Climate Crisis Isn't Over with David Wallace-Wells

Thank you, man. Good to be here.

Yes. Yes. Yes. The Hester food market, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Wow.

Because I was selling kimchi cold noodles over there.

And it was like the sisters with me over there. It was awesome. That was a fun food festival. The Hester Food Market.

Yeah. Down all the way on Grand Street, like on the big co-ops. Yeah.

Invisible Exports.

Yeah. And I lived two doors down from Invisible Exports on 20 Orchard Street.

Absolutely.

Bravo is still thriving. Every other TV channel is dying, but like...

Just think about how embarrassed Julia Roberts from like 1985 would be to see herself now.

It's like the equivalent of the MCU, but for a different kind of brand.

It's like the inner life of the...

drama into it. It's incredible.

Well, it's The Real Housewives of New York season 2, I think. No, which one is the one? It's season 7.

It's around 2013.

New York City. A lot of good stuff going on.

Not OG, but it's like the prime.

So, we have some new cast members. We have somebody who came back. It's just like that was the prime of that franchise. It's never been as good as it was. And it's funny because they always try to do the downtown reality show, like Housewives but downtown, like Gallery Girls or the Dime Square one or like K-Town Cowboys.

The Real Housewives, when it works, the seasons I've seen that are good, is people are just mask off going bananas. Like they do not give a damn about what anyone thinks. I'm like, that is entertaining. Like if you go on reality and you care what people think, it's going to be terrible.

Well, I think we're all looking at people's masks. Like I think very few people have the mask off. Interesting.

Yes. No, I think the mask is 'I want you to think that I am not wearing a mask.' Like it's a very curated... I sometimes think that's the intention behind it is like, 'I want you to think...'

Yeah. Now, I mean, I think it's hard because everyone's so aware of, like, you know, we're all being surveilled in some way, like right here. Even in your private life, you're like walking down the street. Like I was...

It's crazy. Like from my childhood, I would worry about the surveillance state being built by the state, but the surveillance state is being built by... I was thinking about that in Minneapolis. It's like I'm watching, the cops are filming, the protesters are filming, the people getting harassed are filming. It's like mutual...

Straight up Spider-Man meme filming. It's just like everybody's filming everybody. And everybody thinks that by filming they've got the upper hand, but everybody's filming.

Yeah. I mean, I'm just, you know, I was working in journalism, always trying to be a writer, thinking about the news, thinking about the future, doing work with other people, which was great. I mean, I actually really miss working there. But also felt like, you know, I was often throwing out ideas in ideas meetings that we didn't really have anybody to tackle just because of the kind of place we were. And at a certain point, the people I was working with were like, 'You should just be writing some of these stories, you know.' And, you know, in particular, that story came about. I mean, this is like kind of inside baseball, maybe not all that interesting, but after the 2016 election, I was kind of in a dark spot for a number of reasons. My dad had just died. The politics of the country were like a wreck. And I was just, you know, in a little bit of a hole wanting to do something a little bit different. And I saw this open listing for a position that the New York Times was creating to launch a new climate section. And I was like, I know a little bit about climate. So I started thinking about what that could be. I applied for the job. I went through this whole process, talked to them for months and months, and I ended up not getting the job. I was like the runner-up candidate. But I had spent like six months thinking about how we should or could tell the story of climate change differently. And felt like, well, let me just throw that into a Word doc and send it to my editors. And that was the piece that ended up coming out in 2017, which was basically like, what's the worst that could happen?

And why are we not thinking about that really scary end of the spectrum and telling ourselves that, you know, we're definitely going to be sort of middle-of-the-road outcomes or better? Maybe we should be a little bit more worried about the surprises that could be in store for us. And yeah, as you said, it was like a huge phenomenon, which made me realize that there were a lot more people who had similar intuitions to mine, who felt like, you know, they had some sense of climate change is serious, climate change is a big deal, but maybe it could be a much bigger deal than most media is telling us. And I ended up getting pulled into all of these arguments and debates with, you know, climate scientists, with climate activists, with politicians about whether it was appropriate to use fear, whether we should be scared of this future, what the science really said. And I came out of that just feeling like, wow, this is the story of the 21st century. It touches every aspect of the future of our lives, our politics, our, you know, where we live, what we want for each other and for ourselves. And that there was just so much more to say and do and think about those issues than I'd even written in that original piece because there are political dimensions, there are philosophical dimensions, there are, you know, how it relates to economics and culture. And it felt to me at the time that, you know, I had done this one piece, I had done this sort of raising the alarm, talking about really scary stuff, but I also then wanted to write about what it's going to mean for us to live on a world that's totally transformed. And that doesn't mean that, you know, everybody's going to die or like, you know, all the cities on the coast are going to disappear, but it does mean that, you know, much more is going to change than almost any of us really at an intuitive animal level really expect.

