

wesley morris

It’s like a micro-aggression to me. You know, like it is—

jenna wortham

Mm-hmm. Against you and the planet.

jenna wortham

So what happens when you call?

wesley morris

That’s every week we do this.

jenna wortham

Has anything changed?

wesley morris

You mean about my blood pressure or about the circulars? Because the circulars are still there and I’m sure my blood pressure is higher.

wesley morris

Yeah. But I mean, I feel like I have this need to do something, right? I feel like I want to take control somehow rather than accept my fate of getting these circulars every week. Because the circulars really do— they make me angry.

jenna wortham

You know, it’s interesting. Because it’s kind of like the devil you know. It’s like, this is something that you can deal with that’s immediately in front of you. And I think it’s emblematic of a way, I think, that generally a lot of us are feeling when it comes to coping with any kind of environmental issue in this country.

jenna wortham

Like on one hand, you know, a devastating climate report comes out that says the temperature is going to go up no matter what we do and the consequences will be dire. And each day it feels like we’re getting new reports of some sort of devastating extreme weather condition, whether it’s droughts, or tornadoes in Alabama, or news of another hurricane. And we’re dealing with—

wesley morris

Fires, yeah.

jenna wortham

—California fires. The point I’m trying to make is that climate anxiety is real. And we see it in front of us and around us all the time.

wesley morris

Yeah. No, I mean, I definitely feel anxious. And I definitely feel like making these circulars stop would made me feel a lot better before I go into the house on a Wednesday evening. But nothing is changing and so I feel helpless.

jenna wortham

I think another word for what you’re feeling is powerless. You know, when it comes to thinking about what we can do to affect change around the environment, it’s really hard to feel like we have any power to change anything.

wesley morris

Well then, does my calling the distribution company mean I care too much?

jenna wortham

No honey, of course not. It’s just that, maybe there’s a better way to show that care. [MUSIC PLAYING] [PHONE RINGING]

david wallace-wells

Hello?

wesley morris

David Wallace-Wells, it’s Wesley and Jenna.

wesley morris

How are you?

david wallace-wells

I’m good. Great to talk to you guys.

jenna wortham

OK. So you wrote an incredible piece in New York Magazine last year called “The Uninhabitable Earth” and you just published a book by the same name. Congrats.

david wallace-wells

Thank you.

jenna wortham

And it’s really about how we deal with the devastating realities that await us as the result of climate change. And I’m calling today specifically to enlist you on a very personal campaign of mine to potentially try to change what a one Mr. Wesley Morris does every week that’s driving him insane.

david wallace-wells

What’s the problem?

jenna wortham

Well you lived in Brooklyn, so you’ve probably seen those coupons circulars that make their way around? And they look like the Sunday paper, but they’re all in white. And then we open them up, there’s like $0.10 off of bananas this week at Food Town. And you’re just like, what, do I need to know that? Have you seen these before?

david wallace-wells

I don’t think so, actually.

jenna wortham

They actually do function as kind of like, free litter. Like, you don’t want them, but it’s your responsibility to get rid of them. And Wesley is on a personal mission to get the company that delivers them to stop doing it, because he feels like this is the one thing that he can do to stop climate change.

david wallace-wells

Yeah. My feeling about like, what difference individuals can make is so much that the whole answer is politics. And that the way that we relate through what we buy and how we consume, we’d all be better people if we did that a little bit more responsibly. But the impacts are so small. And I think for a lot of people, they actually distract from the real urgency of the need to take political action to vote in particular, but also organize beyond that. And so I basically think that we can get around to cleaning up the circulars, we can get around to going vegan, and stopping our flying, and all that stuff. But by far the most important thing to do is just to get people into office who are going to take this thing seriously. And when I look around and I see people arguing about veganism, people arguing about what clothes you buy, and plastic consumption and all that stuff, it’s so small that it often feels like it’s just a way to distract ourselves from the real problem, you know? Making us feel active when we’re actually not all that active.

wesley morris

Oh, lord. [LAUGHTER] I mean.

david wallace-wells

The plastic thing is really interesting, because it’s been a huge movement, especially in England over the last year or so. One of the episodes of David Ambrose last series had a whole segment about plastic in the oceans. And there’s just been a huge upswell of concern about plastic in the oceans, which is— I mean, it’s awful. There shouldn’t be any plastic in the oceans. It’s gross. But there’s something so powerful about that image. It’s just like, when you look at a photo of water with debris in it, you’re like, that’s gross, we got to clean that up. And climate change is so much more complicated than that. Like, we can’t see carbon. It’s invisible. And I think that’s one of the reasons that we’ve been so distracted from the issue for so long, is that it’s been really hard to see it. It’s like, always something that’s been told to us. It’s almost like an abstraction. We were told it was coming distant in time, and it was distant in place, and it was visible.

