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
We're heading towards a future that we defined as unacceptable.
And when I say that,
I don't just mean that the scientists at the IPCC defined as unacceptable.
I mean that when they published their research into the difference between these two levels, 1.5 degrees and two degrees Celsius warming, that report was the event that gave us the huge global climate awakening
in late 2018, 2019 into 2020.
It's the reason that we know who Greta Thunberg is.
It's the reason we heard of Extinction Rebellion and Sunrise.
It's the reason we started talking about a Green New Deal and a Green Deal in Europe.
All of that, and all the talk that presidents and prime ministers, all the lip service they paid to climate change at Davos and at the UN in the years that followed, and all of the similar talk that we heard from the world's corporate leaders, all their CEOs and plutocrats,
all of that came out of a report that was basically saying we need to limit warming below two degrees.
That fear, that panic, that sense of urgency, and that sense of, you know, this must be a top priority, a top political and social priority for the world, all of that was the result of a scientific report documenting how bad things would be at two degrees.
And we now know
that we will be heading north of two degrees.
So the things that terrified us into action, not that long ago, six, eight years ago, are now our inevitable future.
I think it's going to be a test on that score, which we will fail.
And the question is what impact that makes socially and politically.
We are already seeing every year in countless ways how poorly prepared we are for the climate present, but most of the time, it isn't producing the kind of political response and social response that I would like to see.
And I worry that the basic pattern is going to continue to be that going forward, even into a much warmer future, where rather than changing course
On the mitigation side, yes, but also more profoundly, perhaps on the adaptation side, rather than changing course and designing a much more responsive and resilient future, we will just find ourselves defining more and more suffering as acceptable and normal as sort of the cost of going about our daily lives without being too preoccupied by the course of climate change.
What I would say is that people are complicated and populations are complicated and politics is complicated.
Showing 101–120 of 263 · page 6 of 14
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