David Wallace-Wells: The U.S. Is Handing the Baton to China

Summary

The Bulwark Podcast: David Wallace-Wells - "The U.S. Is Handing the Baton to China"

Release Date: July 17, 2025

Hosts: Tim Miller
Guest: David Wallace-Wells, Science Writer and Essayist for The New York Times Opinion, Columnist for The New York Times Magazine, Author of The Uninhabitable Earth (2019)

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1. The Texas Floods: Scale and Reaction

The episode begins with Tim Miller addressing the devastating Texas floods, which resulted in 132 deaths and 100 missing as reported by the Dallas Morning News. Despite the magnitude, the public and media response appeared surprisingly subdued compared to past climate disasters.

David Wallace-Wells highlights the recurring pattern of inadequate responses to climate-induced disasters:

"[00:01:17]... the scale of reaction, I think that that's basically the standard now."

He contrasts the Texas floods with the Maui fires, emphasizing how high-profile events like the latter fade from the national consciousness swiftly despite their severity.

2. Media Shortcomings in Climate Crisis Reporting

Wallace-Wells criticizes the modern media ecosystem for its inability to sustain long-term narratives on climate disasters. He points out that while initial coverage is intense, it quickly shifts focus, leaving the public inadequately informed about ongoing climate challenges.

"[00:01:17]... we don't have the kind of... media ecosystem that makes these things really long stories anymore."

3. Comparing Climate Disasters: Texas Floods vs. Hurricane Katrina

The discussion draws parallels between the Texas floods and Hurricane Katrina, noting the lack of substantial political and social repercussions following such events. Wallace-Wells argues that unlike Katrina, which significantly impacted George W. Bush’s presidency and the Republican Party's reputation, the Texas floods did not elicit a similar generational response.

"[03:56]... we don't have the kind of... response to these floods as there wasn't to Hurricane Helene."

4. Climate Adaptation: Coastal vs. Inland Challenges

Wallace-Wells delves into the disparities in climate adaptation strategies between coastal regions and inland areas. While places like New Orleans have improved hurricane forecasting and infrastructure, inland states struggle with increased flooding events without adequate preparation.

"[07:10]... I'm more on the left than you, but my view is like..."

He emphasizes that inland regions are experiencing more frequent and severe extreme weather events, leading to substantial economic damages.

5. Declining Global Climate Action Momentum

The conversation shifts to the diminishing global momentum for climate action since the Paris Accord in 2015. Wallace-Wells laments the loss of global cooperation and solidarity that once characterized international efforts to combat climate change.

"[13:23]... the momentum for global climate action that was building all through the 2010s... now just feels like a relic of an impossibly distant era."

6. China's Ascendancy in Green Energy

A significant portion of the discussion focuses on China's dominance in renewable energy, with 75% of all renewable projects being developed by Chinese companies globally. This imbalance positions China as the primary driver of the green transition, leaving the U.S. struggling to keep pace.

"[14:17]... China is doing an awful lot to accelerate the green transition... they are building a massive clean energy electrostate."

7. Electric Vehicles: BYD vs. Tesla

Wallace-Wells highlights the competitive edge of Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer BYD over Tesla, noting innovations like a 5-minute charge car, which could revolutionize the electric vehicle market and undermine Tesla's dominance.

"[37:13]... BYD, the electric car company has a 5-minute charge car that's coming which could totally change the game in that space."

8. AI and Energy: A Compounded Challenge

The tie between Artificial Intelligence (AI) and energy consumption is explored, with the U.S. focusing heavily on AI advancements while neglecting the necessary green energy infrastructure to support its growing energy demands. Wallace-Wells warns that without embracing renewable energy, the U.S. risks falling further behind China.

"[27:14]... the US is over here doubling down on fossil fuels, kneecapping renewables wherever they can."

9. Geoengineering: Potential Risks and Benefits

The conversation touches on geoengineering as a controversial method to mitigate climate change by altering atmospheric conditions. While it offers potential climate benefits, Wallace-Wells expresses skepticism about its safety and effectiveness.

"[21:53]... geoengineering pitch is, let's just put that stuff higher in the atmosphere so we don't have to breathe it into our lungs."