wesley morris

Yeah. Yeah.

david wallace-wells

And we respond so much more to these— yeah, like the picture of the plastic island in the Pacific, or a picture of a polar bear, just because we can see it. But those things are so— I don’t know, at best marginal to the problem, you know? Not to depress you guys.

wesley morris

No, no, it’s— [LAUGHTER]

jenna wortham

But it’s reality thought.

wesley morris

Listen, I mean, I’m already depressed. And I’m angry, right? And I think that in some ways, to deal with the circulars— in some ways it’s disconnected for me from the larger problem. Like, the thing that your book is actually about is the thing I’m trying to live on the most microscopic level possible. And you know, this distribution company is an affront to my living in philosophical and practical accordance with the uninhabitable earth, your book.

david wallace-wells

Yeah. I mean, I think it seems like a kind of powerful metaphor for the problem. So like, in the US, I think we waste about a third of our food.

david wallace-wells

We Waste like 70% of our electricity. Like, it’s literally wasted on the way from wherever it’s being produced to your home because our grid is in such bad shape. 70% of it. Which means if we built a new grid, we could cut out the carbon footprint of our energy production by 70%. And there’s so many features of modern life like that, especially for people in the West. Especially relatively well-off people in places like New York City. Even when we think, we’re urbanites, we live in the city, we don’t drive much, we walk, we’re eating good local food, et cetera, there’s so many features of our life that are just full of waste. And every one of those wastes does add up. I mean, I applaud you. You’re a better man than I am. Like, I’m not taking action at that level. But those solutions, for me, they have to be political. It’s like, to get that one company out of business, it’s going to make such a small difference. But if for instance, there could be a law that was banning all plastic production. There could be a law that was like, New York City has no cars in it. Those solutions scale up from the quite plausible to the kind of implausible seeming. But all the ones that are consequential I think are achieved through politics. And we live in this gross moment where we’re told that we make our mark on the world through how we consume, politically. Like, we register our politics through our— what we eat, what we wear, even the music that we listen to, the movies that we watch. And I just think that’s such a diversion from actual political action. Like, if you really define listening to the right music as the most meaningful political choice that you’re making— I mean, obviously music is political. But if you’re defining that as the core of your political relationship to the world, you’re leaving aside so much power that you have in a country like ours to really make change. Not to sound like such a naive American flag waver or whatever.

david wallace-wells

Obviously there’s huge problems in our system. But the opportunities are there. And I don’t know. When people would talk about the inertia of the system, it’s like, yeah the system is inert, but we still get to vote in it. We still get to try to make change. And I feel like we give up on that too easily and are too enamored with virtue signaling through consumption choices.

jenna wortham

Well I hear all of that and I get it. I think I’m trying to reconcile that political imperative with the very real ways that our political system feels uninterested in those issues. And so how do you make sense of that when we’re living under administration that is actively de-prioritizing climate change and doing things like extracting the US from the Paris Agreement? Or putting climate deniers in cabinet positions? And even though there are exciting policy proposals out like the Green New Deal, but everything we read about and hear about it is that it’s unlikely to pass. So how do you get people to see that political change as the most important thing when all signs right now in this moment kind of point to political inaction around climate change?

david wallace-wells

I mean, I think if you took a sort of long view, there’s a lot of really exciting movements. I think the numbers are 73% of Americans now believe in climate change. 70% of them are concerned about it. Those numbers are up 15% since 2015. They’re up 8% since March.

david wallace-wells

So extreme weather has been a grotesque teacher. The California wildfires— I’m actually out in California now reporting on wildfires. And even watching them around the country, watching from around the world, I think people have really woken up to just how horrifying the future could be if we don’t change course. And heat waves, hurricane after hurricane in the Caribbean, flooding all around South Asia, I just think the news has been teaching the world to wake up on this issue. And when you see like, in Europe, there’s Greta Thunberg and the climate strike. There’s a movement in the UK called Extinction Rebellion. In the US we’ve had Sunrise, which has led to the Green New Deal, which is— you know, there’s huge questions about it. It’s basically just like a statement of principles. It’s not really a piece of legislation you could put into action right now. But it puts the science first. That’s like, unprecedented in American political climate history. It’s like, opens with quotes from the UN About what’s necessary and then tries to find a policy response that could fulfill those goals rather than defining our goals through what’s politically possible. And that is like, just a huge sea change. Now like, will it come to pass in something like the form that AOC and Ed Markey hope?

