The amount of false stuff that ChatGPT and even deep research and whatever throws at me, I'm just like, I'm not going to hand the future of the planet over to these machines anytime soon. Like, that would be completely irresponsible. And yet here's the Pentagon signing a huge deal with Grok, and it's like, I know last week Grok was calling...
I thought it was Hitler last week, and now it's like the Department of Defense is like, all right, sign me up.
Machine Hitler getting a military is no problem. Nothing to worry about there.
Right.
Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. Delighted to have with me a science writer and essayist for The New York Times Opinion, a columnist for The New York Times Magazine. He also has a newsletter on climate, and he's the author of "The Uninhabitable Earth," published in 2019. A very uplifting, you know, piece of literature. It's David Wallace-Wells. What's up, man?
Really good to be here. Good to see you.
Good to see you, too. I guess I just want to start in the micro about the Texas floods, which is one of the reasons I reached out to you recently, and then kind of get a little more macro on climate stuff after that. But you know, as of last night, we have 132 dead from those floods, according to The Dallas Morning News, and another 100 missing, which is, I think, as you noted in your column about this, more dead than in the Maui fires. And maybe it was because we were both on holiday recently and I just kind of missed it. It feels like the scale of the reaction to this has been like kind of mild compared to the scale of the devastation. But I just kind of want to put a quarter in and give any thoughts you have on what we saw in Texas.
Well, just to start with what you mentioned, the scale of reaction. I think that that's basically the standard now. I mean, I think a lot about the fires that swept through LA. That was just six months ago. It's like a huge, incredibly wealthy neighborhood in one of the most globally culturally relevant places in the entire world, full of lots of famous, well-connected, powerful people. The entire neighborhood was incinerated. And six months later, it's not like a major story about our climate, about our politics, about our society. Even when I talk to my friends in LA, it's like a third or fourth order concern for them. And you see the same thing as, you know, the Maui fires that you mentioned from a couple years ago, which, you know, okay, it's a wildfire, it's a tragedy. It was the deadliest North American wildfire in more than a century. It destroyed the indigenous capital of the island.
There still are, I mean, you could, you know, last year there were these shocking national homelessness numbers. Homelessness went up more last year than it had in recent history. And there was some part of that coming out of the migrant surge and people, you know, basically the way that that filtered through the cities, but a big part of it was actually people displaced in Hawaii by the LA fires. And so that's the scale of climate disaster that that was. And again, it's just not getting traction. With the Texas floods, we had a pretty intense, you know, three or four day news cycle. We're still seeing a fair amount of, you know, soft focus human interest coverage, and the stuff is just absolutely devastating. I mean, to think about these camp counselors leading these little girls through the flood waters and, you know, people getting notes home from their camper kids who are now dead, getting their notes in the mail. I mean, it's just absolutely, you know, kind of crippling, devastating. But we don't have the kind of, you know, attention economy media ecosystem that makes these things really long stories anymore.
And I think there's a really natural comparison to make between the Texas floods and Hurricane Katrina. And when I think about that example, I just think, you know, it wasn't the only thing that killed George W. Bush's presidency. It wasn't the only thing that like put the Republican Party's reputation in the toilet, but it was a meaningful contribution to what felt like a general generational setback. And I don't think there's going to be anything like that kind of response to these floods, as there wasn't to Hurricane Helene, as there haven't been to so many of these disasters that we've seen. Even though, you know, you can make a case that the FEMA response and the federal response in Texas and the way that the local authorities failed to prepare for such an event was, you know, as terrible and ill-prepared as we saw in New Orleans around Katrina.