10. Climate vs. COVID-19: Public Response and Solidarity

Drawing a parallel between the collective response to COVID-19 and the current climate crisis, Wallace-Wells reflects on the initial global solidarity during the pandemic. However, he notes a post-pandemic resentment that hinders similar unified action against climate change.

"[64:03]... when I compare it to the climate crisis, I think there's something really amazing and inspiring about the first period of the pandemic response when... an incredible global gesture of solidarity."

11. Epstein Scandal: Elite Impunity and Social Repercussions

In a more somber segment, Wallace-Wells discusses the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, emphasizing the lack of legal and social repercussions for many involved elites. He criticizes the American and global elite's impunity, underscoring the broader issue of unchecked power and moral failure within influential circles.

"[53:45]... how could anybody, putting aside those who are directly associating with him, how could deans and provosts be... think, oh, that's fine. It's coming from an acknowledged sex trafficker and sex offender."

12. Reflections on Collective Action and Future Prospects

Concluding the episode, Wallace-Wells reflects on the importance of collective action in addressing global crises. He compares the successful, albeit temporary, solidarity during COVID-19 to the fragmented response to climate change, urging for a renewed sense of global cooperation.

"[68:10]... it was a really... an incredible global gesture of solidarity that I think is basically unparalleled in modern history."

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Notable Quotes

• David Wallace-Wells on Media's Short Attention Span:

  "[00:01:17]... we don't have the kind of attention economy, media ecosystem that makes these things really long stories anymore."

• Wallace-Wells on China's Green Energy Leadership:

  "[14:17]... China is doing an awful lot to accelerate the green transition... they are building a massive clean energy electrostate."

• On the Lack of Repercussions in the Epstein Scandal:

  "[53:45]... how could anybody, putting aside those who are directly associating with him, how could deans and provosts be... think, oh, that's fine. It's coming from an acknowledged sex trafficker and sex offender."

• Reflections on COVID-19 Solidarity:

  "[64:41]... there was a really... an incredible global gesture of solidarity that I think is basically unparalleled in modern history."

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Conclusion

This episode of The Bulwark Podcast with David Wallace-Wells offers a compelling analysis of the intertwined crises of climate change, global energy leadership, and societal impunity. Wallace-Wells underscores the critical juncture at which the U.S. finds itself, grappling with internal political challenges while China rapidly advances its green energy initiatives. The discussion also navigates the complexities of public response to global threats, drawing lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic's initial solidarity that have yet to be fully translated into the climate movement. Additionally, the Epstein scandal serves as a stark reminder of the pervasive issue of elite impunity, further complicating the landscape of global governance and accountability.

For listeners seeking a thorough understanding of the current state of global climate politics, the rise of China as a green superpower, and the societal failures exemplified by the Epstein case, this episode provides insightful perspectives and critical reflections.

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Note: Advertisements and promotional segments for SelectQuote.com and Simplisafe were omitted to focus on the core content discussed during the podcast.

Transcript

[David Wallace Wells]

Foreign.

[Tim Miller]

Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Delighted to have with me a science writer and essayist for the New York Times Opinion, a columnist for the New York Times Magazine. He also has a newsletter on climate and he's the author of the Uninhabitable earth, published in 2019, a very uplifting, you know, piece of literature. It's David Wallace Wells. What's up, man?

[David Wallace Wells]

Really good to be here. Good to see you.

[Tim Miller]

Good to see you too. I guess I just want to start in the micro about the Texas floods. Just one of the reasons we reached out to you recently and then kind of get a little more macro on climate stuff after that. But, you know, as of last night, we have 132 dead from those floods, according to the Dallas Morning News, and another 100 missing, which is, I think, as you noted in your column about this, more dead than in the Maui fires. Maybe it's because we were both on holiday recently and I just kind of, it feels like the scale of the reaction to this has been kind of mild compared to the scale of the devastation. But just, I kind of want to just put a quarter in and give any thoughts you have on what we saw in Texas.