I mean, it depends what future you're aiming for, but yeah, if I would, I would like to pull back even further. Yeah. In 2000, when the US voted more for a climate alarmist, Al Gore, than it did for George W. Bush.

Thank you. So he was like, you know, he was running for president. He had written a couple books about climate change. He had campaigned on it. He was running for president in 2000. He won more votes than George W. Bush did. He didn't win the election, but he won more votes than George W. Bush did. If we had started decarbonizing and undertaking the green transition then in the year 2000 to keep ourselves below the temperature level that we said in 2015 we wanted to avoid — this is getting a little technical, but like below, you know, the Paris Agreement said we're going to definitely stay below two degrees. If we want to try to stay close to 1.5 degrees of warming and to hit those targets starting in 2000, we would have had to slow our carbon emissions so little that we would have had 125 years to do it. We would have had to only reduce them by like a percent a year. And then now where we are now, it's like we may have already lost the chance to avoid those warming levels. So those 25 years of inaction have meant that we've squandered the whole opportunity to secure the kind of future that 20, 25 years ago or even 5 or 10 years ago we were saying was the livable one. And we're now in the future that we described a few years ago as unlivable. Now that's not to say it's actually going to be literally unlivable. There's a lot that we can do to make it more manageable, etc. But it does serve as a reminder that like we looked at the science not that long ago. We said here's the dividing line between what's acceptable and what's not. And we are already racing past that finish line. And that's really scary. So like what that means for the future, it's a human question. It's not just a scientific question. It's like how much adaptation are we going to do? Are we going to design better crops that can grow in heat better than the ones that did in the past? Are we going to build a seawall around lower Manhattan? Are we going to, you know, all that kind of stuff. Are we going to start air conditioning the Hajj? You know, all this kind of things that, you know, a couple thousand people died at the Hajj last year from heat. And you know, we don't know how that's going to go. We don't know how we're going to handle mass migration. Our record in the last few years suggests pretty poorly. And that means that we're in for a world of disruption at the hands of climate. Even at a time when if you look around at the headlines of newspapers or like, you know, social media, people seem to be worrying about it less, talking about it less than five or six years ago. And that's like on some level the dynamic that worries me most is that we freaked out about this thing when we were looking at it ahead of us. And then when we had to really reckon with what it was going to mean for us and live in that future, we were like, 'All right, we're just going to forget about it and act like nothing's happening.' And I think that's kind of a recipe for disaster.

Yeah, I mean, I think on some level the Palisades fires, you know, the Eaton fire in Altadena, these are like really powerful illustrations because they are exactly what people would have said 10 years ago would wake up the American public. They'd be like, 'These are rich people. They're really well-connected. A lot of them are famous. Like, they have public profiles. This is a glamorous part of the world's cultural capital and it's going to be incinerated in one night, casting, you know, toxic air across the entire city for months at a time.' That's the kind of disaster that we would have thought would have really woken people up. Like you look at Katrina and you can think, okay, that was a humanitarian disaster, but it mostly affected poor people. It mostly affected Black people. If you have a cynical view of the American public, you think, okay, they have a way of writing that out of their conscience. But if it happens in LA and like it's all these celebrities who are having their homes destroyed, there's no way we're going to be able to ignore that. And yet we kind of are.

Yeah.

It's like AI or even like...

I mean, I think the obvious answers are the obvious ones, right? It's like if you have a car, it would be better if it was an EV. Now, that can be more expensive. So if you can afford it, that's a good idea. If you can't, you know, maybe try to afford it down the line. You know, if you travel, you can fly less or you can buy carbon offsets, which are kind of dubious, but they're also cheap. Not that, you know, they don't add all that much to it. And you can eat less red meat, which is like a really bad source of methane emissions in particular, but also deforestation, which is really bad. But in general, I think that like even those measures are mostly important because they signal to the people around you and to your local leaders and to your national leaders that you care. And it's sort of like a way of organizing future action rather than being consequential on their own. Like I don't think that if you're an American in 2026, you need to feel an overwhelming ocean of climate guilt because you're driving a gas-powered vehicle. Like the truth is, like we live in a world in which it's hard to make that decision. It's not up to you or me or you to like, you know, it's like we can't go and buy a Chinese EV that's like $8,000 and a really good car because the political and cultural environment in which we live have made that impossible.

