David Wallace-Wells
speaker
263 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 29 Jul
David Wallace-Wells’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 Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I mean, I think that the way that the response to Hurricane Helene was politicized and the way that FEMA has been reorganized in the aftermath is quite bad.
It means that we are much more vulnerable to natural disasters in the U.S.
than we would have been otherwise.
Do we know how much more vulnerable?
Well, I mean, they're trying to push disaster response, the responsibility for disaster response onto the states who simply don't have the budget to respond to anything like these disasters like we've seen over the last few years.
It's, you know, anytime we push any responsibility onto the states, there's an enormous problem because
They all are required by law to balance their budgets.
They can't go into debt because there's a particular crisis.
I mean, we'll see what happens.
It may well be the case that the federal government swoops in with a lot of money that they wouldn't have otherwise or didn't expect to allocate, as they have, for instance, to bail out the American farmers from...
you know, a lot of impacts from tariffs to weather events over the last couple of years.
We'll see.
But the way that the Trump administration seems to want to deal with natural disasters is basically to ask the states to deal with it themselves, which I think is truly a recipe for a disaster if it comes to pass.
But there's also...
know beyond that what trump is doing in the world trying to you know restore a sense that um fossil fuels are at the heart of the modern economy and of um geopolitics um his stated purpose in toppling the leader of venezuela was you know to get control of their oil and
And, you know, obviously the war in Iran has enormous fossil fuel implications, and its implications for the green transition are, if anything, positive because it has taught so many countries around the world not to depend on the supply of fossil fuels, given that this is the third fossil fuel shock since 2020.
And we've had many more going back in the decades before.
Nevertheless, I think there's something quite corrosive and damaging about the basic
And the basic model of human interaction that Donald Trump works with and which he is trying to impose on the world in which nations owe nothing to one another and the only law that they need to abide is the law of their own self-interest as they understand it.
You know, five or six years ago, I might have said that that would that spelled doom for our nation.
Showing 181–200 of 263 · page 10 of 14
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