wesley morris

Yeah. AOC being Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

david wallace-wells

But like, her arrival in the house alone has made climate a much, much, much more central issue for our politics. And when you look at those numbers, 73% and 70%, it’s like we pass everything about our culture through prisms of politics now. So there’s these stats about how when you control for race, Democrats and Republicans actually had the same opinions about the guilt of OJ Simpson. And that is just unthinkable now. Now everything about the way we think about everything is passed through our partisan identities. And when you see those numbers that high in that light, you’re like, wow, that’s actually incredible. 73% of Americans believe climate change is real, 70% of them are worried about it. Given how tribalized, how partisan our politics are and our culture is, I don’t know. In certain ways I’m a climate alarmist, in other ways I guess I’m a climate optimist, because I see a lot more movement actually than I would have expected 5, 10 years ago. Not that I was personally affected by climate 5 by 10 years ago. But it just seems like from any political science metric, things are moving really, really fast. And the problem is that the UN says we’ve got 12 years to have global emissions to avoid what they call the threshold of catastrophe. Two degrees—

wesley morris

To cut them in half, basically.

david wallace-wells

Yeah.

david wallace-wells

And if we hit two degrees, that’s— two degrees is a level that the island nations of the world called genocide. And that’s not unreasonable. Those nations will be underwater. And if we hit two degrees, I mean, that’s like walking through the horror show. But they think that many of the biggest cities in the Middle East and South Asia will be unlivibly hot in summer a two degrees, which could happen as soon as 2050. The UN thinks there could be 200 million climate refugees. They think there actually could be as high as one billion climate refugees, which is as many people as live in North and South America combined. [INTERPOSING VOICES]

wesley morris

OK, wait, you’re warming up the studio in here. [LAUGHTER] It’s just like you just dropped 400 bags of circulars in my ears right now. The question I want to ask you based on all of this stuff, which by the way is perfectly explained and evocatively explained in the book, like the worst case scenario. But eventually, your climate optimism surfaces. But what happens between election cycles? I know that the voting is the most important thing. And if the right people run and I vote for them, we’re good, or we’re on the path to being good. But that’s a lot of waiting every two years to make that change.

david wallace-wells

Well, there’s a lot of grassroots activism going on all around the world. And I think anyone can be a part of that. I think you can do constituency contact, like showing up at Dianne Feinstein’s office and shaming her about her—

david wallace-wells

Let me give you my spiel that’s like, it’s possible to be optimistic about it. When you think about all these horrors that are possible— I mentioned a few of them— those are a reflection of the power that we have over climate.

david wallace-wells

If we get to four degrees of warming by the end of the century, which is what we’re on track for, that will be because of choices we make going forward. There’s a little bit of a delay in the climate system. But it’s not much of a delay. And we’re doing the damage we’re doing now basically in real time. Half of the emissions that humanity has produced and put into the atmosphere and the burning fossil fuels have come in the last 30 years, which means we’ve done as much damage since Al Gore published his first book on warming, since the premiere of Seinfeld, than we did in all of the centuries before. And that’s horrible, but it also means that we are doing this. We have our hands on the levers. And the most important input going forward is human action, what we do, how much carbon we emit, what action we take. So when we think about the future, we are heading on track for some really awful outcomes. But the scale those horrors is a reflection of just how much power we have to control the climate. There are climate deniers who are like, oh, this is just natural warming, it’s not human made. And I’m like, that should terrify you more. If we were heading down this path and had no control over it, that would be crazy. But we’re in this situation—

wesley morris

Yes. Yes. All the farting the earth is doing is perfectly natural. You should still want the gas to stop.

jenna wortham

Right, right.

david wallace-wells

Right.

jenna wortham

David, I think the thing I keep coming back to in this is voting in this country is really complicated for people of color.

david wallace-wells

Yeah.

