This is a 2019 interview with David Wallace, author of The Uninhabitable Earth, a book often described as alarmist and doomer. I barely remember much of the interview but this section always sticks out in my mind, especially given the sociological ending of the pandemic we've been witnessing and the people who have been abandoned.

Those changes are coming for us too. I don't think that we'll be able to escape them in the U.S. and the U.K. For instance, but the question of climate reparations, I think, will be a major subject in the coming century. Who's gonna build the sea walls? And where do we decide where the sea walls will be built, and where they won't be built?

I was talking to a really prominent climate scientist a few months ago, who was one of the lead authors of the IPCC last report, and has been doing a lot of consulting work in New York City where he lives. So I said, "Are we gonna build a sea wall in New York?" And he said, "Oh, of course we'll build a sea wall. Manhattan real estate's way too expensive to lose." But those kinds of projects ... You look at the subway, it takes 30 years.

If we started now, he said, we couldn't build it fast enough to save parts of Howard Beach, South Brooklyn, Queens. He said, "The city knows this, and you're gonna start seeing them stopping infrastructure repair, not doing work on the subway lines and even telling those residents explicitly, 'You might be able to live here for another 20 years, but you're not gonna be able to leave this house for your kids.'" This is in New York City. And this is a conversation that the climate...

CHRIS HAYES: Really?

DAVID WALLACE-WELLS: Yeah.

CHRIS HAYES: Parts of New York City that the city sort of already knows, in its long-term planning, are going to have to be essentially abandoned back to the sea?

DAVID WALLACE-WELLS: Yeah. He said... You know, if you look at the map of Long Island, the cemeteries that are in Brooklyn and Queens, they basically trace a particular geological line all the way out to the middle of the forks at the end of Long Island. That's the highest point on the island. And he was like, "Basically everything south of there, it's gonna be gone."

edit: Forgot the link!😅