I thought you were going to make the comparison to kind of Uvalde, right? That it's like this horrific tragedy that also happens in Texas. Obviously, a big story for a little while, but like no repercussion. I know it's a total failure of local officials, you know, in addition to being this broad cultural failure. No repercussions for anybody politically in the Texas Hill Country. It's like, you know, all of these stories we've seen over the last, you know, week or 10 days. You know, this was known to be a meaningful risk. Climate change is intensifying that risk, making these kinds of extreme floods more likely. We could talk about that in a second, but you know, it was known that there was real danger here. And yet, very little was done to prepare. And in fact, the camp itself lobbied to be excluded from these FEMA requirements when they did repairs in recent years, a multi-million dollar. You know, they didn't do anything to address the flood risk. And I think that tells you something complicated about the thing we're dealing with here when we talk about the risk from climate change, which is that, you know, it's not neatly that we're going to be facing these unprecedented, unimaginable storms, natural disasters, although those will occasionally happen. Much more often we're going to be dealing with more intense climate events that resemble events that we encountered in the past and which we have just utterly failed to prepare for. And climate skeptics will often talk about that and say, or you know, people who are climate complacent and say, well, we can manage these risks in theory, we could have done more to prepare for these floods in Texas, and that is to some extent true, but we didn't, even with the knowledge that we had. And climate change is making the gap between, you know, the adaptation levels that we'd want to be at and the adaptation levels that we are at larger rather than smaller. And that's a story that's playing out all around the world when it comes to climate risk, not just in Texas, but I think, you know, because of the culture of Texas, Texas has especially a lot to answer for here.
Yeah. Living in New Orleans, I think about this a lot. I mean, we literally went through Katrina and there have been some huge changes to, you know, prepare for the future, but also simultaneously like we have pumps that don't work like for regular rainfalls. And I'm like, how is this like not an urgent priority for the city of New Orleans? Making sure the pumps work. And I mean this is just a micro example where I live, but you know...
Totally. I mean, the major infrastructural response that we took in the aftermath of Katrina didn't even prepare the city for a Category 5 hurricane. So, you know, and Katrina wasn't when it hit, but like...
You know, obviously it should have told us that that kind of thing was possible, and in planning we should say, well, what is the worst case scenario? Let's prepare for that. And as you well know also, it's like it's not just the direct climate risks. I mean, you know, New Orleans is a different city, you know, it's a different economy, it's a different school system, it's a different culture than it was before that storm. This can have really profound, you know, what used to be called kind of civilizational scale effects, yet we're not doing nearly enough to prepare, adapt, or respond to the things even after they hit.
Yeah. So your column on this last week, I guess, was about, you know, how we can adapt and prepare for floods. You wrote about, you know, how we're not all that adapted to the climate we have now, forget the climate that's coming. Like, what are some examples of that? And are there places where people are doing it well? You know, do you have any thoughts on that?
Yeah, I mean, in general, I think one lesson is that we've actually gotten quite a bit better when it comes to hurricanes. People, you know, we can track them really well. Our hurricane forecasting is much better, which means when people are told to evacuate, actually, it's a much more targeted ask than it was even 15 or 20 years ago because many, you know, we have a much better sense of where the hurricane's going to land. People basically in hurricane zones do know to leave. You know, not everybody does. There are some people left behind. A lot of that has to do with, you know, socioeconomic disparities, but in general, we have acculturated the idea of like when a huge storm is coming, that is a real risk and you should get out of the way. And we saw that even with, you know, even in Hurricane Helene, when it hit the coast and it was actually not that devastating on the coast, but then it continued inland where we have not done nearly as much of that kind of cultural preparation, and it just absolutely walloped, you know, Georgia, South Carolina, and especially western North Carolina, which are not places that are used to dealing with these risks.
And I think globally we're seeing that phenomenon quite dramatically with all of these crazy flooding events, particularly in cities. I see videos from South America, from Europe all the time with just like streets in old cities just absolutely flooded, you know, cars being pulled down by the flood water, people being pulled away by the flood water. And we're seeing that kind of episode more and more. Not the, you know, not the hurricanes. And you know, in the last couple of years, actually, we haven't even had, you know, there have just been kind of fewer of those classic coastal disasters. But the inland flooding is like something that few people were even worrying about a few years ago, and now it seems almost like it's like the protagonist of the climate crisis is disasters inland. I mentioned in that piece, you know, the NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, compiles this database of what they call billion-dollar disasters. And there are a lot of issues with this database because it, you know, as land gets more valuable, the same disaster will register a much bigger hit, etc. Nevertheless, they're just calculating how many disasters have caused more than a billion dollars in damage. And the number is going up very dramatically.