[David Wallace Wells]

Well, just to start with what you mentioned, the scale of reaction, I think that that's basically the standard now. I mean, I think a lot about the fires that swept through la, that was just six months ago. It's like a huge, incredibly wealthy neighborhood in one of the most kind of globally culturally relevant places in the entire world, full of lots of famous, well connected, powerful people. The entire neighborhood was incinerated. And six months later, it's not like a major story about our climate, about our politics, about our society. Even when I talk to my friends in la, it's like a third or fourth order concern for them. And you see the same thing as, you know, the Maui fires that you mentioned from a couple of years ago, which, you know, okay, it's a wildfire, it's a tragedy. It was the deadliest North American wildfire in more than a century. It destroyed the indigenous capital of the island. You know, last year there were these shocking national, shocking homelessness numbers. Homelessness went up more last year than it had in recent history. And there was some part of that coming out of the migrant surge and people, you know, basically the way that that filtered through the cities. But a big part of it was actually people displaced in Hawaii by the Lahaina fires. And so that's the scale of climate disaster that that was. And again, it's just not getting traction with the Texas floods. We had a pretty intense, you know, three or four day news cycle. We're still seeing a fair amount of, you know, soft focus, human interest coverage. And the stuff is just absolutely devastating. I mean, to think about these camp counselors leading these little girls through the floodwaters and, you know, people getting notes home from their camper kids who are now dead, getting their notes in the mail. I mean, it's just absolutely, you know, kind of crippling, devastating. But we don't have the kind of, you know, attention economy, media ecosystem that makes these things really long stories anymore. And I think there's a really natural comparison to make between the Texas floods and, and Hurricane Katrina. And when I think about that example, I just think, you know, it wasn't the only thing that killed George W. Bush's presidency. It wasn't the only thing that, like, put the Republican Party's reputation in the toilet, but it was a meaningful contribution to what felt like a generational setback. And I don't think there's going to be anything like that kind of response to these floods as there wasn't to Hurricane Helene, as there haven't been to so many of these disasters that we've seen. Even though, you know, you can make a case that the FEMA response and the federal response in Texas and the way that the local authorities failed to prepare for such an event was as terrible and ill prepared as we saw in New Orleans around Katrina.

[Tim Miller]

So I thought you're gonna make the comparison to gun violence and Uvalde, right? That it's like this horrific tragedy. It also happens in Texas, obviously a big story for a little while, but like, no repercussions. It's a total failure of local officials, you know, in addition to being this broad cultural failure, no repercussions for anybody.

[David Wallace Wells]

In the Texas hill country. It's like, you know, all of these stories we've seen over the last week or 10 days, you know, this is. Was known to be a meaningful risk. Climate change is intensifying that risk, making these kinds of extreme floods more likely. We could talk about that in a second. But, you know, it was known that there was real danger here and yet very little was done to prepare. And in fact, the camp itself lobbied to be excluded from these FEMA requirements when they did repairs in recent years, a multimillion dollar, you know, they didn't do anything to address the flood risk. And I think that tells you something complicated about the, you know, the thing we're dealing with here when we talk about the risk of, from climate change, which is that, you know, it's not neatly that we're going to be facing these unprecedented, unimaginable storms, natural disasters, although those will occasionally happen much more often. We're going to be dealing with more, more intense climate events that resemble events that we encountered in the past and which we have just utterly failed to prepare for. And climate skeptics will often talk about that, say, or, you know, people who are climate complacent and say, well, we can manage these risks. In theory, we could have done more to prepare for these floods in Texas. And that is to some extent true, but we didn't, even with the knowledge that we had. And climate change is making the gap between, you know, the adaptation levels that we'd want to be at and the adaptation levels that we are at larger rather than smaller. And that's a story that's playing out all around the world when it comes to climate risk, not just in Texas, but I think, you know, because of the culture of Texas Tech. Texas has especially a lot to answer for here.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, living in New Orleans, I think about this a lot. I mean, we literally went through Katrina and there have been some huge changes to prepare for the future. But also simultaneously, we have pumps that don't work if irregular rain falls. And I'm like, how is this not an urgent priority for the city of New Orleans, making sure the pumps work? And this is just a micro example where I live, but that plays out everywhere.

