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
But I think that in the big picture, that...
most of that is going to be manageable, navigable to us as humans.
But I don't feel extremely confident in that because the challenges are so long that I can't possibly, and so large that I can't possibly wrap my head around even the scale of the challenge, let alone what would be required to accommodate that.
those impacts without huge disturbance.
And that's leaving aside the possibility that if we end up on the emissions trajectory that tells us now to expect two and a half degrees, the climate system may surprise us, as Jim Hansen is warning us, and end up at three and a half or four degrees, or maybe even north of that.
in which case a lot of the suppositions that we've carried forward are going to be proven quite foolish.
And I think it is the case, as climate deniers often say, that climate alarmists, of whom I am one, do often talk about the future in deterministic terms and don't allow for human adaptation, which will happen.
But I also think in telling those stories, they profoundly misunderstand how complex and challenging adaptation really is and how inevitably, even in a basically optimal ideal outcome, we're going to be dealing with an imperfect response to an incredibly turbulent future.
The world is full of good news.
On this front.
I could be the famous optimist, David Wells.
I mean, just on climate stuff, the green transition is proceeding at a breakneck pace, much faster than even its biggest boosters said was possible 10 or 15 years ago.
And really even faster than most people expected 5 or 10 years ago.
The fact of this battery revolution...
changing the economic calculus for renewables is really profound.
It means that we can probably, in large parts of the world, do 100% of the time renewable power, which many people said was going to be completely impossible.
And even before we get there, we are dealing with already in sun-rich parts of the world, free electricity in the middle of the day.
In Australia, they've literally passed a law promising Australian citizens that for several hours every day, they will be guaranteed free electricity.
Now, that doesn't help a factory that needs to run 24 hours a day.
But in many other cases, you can imagine designing your small business and its activity around
Showing 221–240 of 263 · page 12 of 14
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