But even more striking than that, it's dominated by these like normal storms. It's not dominated by hurricanes. It's not even dominated by wildfires. It's dominated by just what they call extreme storm events. So all over the country in the US, you just have, oh, here's a big rainstorm hitting Iowa. Here's a big rainstorm hitting New Mexico. There was a huge flash flood in New Mexico last week, too. Or North Carolina. There was another one last week as well. And I just think off the coast, we've done far, far, far too little to prepare for these kind of floods. And I don't even think we really understand exactly why they're getting so intense. The science says they have this line that's like for every degree of warming you get 7% more water. And they also say that extremes get worse much faster than the median. But when I look at these storms, these, you know, 500-year storms, thousand-year storms so-called, they just seem to be happening so much more often and doing so much more damage. And I think there may be some remaining mystery about exactly why they're getting so intense. Certainly we're not prepared for the intensity that they're bringing today.
Yeah. And maybe I'm missing it just because I'm consuming so much insane national politics news, but like it feels like it's less of a conversation than it was 10 years ago, right? Like, you know, in the sort of how do cities adapt, right? Like as far as in the political kind of cultural, you know, conversation is here's a big challenge we need to solve. And it's not like it's not happening, but it feels like it's been deprioritized. You're following the stuff closer to me. Is that a misimpression?
I think it's kind of complicated, but I would say that you have had a very representative experience, which is to say that like our politics has become much more nationalized even over the course of the last 10 years. And that's true at the level of discourse, like who's saying what, who's focusing on what. It's also true at the level of funding. Like, you know, it's just not the case that like if Houston wants to build the Ike Dike, like they can't do that without federal money. Even New York, like, you know, one of the richest places in the country, we can't build a hundred billion dollar storm barrier, which is like what FEMA is proposing we do, without federal money. And so, you know, states in particular have these budget constraints. They can't do disaster response, they can't do large-scale adaptation without federal funding. And yet we have, you know, a system in which systematically local authorities have much less money to play with in spending, you know, and spending on this stuff. And as a result, people just don't focus on it as much. I do think there is some local adaptation going on.
You know, you do hear, especially in places like Phoenix, a lot of stuff about heat adaptation. And you know, we'll see what happens with the insurance market coming out of the California wildfires. It's still a huge, huge question. And how that all shakes out really will shape the future course of development in California and maybe even around the country since the consequences for the insurance market are so large. But I would also just emphasize like, you know, adaptation is not just a public policy measure. It's also an individual response. People learn what to do and how to respond. Like in California, you get an alert, you get out of the house, you know, when the fires come in. And that is not just even true at the level of behavior, it's also true at the level of biology. If you look at the way that, you know, heat affects people in really poor hot countries, it actually takes a lot more to kill people there than it does in Europe, which actually has the highest level of heat vulnerability because the people there are not used to high temperatures. They don't have air conditioning. They're a lot older than people in like, you know, India and Bangladesh and Pakistan, Saudi Arabia. And so, you know, we've told ourselves in the climate world a lot of scary stories about the intensity of heat effects, especially on the Global South. But it may be the case that like, you know, that the sort of bullseye there is actually Europe. And that's in part because people's bodies as they grow learn how to deal with different climates and different effects. And we just haven't seen those kinds of extreme temperatures certainly in Europe and in parts of the US too.
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All right, so let's zoom out a little bit. Last time we talked, I basically asked you, I said I want an Uninhabitable Earth update, right? I think we talked in 2023 or '24. I'm going to TL;DR you a little bit. It was basically we aren't alarmed enough at a global level, but also warming projections had gotten better since you'd written the book. So now around a year and a half since then, update me.
Well, the big story that I would tell is that the momentum for global climate action that was building all through the 2010s kind of gave us the Paris Accord in 2015, and then to some extent this like rising tide of climate concern and alarm in 2019 and 2020 with things like Extinction Rebellion and Greta and the Green New Deal and the Green Deal in Europe, that now just feels like a relic of an impossibly distant era, and not just narrowly on climate action. Although that's a big part of it, it's also just like if you think about what the Paris Accords told us about the future, it was that we were heading towards an era of more global cooperation defined by increasing solidarity among the world's nations and a growing sense of mutual obligation and aid. And those are just not principles that are like present on the global stage anymore.
So we don't care about each other anymore. So that's a big change in the last year, you know.
