David Wallace-Wells

speaker

678 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 6d ago

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

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

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

There's also noise.

And that's all sort of like in one bundle, which is to say the local impacts of this construction.

And then there are objections to the purpose that this is being put towards.

And to that end, I would say anxieties about AI and what it means for

The future of the economy, the future of employment, to some extent, the future of our social lives and our political lives, any even existential anxiety to the extent that that's playing a role.

There's also worry that people have about the particular political economy of this business and the fact that we have a few companies run by a couple of people who are insanely wealthy and through AI seem to be laying claim to more and more control over the future of the country and the economy.

People look at that development pattern and feel so powerless.

And they think, you know, if Sam Altman is going to decide that my community is going to suffer water shortages and local pollution and my electricity bills are going to go up and me and everybody I know is going to be put out of work by this and I have no lever to pull.

My access to power in Washington feels really limited.

What can I do?

Here is a town hall I can go to and scream my ass off and get this project killed.

And so there's, you know, there's that piece of it too.

But I wonder if we could talk about each of these both as sort of concrete claims, right?

That is, like, how serious are the problems about water and pollution, for instance, and also what it means politically to be mounting a political objection on this ground.

So, you know, my read of the research is that the environmental arguments...

Those claims are often a little overstated.

There is an effect on water.

In some cases, it can drive electricity prices up, although in other cases, it drives them down.

But it is interesting to me that this set of claims, which are the center of the political energy there, are kind of most factually dubious.

Is that how you read the research there?

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