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 over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Unexplainable · The Godzilla El Niño · 29 Jul 2026 podcast

Absolutely free, 100% free electricity.

That's just on the green transition side of power.

When you think about the EV rollout that we're seeing all around the world, you never have to go to a gas station ever again because you just charge up at your house.

Whenever we electrify anything, it gets dramatically more efficient.

We're cleaning up air pollution.

We're past air pollution, which is a much larger threat to human flourishing on any conceivable timescale than climate change is.

Today, somewhere between 5 and 10 million people are dying every year from air pollution, but we're past the peak of that.

We're drawing that down.

There is a lot going on.

There's a lot of progress that is really wonderful and worth celebrating.

And so I don't want to give a sense overall—

that for all of my political despair and for all of my, what I would call my climate realism, that that means that we are all doomed in some meaningful way.

We're living in an incredibly messy world.

We have imposed on ourselves and our future much more suffering and difficulty than we needed to because climate change will be that disruptive.

But

That challenge is a political one, it's a social one, it's a technological one.

And while we are not pursuing each of those paths optimally, in my view, we also shouldn't assume that we will absolutely fail each of those tests like we're getting a zero.

We're gonna be muddling through, and the future that we live in as a result

will have a lot of bad stuff in it and a lot of good stuff in it, which is, of course, human nature, human history.

One hopes along the way we will wake up a little bit more, not just on climate, but on politics and many of these other questions of governance and social organization.

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