I saw news the other day, there was one that was like, it's got 1,800 horsepower. It goes 0 to 60 in two seconds. It's like, and yeah, I mean, everybody who goes to the auto shows where the new Chinese EVs are like, 'Holy, they're way ahead of us.'

So cheap. So cheap. And I mean, on some level, I feel like, you know, Joe Biden put all of this energy into the Inflation Reduction Act as a climate bill. And I applauded that at the time. It ended up mostly getting undone by Trump. But even like putting that aside, I think maybe it would have just been better if we had lifted the tariffs against Chinese EVs. It's like maybe we would have been in a better place climate-wise if we had forgotten about, you know, trying to build up a new clean energy industrial infrastructure, which is what the IRA was trying to do, and just let Americans buy the really good cheap ones from China. And you're seeing that actually in other parts of the world that we used to think were never going to go green. Like, you know, in Pakistan two years ago, they had all these blackouts because when Russia invaded Ukraine, Europe started buying all this coal that was meant to be sent to other parts of the world. So there were literally boats that were supposed to go to Pakistan and they got rerouted to Europe and they ended up with, you know, energy shortages and blackouts. And totally independent of government action, people in Pakistan were just like, 'I'm going to buy these cheap solar panels from China, put them on my roof,' and as an act of resilience, in a single year the country doubled the effective size of its electric grid because so many people were doing that and made themselves much more energy resilient, much cheaper energy, not because the government in Pakistan introduced a new policy, because so many people took it on themselves to do that. You see the same thing in Nepal, 76% of cars sold in Nepal are EVs now. And all across sub-Saharan Africa, you're having this huge solar uptake in particular because these are countries that are like, you know, we import all of our energy. We're poor. Why would we want to pay some other country who doesn't have our best interests at heart to get energy when we can just, like, one-time installation, throw this thing on our roof or throw this thing on this open land and have energy abundance forever? So you're seeing those dynamics in other parts of the world where geopolitics aren't interfering. Unfortunately, in the US, we had so much focus on competition with China that we didn't let ourselves even benefit from the technological innovations that they've made.

No, I mean, yeah, we invented solar panels. It's like an American tech. Like Jimmy Carter put solar panels in the White House in the '70s.

Yeah. I mean, I think there are a lot of answers to that question, including, you know, a lot of the solar industry in China was built under pretty ugly labor conditions. There are people who are being subjected to pretty exploitative work environments. But I think it's also just the case that they're just pouring much more investment into R&D and development and they are doing so in a really, really competitive environment. So they have all of these companies who are competing and the result of that competition is that the prices just get lower and lower and lower. And in the US, we're just obsessed with profits and so everybody's chasing profits and it's a different dynamic. Actually, one of the things that a lot of people on the climate left have started to worry about is that, you know, for a long time people were like, 'Oh, going green is going to be too expensive. Nobody's going to want to do it.' And now it may be that it's so cheap that nobody can make a profit off it, which is a whole different set of problems. But, you know, I would say in general, like we may be pretty bleak about green energy in the US because of the president and everything that he's doing and, you know, the kind of ugliness of the right wing on a lot of this. But last year, 2024, 96% of all new energy capacity in the US was green. 96%. And there was a little bit of a drop last year in 2025 when Trump came in and now it was down to like 92.5%. So like if this is a competition between building dirty energy and building clean energy, we are building like 10 to 20 times as much clean energy as we are dirty energy. And that's true globally too. So we can be pretty dark about like, why aren't we moving faster? I feel that anger too. But like when you look at the raw numbers, to the extent that we are now building the energy future, the one that's going to sustain us 10, 20, 30 years from now, we're just not doing fossil. We're doing clean energy. And the question is like, how soon, how fast do we do that? And how soon can we use it as a reason to draw down the use of the dirty stuff? Because right now we're still running the old systems.

Although the streamers now suffer too, right? I mean, like, so that was on some level, that was like for me, that was like an example of almost like a VC economic model where you have all of this subsidy coming in that nobody actually needs to justify what they're doing in terms of profit. And then when they do, five years later, everybody's like, actually...