Yeah. No, I mean, I think it's a huge story, especially coming out of the pandemic. I think many, many people who had a sense of real deep, you know, humanitarian solidarity in, say, 2018, 2019, 2020, by 2022, like having been pushed through the ringer of, you know, whatever was all the burdens and, you know, trauma of the pandemic, so many more people came out feeling like just much more mercenary in their view of the world, and that has filtered up through our politics in really profound ways. I don't know that it's all that dramatic in the end for climate, in part because one thing that's happened is that the US has just completely retreated, and that's given a huge opening to China, who is doing an awful lot to accelerate the green transition. So 75% of all renewable projects being built anywhere in the world right now are being built in China or by Chinese companies elsewhere in the world. And you know, they maybe have reached a peak of carbon. We'll see how it shakes out. But like in any event, they are building a massive clean energy electrostate, and the US is over here doubling down on fossil fuels, kneecapping renewables wherever they can. But the third part of the story is that because China's made so much of this stuff so cheap, it can now be provided, be sold to countries who people like you and me used to talk about as like they can't afford the transition on their own.
And like just a couple years ago, there was this miraculous thing that happened in Pakistan where, you know, there was the issues with global coal systems because of the invasion of Ukraine. In Europe, it bid up the price of coal. All this coal that was like literally on boats going to South Asia got redirected back up to Europe so they could use it. And there was in the Global South a huge problem with like these rolling blackouts because electricity prices, fossil fuel prices were so high and some of the supply even though they counted on wasn't there. And the response to that was not even at the policy level in Pakistan. It was at the individual level, just like tons of people just started buying these solar panels from China and putting them on their roofs. So much so that like they've now, you know, they've now, it's something like 40 or 50% of their energy mix comes from rooftop solar. And like that's because a solar panel now costs less on a free global market. Not in the United States where you can't buy it this way, but on the free global market, a solar panel costs less than the same amount of wood to build a fence. So like if you're putting up a fence in your yard, people are like, why not? Why not just build it on...
I'm leasing a solar panel on my house right now. I'm on like a, you know, 80-year lease that I'm paying some guy.
In the US, the story is really different. But yeah, I mean, you know, in Germany, they're like hanging them off their balconies. There's been this huge boom in balcony solar power, and it's like you're not even, they're not even angling the solar panel towards the sun in the optimal way. But it's like, who cares? It's like if the material is actually cheaper than what I'd be doing otherwise, any power that I can get from it is a bonus. And there are now, according to think tanks and stuff, they say like, you know, this Pakistan boom that took everybody by surprise because it wasn't even directed by public policy, just by individuals who are desperate for energy, there now maybe dozens of other countries that are poised to make the same jump that they did in the Global South because of just how cheap things are. So we have this like, you know, the era of global climate geopolitics has kind of ended, but the actual green transition is moving ahead maybe as fast, maybe even faster than we would have hoped it would have in the presence of politics. And you know, that's kind of mind-bending in certain ways. It's also depressing about the future place of America on the world stage, but it may for the sake of climate be ultimately at least a mixed bag and maybe even good news.
Yeah. I want to do more on the China thing, but just really quick, like the actual, so when we last talked, I think you said like in 2019, you know, the projection, like the median projection was something like 4% warming gone down to like 2.5%. Is that, you know, kind of still what the experts think? And this is not my wheelhouse.
That's basically where we are. Yeah, we're still somewhere in the zone of between two and three degrees. Not much has changed over the last couple of years in part because there hasn't been much policy change and a lot of that modeling is based on policy. But you know, just to keep that in mind, like that's really good, right? Like we went from four to five to two to three, huge progress.
But like if you remember getting freaked out about climate change in 2019, as a lot of people were, that was because there was a huge scientific report about how bad two degrees was going to be, and we are going to get north of...
Like what freaked you out then? We're not avoiding it.
