Morning Joe invited authors David Wallace-Wells and Michael Mann to talk about the urgency of doing something about climate change.
"So what are three steps that you would -- what are three tangible steps that you would tell every presidential candidate that cares about this issue they should be talking about? one, two, three," Joe Scarborough said.
"I think it's sort of all hands on deck, all solutions are necessary. I think a dramatic carbon tax that probably approaches the scale of a ban on much carbon use," said David Wallace-Wells.
"I think a really aggressive investment in green energy and major investment in rebuilding our infrastructure so it is less carbon intensive. There's also agriculture. There's air travel. So many things. Life in the modern world has a carbon footprint and we need to cut that footprint everywhere."
"There are things we can do as individuals that reduce carbon emissions and there are 'no regrets' actions. They make us feel better, save us money. but personal action alone won't get us where we need to be," Michael Mann warned.
"We need policies to incentivize the shift away from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Only our policymakers acting on our behalf rather than the polluting interests can make it happen."
"How do you address the false binary set up by the president that we can fix climate change or lose jobs?" Willie Geist.
"it's an ironic fallacy," Mann said.
"Just the opposite is true, which is true with many of Donald Trump's claims. The fact is that the cost of inaction of not doing something about this problem greatly outweighs the cost of taking action. And we saw that writ large this summer with unprecedented devastating costly, deadly, extreme weather events that are being made worse by client change, as David said, and will get worse if we don't act."
"it's interesting. I was out golfing, I golf once every three years or try to," Joe Scarborough said.
"I was golfing with a Republican, a very Republican guy. Voted for Republicans his entire life. He also happens to work for insurance companies. You talk about all of these natural disasters. He's the one that's got to tell the insurance companies, 'This is how much we're going to be paying out over the next 20 years.' He said, 'I'm a republican. I'm conservative. I look at the charts. I look at the data. You would have to be a fool to not believe that climate change is happening and it's all only getting worse.' "
"I think what we're looking at a decade or two down the road is terrifying," Wallace-Wells said. "You look at the impacts in the U.S. and it's horrifying enough but around the world it's even more dramatic. Many of the biggest cities in the Middle East and India could be lethally hot in summer. It could be hard to go outside without suffering a risking. >
"How far off is that?" Mika Scarborough asked.
"A couple of decades. 2050. There's uncertainty in all the predictions. They may be a little off. We're entering into an unprecedented climate and that all of the ways that that will transform how we live on this earth, it's an uninnumerable list," Wallace-Wells said.
"Public health, economic growth, conflict. For every half a degree of warming, we're expected to see a increase in conflicts. We could have twice as much war as we have today. And that conflict happens even at the individual levels, rises in murder rates and rape, domestic assault. It spikes the rates at which people are admitted to mental hospitals.
"Absolutely every aspect of life on this earth is scheduled to be transformed by climate change and that's what my book is about."
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming -- David Wallace-Wells.
The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy -- Michael Mann.