jenna wortham

I mean, you have things like voter suppression. You have things like ballot manipulation, North Carolina that— things that even impact at a very local level. Not even talking at a presidential, not even at that scale. But things that prevent regular shmegular Joes from getting into office. And typically what happens is for low income people, or people of color, they’re the ones that deal with these issues the most. And they have the least political representation and tend to be the most impacted by things like climate change, although soon we’ll all be as equally impacted by climate change. But I don’t know how to make sense of that either. Because if voting is our best option and yet the powers that be keep those of us that are impacted from being even able to vote, what do we do about that?

david wallace-wells

I mean, it’s a hard problem. It’s even harder when you look globally. Climate change punishes unequally. It is already exacerbating inequality, but it will exacerbate it more. And that happens within nations, but it also happens between nations. And the people of the Middle East and South Asia are already suffering intensely from climate change. There’s also the question of, how do we protect whole nations? I mean, Bangladesh is really in immediate peril. Over the next generation they could have— where half of their population lives, it would be underwater. And that’s not even counting the kind of economic impact that would come from all of the additional flooding beyond the direct sea level rise. And it’s an incredible moral burden on the world as a whole, on the planet as a whole. And I think we’re going to see a new politics emerge. We had after World War II a global order come around that was in name committed to human rights, peace and prosperity, et cetera. That was often an alibi for bad behavior, it often involved continued oppression. But the world was probably still better served by a system that held up those values a central than one that didn’t. And I think that we’re likely to see a similar system emerge that really puts the issue of climate change at the very center of political discourse. So you hear MBS, the kind of awful leader of Saudi Arabia saying the country’s economy needs to get off oil by 2050. 100% off oil by 2050. I think he said he wants them to get close to that by 2030. And to me, that contains wisdom about the future of the world. That you won’t be able to continue producing this stuff and still expect a seat at the table of nations as soon as a couple of decades from now because the world just won’t allow it. There’ll be at the very least sanctions. And it sounds crazy to say, but I think that there could be military action to enforce and respond to bad behavior on climate. And we have heard a lot of wars that were fought in the name of human rights. Not to say that all of them or even any of them were good ideas. But I think that we are sort of headed in that direction, which is a ways away from the question you asked, Jenna. And that’s in part because I don’t think there’s really a great answer for it except the answers that we all try to give to that question more generally beyond climate, which is just, we have to fight to give everyone access to the political system as best we can. And whether that’s through community organizing, whether it’s through federal reform and everything in between, it’s obviously a hugely important vector for climate action as it is important vector for all of our political futures. Because we need to have as many stakeholders invested in this project and pushing the changes that they think their communities need. There’s a kind of meta debate among people who write and talk about climate. Like, how should we talk about it? Should we talk about it this why, should we talk about it this way? My feeling is like, any story you have is a good one. Any idea you have about it is a good one. Any impulse you have is a good one. So even, Wesley, with your circulars, I’m like yeah, go for it man. Like, I applaud you. It’s not what looks like the most important solution to me, but any impulse— [LAUGHTER] —that anyone has towards this solution— [INTERPOSING VOICES]

jenna wortham

Yeah. Yeah.

wesley morris

Yeah. I mean, I think the thing that I would say about that is that if there is a company that can produce the paper, procure the plastic, put the paper in the plastic, give all the stacks of paper in plastic to a distribution company, and have members of that distribution company throw the plastic bags of paper onto people’s property and they didn’t ask for it, it just seems to me like the biggest F you to all the people like me who are trying to reduce their relationship to this stuff. And so consequently, I feel like calling these people up and just asking them to just please leave me out of this. Like, I’m trying to live this other life over here and you keep trying to implicate me in this other situation. Now I know it’s a folly David, because I have to eat off a plastic spoon when I get a yogurt at the bodega. Like, it’s a whack-a-mole. You hit one gopher and up comes another one.

david wallace-wells

But another way of thinking of it is like, the main issue here is carbon. If we had a national politics or we had global politics that really was focused on reducing carbon, and every product that was produced of any kind was held to that standard, if we can organize that new politics and that new set of regulations, it is actually one thing that we’re worrying about. So if we held every part of our economy, every part of our culture to a carbon standard— and I think we will. I wrote a little bit about this in the book, but I don’t think it’s at all crazy that a few years from now we’re going to start seeing in the supermarket alongside things that are advertised as organic, things that are advertised as carbon free. But what we really need is to have that grass rootsy slash ugly corporate approach met with real policy that—

wesley morris

Holds these countries to account for—

david wallace-wells

Yeah.

wesley morris

—for getting on my nerves.