We're going there. In fact, there have been some days that have already been above two degrees, although that's not what people mean when they say that we're at two degrees. They mean a 30-year average. So we are basically, our progress, our models have like somewhat stalled out. We're still in a relatively better place than we were a few years ago while still being north of what we defined not that long ago as catastrophe. There is this other little thing to mention which is, you know, a little scarier, which is that there's a growing concern that a lot of these models are just missing some basic fundamental aspects of the climate system. And there's been a, you know, a sort of contrarian minority of climate scientists who think that we're heading already for considerably faster warming. And in fact, warming has accelerated. It is now inarguably accelerated over the last couple of decades rather than slowing down. And there are a lot of possible reasons for that. But one basic thing is that we have cleaner air now. We've stopped polluting the oceans with these sulfur-belching ocean liners and tankers. And all that pollution that goes up into the atmosphere actually reflects sunlight and makes the planet cooler. It also affects the formation of clouds, which also have an effect here. And the net of all of that is that the impact of the carbon that we put into the atmosphere is actually more intense than it was five or 10 years ago. And you know, there's some pretty prominent people, again, I wouldn't say it's like exactly the conventional wisdom or the establishment view, but there's some quite prominent, quite pedigreed people who think that even if the sort of conventional wisdom model says, you know, let's say 2.5 degrees is where we're heading, they think we're actually still on track for four or five, even though we've cut our emissions below what we thought was necessary to get us to four or five, because it turns out...
Can we pollute without putting out emissions? Are there other kind of pollutants we can put in?
Well, I mean, you know, you've heard of geoengineering, right? That's what that is. That's like instead of...
They just made that illegal in Florida. So, you know...
The basic idea is like, you know, we breathe in all this [__]. We get sick, we suffer as a result. You know, something like 10 million people a year are dying from air pollution. And it has this climate benefit, which is it cools the planet somewhat. And the geoengineering pitch is let's just put that stuff higher in the atmosphere so we don't have to breathe it into our lungs. It doesn't affect our health and we can cool the planet that way. And there are huge questions about whether that's safe or too risky. But it does feel like we're moving in a direction where more and more people are kind of taking that possibility seriously. And maybe, you know, maybe it'll end up being the cure-all that the optimists think it is. I'm suspicious, you know, I'm skeptical, but...
I just, like a lot of people, I read "The Deluge," which is a fiction, but that's kind of fiction after the LA fires, and it's like the contrarian scientist telling everybody that it's going to get worse is hitting a little close to reality there with that, you know?
I mean, the LA fires, I just, I don't know if you have, you looked at like Zillow for Pacific Palisades recently. It is like...
It's like every lot is for sale. Every lot is priced north of $5 million. And the vast majority of them are just rubble. And you know, it's like I think the city has approved something like eight licenses to rebuild. So that whole neighborhood is still just completely destroyed. And you know, a lot of those homeowners, even quite rich ones, are going to just like, I mean, putting aside the fact that they saw their homes burn and they breathed in air that was like full of bicycles and HVAC systems and cars that had been incinerated by the fires. You know, they have like a $10 million home and they're going to get, you know, a much smaller amount of payout from that. So we'll see where it goes.
Yeah. And I have a friend that lived in Pacific Palisades. Now, I'm guilty. I haven't like checked in with them in a couple months. So no, you're making me feel bad. I'm going to have to text.
And there's this whole debate about it, which is related to the Texas flood stuff, which is, you know, I said, I wrote some of this too right after the fires, which is like we got to do a lot more. Forget, you know, climate change is real. It's making these things worse, but we have to do a lot more to protect ourselves from threats like these. But the longer I've gone on and the deeper I've looked into the exact nature of the particular fire in LA, I just wonder just how much could be done because Palisades already had building codes that required people to like keep flammable plants away from their homes. They already had building codes about what you were allowed to build with and not. Most people weren't respecting them, but those codes were still there. And when you see as that fire, you know, and you know...
That comes back to the individual adaptation though.
Totally. And then at the social level, people talk about, you know, we got to take care of the forests. We have to manage the, you know, thin the forest, do prescriptive fire and all that stuff. And that's good at the level of the American West, even at the level of the state of California. But in California, in LA proper, like those hills where the fire started, those are not forests. That's brush. That stuff comes back as soon as there's rain, there's new brush, and then as soon as there's a hot day, it's dry, tinder, and there's just not all that much you can do. You can do a little bit, but there's not all that much to protect yourself there. And then when you have 60, 80, 100 mph winds, it's like, so you have a building code that says you can't have a flammable plant within 10 feet of your house. Is that going to stop you from fire traveling at you at 100 miles an hour? Just seems, I mean, just to be clear, experts do say it would make a difference. Sure. But I sort of wonder like whether we're learning something fundamental about what can be built and defended in an environment like that, you know, like that environment. And we may be learning that a lot less could be done and protected than we hoped.
