Well, for listeners of the Climate Pod, I'm sure you know David Wallace-Wells, but David Wallace-Wells is the New York Times essayist, bestselling science writer of "The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming." And at The Times, in his subscriber-only newsletter, he explores climate change, technology, and the future of the planet and how we live on it. His recent piece on the tragic floods in Texas, called "We Can Adapt and Prepare for Floods, But Will We?", is out now. And David Wallace-Wells, always great to talk to you, and I really appreciate you making the time to come on the show.
My pleasure. Good to be back. Good to talk to you too.
So, in this piece, just thinking about the floods in Texas, you wrote, quote, "These days, more and more disaster stories appear to be playing out far from the coast in defiance of naive intuitions about climate risk and even of our recent experience of climate horror," unquote. What has struck you by what you've seen recently in Texas and then elsewhere?
Yeah, I mean, in certain ways I think of myself as someone who has a lot of knowledge about these issues and follows them very closely. On the other hand, it's also sometimes useful to remind myself that I haven't been in this space and focusing on climate for my whole life and I'm still learning quite a lot. And I would have said, you know, say seven, eight years ago when I was first working on climate, then writing my book, I probably would have told you that something like hurricanes represented like the clearest, most direct embodiment of climate risk to me. I worried about, you know, effect on food and economic productivity. I worried about effect on violence, all that stuff. But like if I had to communicate with someone, you know, a normie, a non-climate normie about climate risk, it might be hurricanes that embodied that threat most clearly. And then we went through a period with these really dramatic wildfires in California and in Canada and elsewhere. And I think people started to think about climate in terms of wildfire. I think they started to think about climate in terms of, you know, like literally like communities being subsumed by fire, like we saw this past January in Los Angeles most dramatically, but we've seen many times over the last decade. And then we kind of moved on. We started thinking about wildfire smoke when that came to New York. So we've had this, we've been through this period where the sort of collective vision of what climate disaster looked like has moved. And I do think we're in a bit of a new phase now, at least to judge from my own social media feed. The clearest indication that I have regularly that we are in a different and, you know, kind of dramatically different climate is how often I see video of really crazy floods, not on the coasts, not even necessarily along rivers, but in small cities and towns in South America and Europe and China, in the US, where, you know, whole roads are turned into rivers and cars are carried down them and sometimes people, and we're routinely seeing, you know, meaningful levels of human death in those instances too. And I write in the piece, you can sort of see this in that billion-dollar database that NOAA maintains, which, you know, there are legitimate questions about what it actually measures because as we get richer, like the cost of disasters go up too. But just taking it as a, you know, sort of dumb measure, like how many disasters did we have this year that produced a billion dollars in damages. Not only are the numbers going up really dramatically, but the area that's increasing, the category that's increasing is what they categorize as just extreme storms. It's not hurricanes, it's not droughts, it's not wildfire, it's just basically like really bad thunderstorms in places that are not prepared for them. And that does a lot of, if we, if we like, if that is, I mean, we could talk about why that is and what we're seeing, but just crediting that it is happening, that we are seeing more of that, that there are these more extreme floods in places well off the coast and then often well away from rivers too, that wasn't the case in Texas, but what that means, that really expands the, you know, the amount of what we might call like defensible space there is, what we need to respond to, what we need to protect. It's not just, you know, talking about where along the coast we need to build a flood barrier. It's not just about, you know, managing, say, you know, the forests of the American West in a better way or regulating home building around those forests so that they're more, you know, more safe in the event of fire. It just means like kind of anywhere that a storm can happen is at meaningful risk. And that's everywhere. And you know, the Texas floods are a little bit different. They didn't come out of the blue. We did know that this was a place of extreme, you know, flood risk and local officials, local community including the camp tragically did not respond to that risk in a, you know, in a thoughtful or productive way. But I think the larger lesson is a little bit more kind of like, you know, knee-wobbling, which is that, you know, floods like this, like we saw in Valencia last year, can happen almost anywhere and we are really and truly not prepared for them.
Yeah. Into that cost equation, like regardless of how you measure it, it's such an extraordinary rise that I just imagine like people are going to have to notice that. And you write in your piece about, you know, whether whatever this gets blamed on. And actually, I'll just quote you here. Quote, "Every weather disaster now has both human and climate causes, but we often argue about which side of the ledger should get the blame when either way the headline message is that we were not ready," unquote. So like to your point, there's a high level of unpreparedness around the globe with those increasing costs. Don't you feel like it's going to be harder for people to ignore what's happening even no matter where you come down on this politically?
