David Wallace-Wells

speaker

678 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 5d ago

David Wallace-Wells’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The Opinions · Is This the Fastest Opinion Shift in American Politics? · 15 Jul 2026 podcast

And I wanted to talk this through with a friend of mine, Robinson Meyer.

Rob is an opinion contributor and the founding executive editor of the great environmental news website Heatmap, which has also been doing a ton of important work following the data center backlash.

Rob, thanks for being here.

Thank you so much for having me.

It's great to be here.

So we're going to talk about the politics of the data center backlash, which are really interesting.

But let's just start with a sense of the scale and just how fast it's come together.

Have you been as shocked as I am about what we've seen over the last year?

And let's walk through what that means in some more particular ways.

I mean, this is a movement that draws on a lot of threads.

You also see different intensities.

Some people really eager to go out to a town hall and protest the data center.

Other people just telling someone who's taking a survey that they're not sure that they want something being built down the road.

So beyond the top line numbers, what else are you seeing over this relatively short timeline?

It's also the case, right, that older Americans tend to be somewhat more supportive and younger Americans somewhat more skeptical, right?

So I wanted to unpack this backlash ideologically and, you know, walk through...

At least as I see it, the sort of comprehensive list of objections, which aren't exactly contradictory, but are also not exactly always, you know, they don't line up in the most intuitive ways or draw all the same people together in unison.

You know, you mentioned water objections.

There's also the effect on electricity prices, the burden on the local grid, local pollution from any extra pollution.

power generation that's required.

Showing 401–420 of 678 · page 21 of 34