This is like kind of vaguely related to what I wanted to get back into on the China side. Your 75% stat is just remarkable, kind of the electric car space too. But like first, like that relationship between that and politics and influence. Like it is just insane to me that like the most influential advisor to the president for the first six months was the owner of an electric car company. And as you mentioned, like the people that have been victims of like the recent climate events are ostensibly influential. You know, we ought to talk about money and politics. Rich people in California, rich people in Texas. And yet there's no attempt to try to compete, right? Like that narrative is barely even out there like, oh, we need to compete with the Chinese, you know, like we need to be better about this. Like the impact is coming for us. Like that is the part that is the craziest. If I would have flown 10 years ago and said, David, Elon Musk is the most influential advisor to the president, you would have like, oh, okay, well we're finally getting serious about the green tech revolution in the White House. And like instead, you know, he was worried about trans boxers.
The most perverse part of this is I think that basically, if you look at the geopolitical game that's been played or the geoeconomic game that's been played over the last half decade, it's that China has really profoundly bet on green tech, clean tech, clean energy. And the US has really bet its economy on AI. And maybe on some level that's like a better bet. I'm kind of agnostic about it on the side of skeptic, but like maybe that's a better bet. But not only is our lead on AI not growing, it's shrinking, but we need energy for the AI that we are building. And we are, rather than pursuing an aggressive buildout of the cheapest and fastest energy that we have, which is solar and to some extent wind, which, you know, people talk about nuclear, it's like it takes 30 years to build a nuclear plant. You can roll out huge large-scale solar much more quickly. We have permitting issues, but nevertheless, like much faster than for nuclear or for geothermal, which, you know, again, I'm pro-nuclear, I'm pro-geothermal, but it's like if you want to rapidly build up...
The Permian Basin, we got more natural gas out of the Permian Basin.
My understanding is that, you know, the basic dynamic there is that it's kind of diminishing returns. There's more that we can pull out of it, but it's not going to get cheaper, it's going to get more expensive and more complicated. And that really like the simplest solution to our growing energy needs, which is to say the economically vital input that we need to make a bet on AI work out, is to deploy basically solar power at much more rapid scale. And when you look at what China's done there, they are just annihilating us. I mean, absolutely annihilating us. And we are not only, under Trump, we are not only emphasizing fossil buildout, which, you know, that's basically the energy policy, we're also like kneecapping the renewable progress that is possible. So it's, you know, they want to sell it as energy abundance or energy dominance, but it's not. It's just fossil dominance that they're going for. And that means that, you know, the main thing that could really make our energy demands for AI workable over the next five years, we're just like not even touching. And so it's just another sign that like with tariffs, we are reducing everything, even what seems like economically vital considerations, to culture war dynamics, and that's just totally catastrophic.
I have a million follow-up questions on this. So just on the AI part first, the thing that's been hard for me to, you know, translate is like it's almost been memeified now on the left like, oh, you shouldn't, you know, create an AI image because you just, you know, kill the tree or like hurt the climate or whatever. Like how much of like climate, you know, energy expense risk is there with AI versus like the other side, right? Like if we're listening to the All-In podcast right now, we'll steal me on their side. Like David Sacks would be saying, well, AI will maybe solve the climate problem because we'll create such smart supercomputers that they'll figure out how to geoengineer things in the air. Yeah. And it's worth it. Like where do the smart people that you talk to fall in like that conversation?
Well, there are a lot of different things in that question. Right. So just on the energy use, it's like I think it's, I would say that the carbon footprint of use of like ChatGPT has been overstated. Like when I put in a query, I'm not doing meaningful damage compared to everything else that I do as a modern American living in 2025. It's not a dramatic...
Flying to Europe was worse.
Totally. Totally. Totally. Way worse. You know, the training runs are more significant. They take up much more energy. And I think the story I would tell there is...
Training the models. You mean the companies themselves training?
