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

We have seen a number of disasters of a scale that would have been completely unthinkable to previous generations over the course of this generation.

And I think of this story going back to Katrina, which was an eye-opening event more than 20 years ago now.

and seemed for a time to mark a high point in American climate concern, helped discredit the presidency of George W. Bush, gave us an upsurge of climate urgency and the election of Barack Obama, who

when he accepted the nomination or won the nomination for the Democratic nomination for president said that this would be the moment that we looked back on as the moment that the seas slowed their rise and the planet began to heal.

There was a lot of an upsurge of concern then

We've seen a bunch of climate disasters just in the United States since then.

Again and again, there's a period of intense national focus and then a kind of a withdrawing from the story of climate change.

But I think that that narrative that we keep getting knocked back on our heels by climate disasters and then forget about them entirely is also too simplistic.

Because whatever you think looking out at the climate landscape today and looking at headlines and watching cable news and listening to politicians, you might think that everybody had moved on from climate and was no longer worried about it.

The truth is that when you look into the survey data, we're basically at the highest point for climate anxiety that we've ever been.

There were a couple points during Donald Trump's first term where the respondents in the surveys might be one point higher than we are today.

But those points aside, Americans are more concerned about climate change than they were in the aftermath of Katrina.

They're more worried than they were at any point in the George W. Bush presidency.

They're more worried than they were at any point in the Barack Obama presidency.

And they're more worried at any point than they were in the Joe Biden presidency.

So we have an interesting political story here, just in America, where we're kind of telling ourselves that the country has moved on from climate and has maybe judged the Democratic Party to have made a miscalculation in prioritizing climate during the Biden years.

But in fact, at the level of individual people, how they feel about their lives, the lives of their communities, and the future of their country, they are just about, if not more worried about

climate impacts than they've ever been before.

But our elite discourse and our elite policymaking has somehow decided to treat those anxieties as irrelevant.

I'm not saying they're not.

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