I mean, honestly, I think that I would tell you that the short answer is no. I don't think it's going to get harder for people to ignore. I mean, I wrote in my book that, you know, I think probably some large amount of these disasters that scientists have warned us about are going to come true, and that the dominant way that we will process that is by normalizing it. And I still think that that's true. I maybe even think that more true today. You know, we talk about mitigation and adaptation and I do think that, you know, it may be that the lion's share of the adaptation that we end up doing is normalization. And when I think about the disasters that we've seen just in the last couple of years, I mean, I wrote in my piece about the Texas floods just briefly about the fires in Maui, which were, I mean, horrifying. When you read about, you know, it's people jumping into the harbor to escape the flames and seeing the fire jump over their heads onto the boats that were floating in the water and burning those boats down. You see an entire indigenous capital destroyed and the effect on the local community is so significant that it was one of the two main drivers of this completely unprecedented spike in national homelessness when we had this horrifying report about how much new homelessness we had in America last year and the two main drivers were, you know, kind of second-order effects of all of the additional migration we've seen and then the Maui wildfires. The fact that that could meaningfully affect the homelessness data in a country of 330 million people tells you just how consequential that was. It was the deadliest North American wildfire in more than a century. And as I wrote about at the time, it also was another reminder, if we needed it, that we're now living in a different age of fire, which is, you know, what Daniel Swain likes to call the return of the urban firestorm. And almost every year now when we talk about wildfire, we're not really talking even that much about the ones out in the forest. We're talking about the fires that are burning house to house and turning, you know, turning human structures into fuel, not turning the natural landscape into fuel, which is a very different space. But you know, how much are we talking about the Maui fires? How much are we talking about the Palisades fires or the, you know, the Altadena fires in California? I mean, this is, that was six months ago, and it was, you know, one of the richest, most high-profile, most well-connected neighborhoods in perhaps the most central capital of global culture in the world. And it burned down overnight with many prominent, well-connected, famous people losing their homes in literally what would have been a nightmare scenario. Like imagined by many of those people in the Hollywood films they made, if they were making Hollywood films about climate, they might have imagined exactly a scenario like this. Very rich people, very pretty people losing everything in a flash with a day's warning or less, in certain cases like a few hours' warning. Are we talking about that? Is that dominating the news cycle? Is that a big part of national politics? You know, the impact of Hurricane Helene was somewhat less made-for-TV in the sense that like western North Carolina is not the Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles. But they haven't recovered. That whole region has not recovered. You know, we see these disasters now every few months and sometimes even more often. You know, in the immediate aftermath of the Texas flood there was a devastating one in New Mexico. There was one in North Carolina. They didn't kill as many people but like as a pure hydrological event were just as significant and dramatic. And you know, what are we doing? How are we responding? How are we remembering? How are we mourning? How are we planning? How are we adapting? All of those, what are we doing? We're just, we're taking it in. We're often taking it in for a few concentrated days of alarm and despair, but then we are very much moving on. And when I think about the sort of mental model that I think a lot of climate campaigners had going back decades, that we would collectively be awoken out of our complacency by disaster on some level. The signal example there is Katrina, which was a much more deadly event than the Texas floods. I think it was like 1,800 people died and destroyed a, I mean, New Orleans is still not the city that it was before Katrina 20 years later. But for all the tragedy, it also meaningfully destroyed the presidency of George W. Bush and seemed at least for a time to discredit his party, his whole ideology of compassionate conservatism, climate denial. It seemed to break briefly. And we now have many more events at something like that scale. We see them much more directly because of social media and smartphones and cameras. We see them really directly. We don't just count on the CNN helicopters or whatever like we did with New Orleans. We see them directly. And yet, you know, they are not making a mark on us, I don't think, in the way that Katrina did. And I think that that's a lesson about climate change and climate alarm and climate alarmism generally, which is that a lot of this stuff really does look most concerning, most scary in prospect or when you first encounter it. And once you've begun to navigate a new landscape, even one that is full of so much more climate disaster, it's just hard not to normalize that and treat it not as something we need to avoid, but as something we need to navigate. And I think that's basically where we are. And it may be where we will be forever going forward. There will be things we do in response. We will try to protect each other. There will be migration. There will be all, you know, all the things you talk about, I talk about all the time. But at a psychological, emotional level and at the level of public discourse, I do wonder if we're sort of past a peak of climate concern and in some sort of period there where the green transition proceeds, local adaptation measures continue, but it is much less front of mind for many people than it seemed to be five or seven years ago, even though over that same period we've just seen much, much more climate destruction.
I want to circle back to where we are politically and culturally. But I just want to drill down on that FEMA point and that Katrina point that you just made. We're coming up on the 20-year anniversary of Katrina and like to your point, you know, I was a little baby progressive at the time just like learning about climate change, but at that time the big takeaway, big narrative takeaway was the fact that Michael Brown was in charge of FEMA was a huge mistake, right? And it was a huge thing like you mentioned to discredit the Bush administration, but it was like if we have people who are not properly qualified in positions of power that can impact government response. Right now we're in an entirely different political environment with the whole idea of FEMA and its funding is on the chopping block, right? And with the whole idea of a federal emergency response is in question. And we see with broader government cuts what's happening with NOAA as well. What are you making of this reduction in funding and support at the federal government level?