Yeah. And when you look at the big tech companies, like five years ago, they were like at the vanguard of being clean tech because they were like, all we need is electricity and we could just use green energy. It's like we're going to be net zero by 2030. They made all these promises about how they were going to cut their emissions very dramatically. It was quite encouraging. A lot of them have like actually tried to do some amount of carbon removal stuff. But even just putting that aside, they were doing much better than the rest of the American economy at getting carbon out of their electricity systems. And that just stopped like three years ago and they've all gone into reverse and none of them are anywhere near the targets that they set for themselves in 2020 because of the energy demands of AI and trying to, you know, meet those energy demands given the mix of the system that we have in the US today, which has a fair amount of clean energy in it but is also a lot of fossil. If you project that out a decade or two down the line, you could plausibly tell yourself, well, if we get to a clean, a net-zero electricity system, we don't need to worry all that much about how much we're using because none of it is affecting the future climate of the planet. And that's true of everything. It's like if we have, you know, carbon-free jet fuel, we don't have to worry about flying to Europe. That's like the optimistic case for all of this is like we can get to some point where we don't have to worry about our guilt on any of these points. And that was technically like Joe Biden's clean electricity plan was to get us there. And we're now not on that path. And that means that for the foreseeable future, especially in the US, we're going to be dealing with some amount of feeling of guilt and responsibility for what we do with AI.
Now, what can this tech do for us in the future? I mean, AI has already done an enormous amount for climate science, for clean energy. You know, I think we often get a little confused because we talk about like AI as though it came out with ChatGPT in 2022 or whatever. And it's like people, scientists have been doing machine learning stuff for decades. And that's a big part of the whole scientific research apparatus. It's a big part of climate science. It's a big part of, you know, energy innovation. Like, you know, when we talk about managing the grid better, a lot of that has to do with, you know, something you could call AI even though it's not being done by a chatbot. And I do think that there's enormous potential there. In the same way that there's enormous potential for AI with medicine and drug discovery and development, I think it's undeniable like the more firepower we have to throw at a problem, like the easier it'll be to solve.
I'm somewhat more skeptical on the like LLMs are going to do all this stuff for us. And, you know, honestly, I'm a little bit out of my depth talking about it in detail, but, you know, when I, in my personal use, like the amount of [__] and, you know, false stuff that ChatGPT and even deep research and whatever throws at me, I'm just like, I'm not going to hand the future of the planet over to these machines anytime soon. Like, that would be completely irresponsible. And yet here we have like, here's the Pentagon signing a huge, what was it, $200 billion deal with Grok. And it's like, I know last week Grok was calling...
I thought it was Hitler last week, and it's like the Department of Defense is like, all right, sign me up.
Machine Hitler getting a military is no problem. Nothing to worry about there.
Yeah, no, it's like that old Norm Macdonald routine about, you know, Germany taking over the world again. I think a lot of this is TBD. I think it's possible in 50 years that we think that AI has really helped us address a lot of aspects of climate planning, climate resilience. I think that's certainly possible, but I don't think it's going to be coming out of a chatbot. I think it's going to be coming out of more constraints, more focused models.
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Back to China, just like the degree to which China is dominating us in this is something that like really has come into my vision in the past like six months. I mean, obviously this has been a little bit of a long time coming, but we're also compounding it right now. Like, you know, just a couple of stories that just, you know, the—so BYD, the electric car company, has like a five-minute charge car that's coming, so you know, which could totally change the game in that space, completely dominate Tesla. There are Chinese electric car dealerships in downtown Amsterdam. I'm walking around last week, right? So, you know, we're losing there in the consumer space. And then the cancellations of the investments we were making, you know, over the past six months. Like, so when you combine those two things, right, like the Chinese advancements with the fact that I think we've closed like $8 billion worth of projects, you know, that the government was going to be subsidizing here in the country, thanks to Elon and DOGE and rescissions. Just like, talk about kind of like the trajectory that the Chinese are on versus where we are.
Well, I mean, I would say, you know, there's an awful lot of blame and responsibility to lay at the feet of Donald Trump and the Republican Party and DOGE and all that. But it's actually a bigger story than that because even despite Joe Biden making a huge push on climate, making the IRA his signature piece of domestic legislation, the US was still falling dramatically behind in those years. And one way that I like to tell that story is like, you know, we basically had these subsidies in the IRA, and those subsidies were calculated to allow American producers to match the Chinese market. It was basically like, this is how much subsidy we have to give in order to make our domestic green economy competitive. And then like nine months after the bill passed, Joe Biden's putting significant tariffs on top of that against Chinese green tech. And the reason he's doing that is because, oh, our calculation was actually way off. The gap is like twice as big as we thought, and we need to fill that gap with something else. And then, you know, it's like a few months after that, I see an essay by Brian Deese, who is, you know, one of Biden's central economic advisers, but has a clean energy background and like really focused on these things. And he's like, we actually need America to subsidize the rest of the world, buying our clean stuff from us, like a green Marshall Plan, in order to compete with China. And that's basically an acknowledgement that even with the tariffs, we're still not catching up. People in South America and Africa are still going to be buying directly from the Chinese. We need to be subsidizing it on top of that. So every few months we take a new assessment and we're even further behind. That even is before Donald Trump comes into office and basically cancels
and their optimistic assessments about like how much it was going to cost to build and support the stuff, like all of that. And you know, everything ends up becoming more expensive and less efficient than they thought.