david wallace-wells

It’s just like, if we just re-prioritized our political systems away from propping up these businesses— many of which are not profitable— to RND, and infrastructure building, and helping those communities who are going to be hit hardest adjust so that they won’t be hit quite as— if we just turn those money from that one category to that second category, at the very least we would be in a much, much better shape. And that doesn’t seem so hard to do. Who wants to subsidize the fossil fuel business aside from the people who run those companies?

wesley morris

I mean, look, none of this feels good. But we thank you for trying to make us feel better about a paralyzing situation.

david wallace-wells

Oh my god, please. You guys are amazing. It’s great to talk to you.

wesley morris

It’s great to talk to you. Good luck with those wildfires. [MUSIC PLAYING] I’m not mad at David. He’s fighting the good fight. And I’m going to do everything he says to do. I’m a voter, I know it’s important. I also feel like I can’t rely entirely on political structures. Even though— this is not to debunk or refute anything—

wesley morris

—that David is talking about. Of course he’s right. But it also doesn’t feel like enough for me. I mean, that’s why I’m out there chasing down the circular guy, because I want to feel like I’m doing something directly.

jenna wortham

No, of course. Of course. And I think that you are literally in the streets, but I also think that a lot of people take to their version of the streets, which is just social media. But they go on social media and they make a lot of noise online to try to effect change. And frankly, not surprisingly, have lost faith in anything that resembles a due process. And Wesley, I also think we live in an era where people feel as empowered or maybe even more empowered by a type of cultural voting system that we’ve rigged together from bubblegum and cat hair. But really from utilizing social currency, and making noise to increase visibility, and signal boosting via tweets, and call outs, and Instagram posts to warrant coverage on let’s say a morning news show, or become a trending topic and then maybe it hits the times front page. And then who knows, it become an HBO documentary. I mean, for better or for worse, that is the way a lot of cultural issues get attention now.

wesley morris

So what you’re talking about basically is not new. It’s not like this just— the hashtag is relatively new in the way we’ve been thinking about direct action. But I mean, protests and the fruits of protest, and that sort of—

jenna wortham

Yeah, letter writing campaigns, all of that.

wesley morris

—activist labor, that’s been around forever.

jenna wortham

Yeah. Of course.

wesley morris

What David is talking about from the standpoint of policy comes right out of environmental activism. The reason that what we’re going through now between these me too cancellations and the mutings of various peoples—

jenna wortham

Mm-hmm, various problematic peoples.

wesley morris

—is satisfying is because it’s so direct.

jenna wortham

Yeah, of course.

wesley morris

Right? You make the right hashtag and you get the right people to stand behind it. Or the cause is so undeniably cause-worthy and outrage worthy that change actually does happen.

wesley morris

And I think that one of the things about this political environment that we’re in is, there’s so much waiting around to be done. It’s basically what I asked David, right? Like, what do I do between voting cycles? I know, mute R. Kelly.

wesley morris

And not to say that calling for the muting of R. Kelly is not a worthy thing to do. But it’s another thing that seems immediately consequential. And I never feel good when I call the distribution company. This process to me feels very circular. And it doesn’t go forward to me, it’s a loop. Like, every Wednesday for me is Groundhog Day. I wake up, it’s Wednesday, I know what’s going to happen when I get home. And every Wednesday I keep hoping the outcome is going to be different. I try different scenarios, I hope that a person answering the phone is going to be a different person. And it’s not. It’s the same.

jenna wortham

You are Natasha Lyonne in Russian Doll.

jenna wortham

But let’s see if we could do something different.

wesley morris

All right, I’ll try David’s way. [PHONE RINGING]

jenna wortham

Oh, there’s no—

wesley morris

I think they hung up, there’s no voicemail.

jenna wortham

There’s no option to leave a voicemail.

wesley morris

Listen, we’re trying.

jenna wortham

We’re trying.

jenna wortham

We’ll keep trying.

wesley morris

We’re out here trying, we’re going to keep trying. [MUSIC PLAYING] [OMITTED PER CLIENT REQUEST] We were going to just say to Chuck Schumer, hey, we’re two people who work at the New York Times, but we’re also calling as constituents.

jenna wortham

Yeah, we’re freaked out.

wesley morris

And we want you to do everything you can—

wesley morris

—to fight climate change.

jenna wortham

Make this a priority and do everything you can. Thank you very much, next.

wesley morris

Well, Ariana, just one second. I also was going to ask him if he could do something about those circulars.

jenna wortham

Oh, honey. Oh my god.

wesley morris

I really was. I was just going to ask him.