David Gelles
speaker
265 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 28 Jan
David Gelles’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And what you're seeing is that work is simply being discontinued.
And all of this, I think, again, goes back to this broader effort across the government to shift the focus
federal government's posture away from climate action and toward a re-embrace of fossil fuels.
And this is one more small way in which is happening, which is that if you don't have the data that shows that climate change is happening and that it is dangerous and that it is indeed affecting our lives and the planet as a whole, well, then it's that much harder to make decisions and make the argument that
that climate change is something that needs to be addressed.
I think it's very meaningful for a number of reasons.
And in fact, that was one of his first actions that he took when he was inaugurated just over a year ago, was withdrawing the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement.
And it's true, Dave, that the Paris Agreement itself is not particularly binding.
It didn't automatically mean that the United States or any other country was going to rapidly embrace clean energy.
But what it did was send a signal
to industry, to policymakers, to local leaders that a country was on a path and that that path ultimately led toward a world in which we were not polluting so much and gave ourselves as a collective the opportunity to try to limit global temperature rise.
By pulling out of that agreement, the United States sent a signal to the rest of the world that it simply wasn't even going to try.
And in sending that signal, it made it much harder for other countries to galvanize their own coalition of policymakers and business leaders to do the same thing.
So while
On one hand, maybe this only affects the United States.
It has sent shockwaves around the world.
And as you note, we are now, the United States, part of a pretty unusual club of countries who have said that they are not going to participate in this global agreement.
Yeah.
I mean, we could spend a whole another hour and a half talking just about foreign policy here.
But there is no doubt that while the United States Agency for International Development was mostly focused on traditional development work, things like hunger and health for developing nations, it was also doing a really meaningful amount of climate work, helping countries
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