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

I would say a couple things about it.

The first is that...

You often hear from people who think we needn't worry as much about climate change as Democratic politicians say did in the period 2018 to 2023.

You often hear from those people that most Americans are not willing to pay, say, $10 a month or whatever to take action on climate change.

you know, in some ways, I feel like that's, it's a kind of a way of weaponizing American entitlement against one particular set of policy crusades.

But the other thing I would say is that, you know, this to some degree has been true for a number of years, but is becoming even more true and in the future will become even, even, even more true.

It's not

the case that we need to shoulder burdens in any meaningful sense to take action on the mitigation side or on the adaptation side.

You know, what's called the levelized cost of electricity, which is a somewhat misleading measure of how expensive electricity is, but has been the sort of industry standard for a generation.

Solar power is dramatically cheaper than any fossil fuel alternative that's ever been produced.

Now, it's misleading, that measure is misleading, because it only accounts for the marginal cost of electricity and not the overall cost of a system of electricity.

And because you get more solar when the sun's shining and get more wind power when the wind's blowing, you need to build out around that to have a reliable supply of electricity.

But according to some new reports that have just been published over the last month or so, because batteries have now made this incredibly dramatic improvement in their cost,

like solar did a decade ago and like wind has done, you can now use batteries, very cheap batteries, to even out the distribution of solar and wind power.

And that means that the overall cost, according to this recent research, of renewable power is now lower than any alternative system.

And we know that those price declines are going to continue for renewables, and we know that they will not decline for fossil fuels.

So to the extent that we're talking about power and electricity,

We know that this bargain, this calculation is a more rapid transition, better for us or worse for us.

We know that going forward, it will be a better deal to do more renewables and not do fossil.

And the world sees that.

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