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 over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.

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Fresh Air · Inside the U.S. reversal on climate change action · 28 Jan 2026 podcast

I ask many leaders this very question, and I'm talking former heads of state.

I'm talking executives of major international companies.

And to a man and a woman, they all said that they believed that this time was different.

And it wasn't just because of the speed at which President Trump and his administration are undoing decades of norms.

There's also a sense, as Carney alluded to, of a broader global reset.

And yes, perhaps the United States and the Trump administration is precipitating some of that or hastening some of that.

But the other factors that many...

that were a part of this sort of rupture are the rise of China, the changes in the Middle East, the reset in global trade and thus global alliances that we're seeing, the rise of other authoritarian powers

leaders around the globe, there really is a sense that even if it were not for the extraordinary actions coming out of the White House every day, we would be in a moment that was going to move away from the past 70 plus years of international order since the last world war and towards something quite different that no one can entirely predict.

Well, this was very much on my mind as I headed to Davos last week.

It was there at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January of 2020, that many financial leaders started to really –

say climate change was going to be a defining issue for finance going forward.

Larry Fink, who's the chief executive of BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, arrived in Davos that year wearing a scarf that depicted 100 years of global warming.

And just a week before, he had issued a letter to chief executives calling climate change a fundamental reshaping of finance.

In the year that followed, so many other banks, asset managers, asset owners started making voluntary pledges saying that they were going to be a part of this broad set of solution.

And in fact, Mark Carney, who's now the prime minister of Canada, who we just alluded to, he was a major figure in this as well.

He...

Founded a new group called GFANS in 2021, which aimed to use $100 trillion or more of assets at the disposal of the financial community to try to bend the curve on emissions, to try to promote clean energy and over time reduce the use of fossil fuels.

And as I went to Davos this year, it struck me that so much of that work has simply dissipated.

Many of the alliances that had been formed had fallen apart.

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