[David Wallace Wells]

Totally. I mean, the major infrastructural response that we took in the aftermath of Katrina didn't even prepare the city for a Category 5 hurricane. So, you know, and Katrina wasn't when it hit, but, like, you know, obviously it should have told us that that kind of thing was possible. And in planning, we should say, well, what is the worst case scenario? Let's, let's prepare for that. And as you well know, also, it's like, it's not just the direct climate risks. I mean, you know, New Orleans is a different city full of different people with a different set of, you know, it's a different economy, it's a different school system, it's a different culture than it was before that storm. This can have really. Prof. You know, what used to be called kind of civilizational scale effects. And we're not doing yet. We're not doing nearly enough to prepare, adapt, or respond to the things even after they hit.

[Tim Miller]

Your column on this last week, I guess, was about, you know, how we can adapt and prepare for floods. You wrote about, you know, how we're not all that adapted to the climate we have now. Forget the climate that's coming. What are some examples of that? And is there, are there places where people are doing it?

[David Wallace Wells]

Well, yeah, I mean, in general, I think one lesson is that we've actually gotten up quite a bit better when it comes to hurricanes. We can track them really well. Our hurricane forecasting is much better, which means when people are told to evacuate, actually it's a much more targeted ask than it was even 15 or 20 years ago because many, you know, we have a much better sense of where the hurricane's going to land. People in hurricane zones do know to leave. You know, not everybody does. There are some people left behind. A lot of that has to do with, you know, socioeconomic disparities. But in general, we have acculturated the idea of like when a huge storm is coming, that is a real risk and you should get out of the way. And we saw that even with, you know, even in Hurricane Helene when it hit the coast. And it was actually not that devastating on the coast, but then it continued inland where we have not done nearly as much of that kind of cultural preparation. And it just absolutely walloped, you know, Georgia, South Carolina, and especially western North Carolina, which are not places that are used to dealing with these risks. And I think globally we're seeing that phenomenon quite dramatically with all of these crazy flooding events, particularly in cities. I see videos from South America, from Europe all the time, which is like streets in old cities just absolutely flooded, cars being pulled down by the floodwater, people being pulled away by the floodwater. And we're seeing that kind of episode more and more, not the hurricanes. And in the last couple of years, actually we haven't even had. There have just been kind of fewer of those, some of those classic coastal disasters. But the inland flooding is like something that few people were even worrying about a few years ago. And now it seems almost like it's like the protagonist of the climate crisis is disasters inland. I mentioned in that piece, you know, the noia, the national oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, compiles this database of what they call billion dollar disasters. And there are a lot of issues with this database because it's, you know, as land gets more valuable, the same disaster will register a much bigger hit, etc. Nevertheless, they're just calculating how many disasters have caused more than $1 billion in damage. And the number is going up very dramatically. But even more striking Than that it's dominated by these like normal storms. It's not dominated by hurricanes, it's not even dominated by wildfires. It's dominated by just what they call extreme storm events. So all over the country in the U.S. you just have, oh, here's a big rainstorm hitting Iowa, here's a big rainstorm hitting New Mexico. There was a huge flash flood in New Mexico last week too. Or North Carolina. There was another one last week as well. And I just think off the coast we've done far, far, far too little to prepare for these kind of floods. And I don't even think we really understand exactly why they're getting so intense. The science says they have this line that's like for every degree of warming you get 7% more water. And they also say that extremes get worse much faster than the median. But when I look at these storms, these 500 year storms, thousand year storms, so called, they just seem to be happening so much more often and doing so much more damage. And I think there may be some remaining mystery about exactly why they're getting so intense. Certainly we're not prepared for the intensity that they're bringing today.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah. And maybe I'm missing it just because I'm consuming so much insane national politics news. But at the local level in these places, it doesn't feel like this is a massive, feels like it's less of a conversation than it was 10 years ago. Right. Like, you know, in this sort of how do cities adapt? Right. Like as far as in the political, kind of cultural, you know, conversation is here's a big challenge we need to solve. It's not like it's not happening, but it feels like it's been deprioritized. Is that, is that your, and you're following this stuff closer to me, is that a misimpression?

