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
ability to take control of this system, this trajectory, that was still a relevant consideration.
The developments of the last few years have made me think that, in fact,
we may have really miscalibrated and miscalculated there.
When I think about what happened in Pakistan in 2022, when in response to an energy crisis produced by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the country basically just started buying so many Chinese solar panels that they effectively doubled capacity
Now that's astonishing.
It's not entirely good because it means that many people are now no longer on the Pakistani grid, which means that the grid itself is probably getting less revenue than it should have.
And the people who are poor and unable to afford their own solar panels are probably getting less reliable electricity as a result.
But nevertheless, huge climate win, not produced even through policy, and certainly not produced because there was a major handout from the global north to the global south, but just because individuals with some amount of cash to burn took measures into their own hands and decarbonized their own lives.
We're now seeing that in many other sectors and economies all across the developing world, from Nepal, where 76% of cars sold last year were EVs,
to across Sub-Saharan Africa, we're seeing remarkably rapid uptake of solar panels and solar power.
Now it looks like many of those places are moving even more rapidly than the countries in the global north, despite being resource strapped.
On the flip side of that, I do think that many of these places are still incredibly vulnerable in terms of adaptation, and there may be considerably more that we need to do to help them on that front.
The true answer is that I don't know.
And I would say one of the things that's happened to me over the last few years is
as I've watched the story unfold and documented it and reflected on it is that I felt humbled in a lot of different directions
And have realized how much more we should be placing uncertainty about the future at the heart of how we think about these challenges.
We will be seeing many more heat waves.
We will be seeing much more fire.
We will be seeing much more flooding.
And in general, much more suffering than we needed to see if we had taken action earlier.
Showing 201–220 of 263 · page 11 of 14
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