A State of the World Address: The Climate Speech We'll Probably Never Hear | Frankly 160

Nate Hagens (0:00)

Greetings, good humans. Time for another Frankly. This week is Climate Week in New York City. So for this Frankly, a kind of a thought experiment. I want you to imagine a world leader, not the leader of any particular country per se, but maybe a generic leader of all of them, someone with no election to win or donors to please, and no border to defend. And imagine this person decided to give the population of Earth a series of honest addresses, using the words and tone that politicians usually use, but saying the things that no politician today would probably actually say.

So here's my take at a state of the world address.

My fellow citizens of Earth, we leaders, elected or not, have known what I'm about to tell you tonight for a long time, at least on most of us. We just did not believe we could politically survive saying it out loud. You have heard two stories about our blue-green planet, the third rock from the sun. In some places, your leaders tell you there is no problem at all. Earth's climate has always changed. The scientists exaggerate, and your job and your truck are under attack from elites who fly private jets to conferences and speak about muzzling your carbon footprint. That story is one that wins elections. But that story does not change the chemistry of the atmosphere or Earth's oceans. In other countries, your leaders tell you there is a problem and that we are solving it. We will swap out the bad energy for the good energy, the solar panels and the electric cars, and your life will continue exactly as before, but cleaner. That story also wins elections. And it is a bit closer to the truth, yet it treats an ecological emergency on our planet more like a product recall, where we just have to swap the part, but keep driving in the same direction at the same or even faster speeds.

Neither of those stories is true. Tonight, I'm going to tell you the truth as best as we currently understand it. To get to the truth, I must first start with the ancient sunlight that we have built our current civilization with. You know this variously as fossil fuels, coal, oil, and natural gas. We have been spending this one-time fortune for 200 years. The sunlight sealed inside every calorie on your plate. A single barrel of oil trades today for roughly the price of a good dinner. But when you combine what's inside that barrel with the various machines that it powers, it can do the equivalent of five years of one human being's physical labor. Digging and hauling and lifting and pumping and pushing and pulling. Five years of it. In a small drum, we could roll across the floor. If you hired a person to do what that barrel does and paid even the lowest legal wage, it would cost you tens of thousands of dollars. We pay under a hundred for everything it does. We pay somewhere between one one hundredth and one thousandth of its economic worth. And we burn through roughly one hundred million barrels of it every single day, plus the coal, plus the gas. Which is why, when the price of energy rises, the price of everything rises with it.

However, tonight I have come to tell you what a century of that burning has been doing to the sky and to the sea.

The heating of our planet is not an accident, nor is it a conspiracy. It is the exhaust from our material success. When we burn these fuels, a little bit of heat stays on earth, but a little bit of it also acts as a blanket around our atmosphere. And over time, this reduces the amount of outgoing heat that can escape into outer space, slowly raising the total average temperature of earth's entire system. The felt effects for you and me are unevenly over space and time, but over the coming decades and centuries, we'll transform this world, which we call home. Carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is now higher than at any point in millions of years. The oceans, which cover most of this world and gave rise to all of our life, have absorbed the vast majority of the extra heat and roughly a third of the carbon, and they are becoming warmer, more acidic, and less alive.

The heatwaves and the floods and the fires and the failed harvests you have watched on your screens are but the leading edge of this, and more is already in motion no matter what we do next. Next year, 2027, will be the warmest year of our lives due to the Super El Nino on top of the existing warming. And within some near-term error band, it will likely be the coolest year of the rest of our lives. Things like this are usually said in science fiction movies. This is science, but alas, it is not fiction.