[David Wallace Wells]

I think it's kind of complicated. But I would say that you have had a very representative experience, which is to say that like our politics has become much more nationalized even over the course of the last 10 years. And that's true at the level of discourse, like what, who's saying what, who's focusing on what. It's also true at the level of funding, like, you know, it's just not the case that like if Houston wants to build the Ike dyke, like they can't do that without federal money. Even New York, like, you know, one of the richest places in the country, we can't build a hundred billion dollar storm barrier, which is like what FEMA is proposing. We do without federal money. And so, you know, states in particular have these budget constraints. They can't do disaster response, they can't do large scale adaptation without federal funding. And yet we have a system in which systematically, local authorities have much less money to play with in spending, you know, and spending on these, on this stuff. And as a result, I think people just don't focus on it as much. I do think there is some local adaptation going on. You know, you, you do hear, especially in places like Phoenix, a lot of stuff about heat adaptation. And, you know, we'll see what happens with the insurance market. Coming out of the California wildfire is still a huge, huge question. And how that all shakes out really will shape the future course of development in California and maybe even around the country, since the consequences for the insurance market are so large. But I would also just emphasize, like, you know, adaptation is not just a public policy measure, it's also an individual response. People learn what to do and how to respond. Like in California, you get an alert, you get out of the house, you know, when the fires come in. And that is not just even true at the level of behavior, it's also true at the level of biology. If you look at the way that heat death affects people in really poor, hot countries, it actually takes a lot more to kill people there than it does in Europe, which actually has the highest level of heat vulnerability because the people there are not used to high temperatures. They don't have air conditioning, they're a lot older than people in like, you know, India and Bangladesh and Pakistan, Saudi Arabia. And so, you know, we've told ourselves in the climate world a lot of scary stories about the intensity of heat effects, especially on the global South. But it may be the case that like, you know, the sort of bullseye there is actually is actually Europe. And that's in part because people's bodies, as they grow, learn how to deal with different climates and different effects. And we just haven't seen those kinds of extreme temperatures, certainly in Europe and in parts of the US too.

[Tim Miller]

All right, so let's zoom out a little bit. Last time we talked, I basically asked you, I said, I want an uninhabitable Earth update. I think we talked in 20, 23 or 24. I'm going to tldr you a little bit. It was basically, we aren't alarmed enough at a global level. But also warming projections had gotten better since you'd written the book. So now around a year and a half since then. Update me.

[David Wallace Wells]

Well, the big story that I would tell is that the momentum for global climate action that was building all through the 2010s kind of gave us the Paris accord in 2015. And then to some extent, this rising tide of climate concern and alarm in 2019 and 2020, with things like extinction, rebellion and Greta and the Green New Deal and the Green Deal in Europe, that now just feels like a relic of an impossibly distant era. And not just narrowly on climate action, although that's a big part of it. It's also just like, if you think about what the Paris Accords told us about the future, it was that we were heading towards an era of more global cooperation defined by increasing solidarity among the world's nations and a growing sense of mutual obligation and aid. And those are just not principles that are, like, present in a global stage anymore.

[Tim Miller]

So we don't care about each other anymore. So that's a big change in the last year, you know.

[David Wallace Wells]

Yeah, no, I mean, I think it's. It's a huge story, especially coming out of the pandemic. I think many, many people who had a sense of real deep, you know, humanitarian solidarity in, say, 2018, 2019, 2020, by 2022, like, having been pushed through the ringer of, you know, whatever was all the burdens and, you know, trauma of the pandemic, so many more people came out feeling like just much more mercenary in their view of the world. And that has filtered up through our politics in really profound ways. I don't know that it's all that dramatic in the end for climate, in part because one thing that's happened is that the US has just completely retreated, and that's given a huge opening to China, who is doing an awful lot to accelerate the green transition. So 75% of all renewable projects being built anywhere in the world right now are being built in China or by Chinese companies elsewhere in the world. And, you know, there maybe have reached a peak of carbon. We'll see how it shakes out. But, like, in any event, they are building a massive clean energy electrostate, and the US is over here doubling down on fossil fuels, kneecapping renewables wherever they can. But the third part of the story is that because China's made so much of this stuff so cheap, it can now be provided, be sold to countries who people like you and me used to talk about as, like, they can't afford the transition on their own. And, like, just a couple years ago, there was this miraculous thing that happened in Pakistan where the issues with global coal systems because of the invasion of Ukraine, Europe bid up the price of coal. All this coal that was like literally on boats going to South Asia got redirected back up to Europe so they could use it. And there was in the global South, a huge problem with like these rolling blackouts because electricity prices, fossil fuel prices were so high and some of the supply, even though they counted on, wasn't there. And the response to that was not even at the policy level in Pakistan, it was at the individual level. Just like tons of people just started buying these solar panels from China and putting them on their roofs. So much so that like, you know, they've now something like 40 or 50% of their energy mix it comes from, from rooftop solar. And like, that's because a solar panel now costs less on the free global market. Not in the United States, where you can't buy it this way, but on the free global market, a solar panel costs less than the same amount of wood to build a fence. So like, if you're putting up a fence in your yard, people like, really? Yeah, why not just build it on?