And you know, we think about it in terms of cars. And I mean, you know, a lot of very smart people think that basically the Chinese car industry is going to destroy the European car industry in very short order. The US may hang on a little bit longer just because we have such a much larger domestic market. But we also think about it a little bit in solar panels, but it's also, you know, it's batteries in general. It's like all of these inputs to all these things. It's the refining of rare earths. It's the pieces of solar panels. So even if you're a, you know, manufacturer in South Asia or Southeast Asia, you're still buying the raw stuff from China. They're just dominating every aspect of the green supply chain globally.
Something like every single input is like 60, 70, 80% controlled by the Chinese. And when you get up to finished solar panels, it's even larger than that. So the US is just, you know, hopelessly behind. And I think there's a way of thinking about this as just, you know, this is the great story of our time. It's bigger than climate, but it's expressed in climate. It is a giant industrial superpower waking up. You know, we thought that like the story of modernity was a Western story, but we may be learning that in fact we're handing the baton to China. That's not to say that like they're going to become, you know, in geopolitical terms or military terms the dominant power in short order. Who knows exactly how that'll all play out, but just when you think about what the global market is, what people trading in goods, where they are focused, where they're drawing from, it's like China is just building stuff out at such a different scale than anywhere else in the world. And it's just humbling because even 10 years ago, 12 years ago, we really thought we were in a dominant position here. You know, when Obama was trying to pivot to Asia and do the TPP, he was like, I can keep China in this little box if I get people to sign on to this deal. And now we're just in a world where like much of the world is just like, forget the US. Just forget them.
Yeah. The thing I think about listening to you, just as sort of like the domestic political challenge in dealing with all this, is it's kind of interesting that there isn't like—if I said who is the person, who is the politician or political figure or leader outside of politics who best represents like almost like a jingoistic or patriotic, you know, flag-waving, like we need to—the US needs to compete and win around the world, like we need to kick the Chinese ass. It's important that we do this economically and geopolitically, you know, Hulk Hogan, like we've got to go, you know, dominate in this space. It's hard to like think like—I don't—that person doesn't exist really. And I do wonder if that like—if like kind of the failure of the IRA like is maybe related to that at all. I don't know. Do you have any thoughts on either of those? That there is like that in like the, you know, Ezra and Derek abundance spirit, like that is sort of like their vision is like...
I think of Ezra as like a Hulk Hogan type figure though, you know.
Totally. Well, but they have, you know, they have a lot of friends sort of in various places on the political spectrum, some of whom are a little bit more jingoistic. Marc Andreessen would certainly like, you know, who's...
I think in many ways a villain, but...
Now we're tipping over from jingoism into kind of like—I'm a little bit interested in white identity politics and fascism, right? We're trying to find someone else on that spectrum.
But it is interesting because, you know, a big pitch by or for the tech right in the run-up to the November election was like, we need unencumbered, you know, development of these key industries, centrally AI, but also everything that serves AI. We need to get all that regulation that Biden piled on us, which I think has been hugely overstated by these people, but I'm just ventriloquizing their point of view. We need to get all of that red tape cut. We need to get some more money flowing in from the government. But basically, we need a hands-off approach to let Silicon Valley take over the future on behalf of the United States. And you hear that not just people talking narrowly about AI, but like all of the Palantir and Andreessen folks, like they are like, we need to do this for military tech. We need to design, you know, what's the name of the Alex Karp book? You know, The Technological Republic or whatever. Although he's not really imagining a republic at all. He's imagining something much more authoritarian than that. But in any event, you know, there was this huge energy coming out of Silicon Valley that actually was doing exactly what you were saying, but it was aligned to the Republican Party.