[Tim Miller]

I'm like leasing a solar panel in my house right now. I'm on like a, you know, 80 year lease that I'm paying some guy in.

[David Wallace Wells]

In the, in the US the story is really different. But yeah, I mean, you know, in Germany they're, they're like hanging them off their balconies. There's been this huge boom in balcony solar power and it's like you're not even, they're not even angling the solar panel towards the sun in the optimal way. But it's like, who cares? It's like if the material is actually cheaper than what I'd be doing otherwise, any power that I can get from it is a bonus. And there are now, according to think tanks and stuff they say like, you know, this, this Pakistan boom that took everybody by surprise because it wasn't even directed by public policy, just by individuals who are desperate for energy. There now may be dozens of other countries that are poised to make the same jump that they did in the global south because of just how cheap things are. So we have this like, you know, the era of global climate geopolitics has kind of ended, but the actual green transition is moving ahead maybe as fast, maybe even faster than we would have hoped it would have in the presence of politics. And, you know, that's kind of mind bending in certain ways. It's also depressing about the future place of America on the world stage. But it may, for the sake of climate, be Ultimately at least a mixed bag and maybe even good news.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, I want to do more on the China thing, but just really quick, like the actual. So when we last, I think you said like in 2019, you know, the projection, like the median projection was something like 4%. Warming had gone down like 2 1/2 percent.

[David Wallace Wells]

That's basically where we are. Yeah, we're still somewhere in the zone of between 2 and 3 degrees. Not much has changed over the last couple of years in part because there hasn't been much policy change. And a lot of those model, a lot of that modeling is based on, on policy. But you know, just to keep that in mind, like that's, that's really good. Right. Like we went from 4 to 5 to 2 to 3. Huge progress. But like if you remember getting freaked out about climate change in 2019, as a lot of people were, that was because there was a huge scientific report about how bad 2 degrees was going to be. And we are going to get north of that. Like what freaked you out then? We're not avoiding it. We're going there. In fact, there have been some days that have already been above 2 degrees, although that's not what people mean when they say that we're at 2 degrees. They mean a 30 year average. So we are, we are our progress. Our models have like somewhat stalled out. We're still in a relatively better place than we were a few years ago, while still being north of what we defined not that long ago as catastrophe. There is this other little thing to mention which is, you know, a little scarier, which is that there's a growing concern that a lot of these models are just missing some basic fundamental aspects of the climate system. And there's been a, you know, a sort of contrarian minority of climate scientists who think that we're heading already for a considerably faster warming. And in fact, warming has accelerated. It is now inarguably accelerated over the last couple of decades rather than slowing down. And there are a lot of possible reasons for that, but one basic thing is that we have cleaner air now. We've stopped polluting the oceans with these sulfur belching ocean liners and, you know, tankers and all that pollution that goes up into the atmosphere actually reflects sunlight and makes the planet cooler. It also affects the formation of clouds, which also have an effect here. And the net of all of that is that the impact of the carbon that we put into the atmosphere is actually more intense than it was five or 10 years ago. And you know, there's some pretty prominent People, again, I wouldn't say it's like exactly the conventional wisdom or the establishment view, but there's some quite prominent, quite pedigreed people who think that even if the sort of conventional wisdom model says, you know, let's say two and a half degrees is where we're heading, they think we're actually still on track for four or five, even though we've cut our emissions below what we thought was necessary to get us to four or five, because it turns out they think.

[Tim Miller]

Can we pollute without putting out emissions? Are there other kind of pollutants we can put into the foot, into the air?

[David Wallace Wells]

You've heard, you've heard of geoengineering, right? Yeah, that's what that is.

[Tim Miller]

That's like instead of having that illegal in Florida. So, you know.

[David Wallace Wells]

Yeah, the basic idea is like, you know, we breathe in all this shit, we get sick, we suffer as a result. You know, something like 10 million people a year are dying from air pollution. And it has this climate benefit, which is it cools the planet somewhat. And the geoengineering pitch is, let's just put that stuff higher in the atmosphere so we don't have to breathe it into our lungs. It doesn't affect our health and we can cool the planet that way. And there are huge questions about whether that's safe or too risky. But it does feel like we're moving in a direction where more and more people are kind of taking that possibility seriously. You know, maybe it'll end up being the cure all that the optimists think it is. I'm suspicious, you know, I'm skeptical, but.

[Tim Miller]

I just, like a lot of people, I read the Deluge, which is a fiction, but that's climate fiction after the LA fires. And it's like the contrarian scientist telling everybody that it's going to get worse is, is hitting a little close to reality there with that.

[David Wallace Wells]

You know, I mean, the, the LA fires, I, I just, I, I don't know if you. Have you looked at like Zillow for Pacific Palisades recently? It is like, no, it's like every lot is for sale. Every lot is priced north of $5 million. And the vast majority of them are just rubble wild. And, you know, it's like, I think the city has approved something like eight licenses to rebuild. So that whole neighborhood is still just completely destroyed. And, you know, a lot of those homeowners, even quite rich ones, are going to just like, I mean, putting aside the fact that they saw their homes burned, then they breathed in Air that was like full of bicycles and H VAC systems and cars that had been incinerated by, by the fires. You know, they're, they're, they have like a $10 million home and they're going to get, you know, a much smaller amount of payout from that. So we'll see where it goes.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah. Now I have a friend that lived in Pacific south side, so now I'm guilty. I haven't like checked in with them in a couple months. So now you're making me feel bad. I'm gonna have to text.

[David Wallace Wells]

And there's this whole debate about it, which is related to the Texas flood stuff, which is. And I said, I wrote some of this too, right after the fires, which is like, we gotta do a lot more. Forget, you know, climate change is real, it's making these things worse. But we have to do a lot more to protect ourselves from threats like these. But the longer I've gone on then, the deeper I've looked into the exact nature of the particular fire in la, I just, I wonder just how much could be done. Because Palisades already had building codes that required people to like keep flammable plants away from their homes. They already had building codes about what you were allowed to build with. And not most people weren't respecting them, but those codes were still there.

[Tim Miller]

That comes back to the individual adaptation though.

[David Wallace Wells]

Totally. And then at the social level, people talk about, you know, we got to, we got to take care of the forests. We have to manage the, you know, thin the forest, do prescriptive fire and all that stuff. And that's good at the level of the American west, even at the level of the state of California. But in California, in L. A proper, like those hills where the fire started, those are not forests, that's brush. That stuff comes back as soon as there's rain, there's new brush, and then as soon as there's a hot day, it's dry, tender, and there's just not all that much you can do. You can do a little bit, but there's not all that much to protect yourself there. And then when you have 68,100 mile an hour winds, it's like. So you have a building code that says you can't have a flammable plant within 10ft of your house. Is that going to stop you from fire traveling at you at 100 miles an hour? Just seems, I mean, just to be clear, experts do say it would make a difference, sure. But I sort of, I sort of wonder like whether we're learning something fundamental about what can be built and defended in an environment like that, you know, like that environment. And, and we may be learning that a lot less could be done and protected than we than we hoped.

[Tim Miller]

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[David Wallace Wells]

The most perverse part of this is I think that basically if you look at the geopolitical game that's been played or the geoeconomic game that's been played over the last half decade, it's that China has really profoundly bet on green tech, clean tech, clean energy, and the US has really bet its economy on AI. And maybe on some level that's like a, a better bet. I'm kind of agnostic about it on the side of skeptic, but like, maybe that's a better bet. But not only is our lead on AI not growing, is shrinking, but we need energy for the AI that we are building, right? And we are, rather than pursuing an aggressive build out of the cheapest and fastest energy that we have, which is solar and to some extent wind, which, you know, people talk about nuclear. It's like it takes 30 years to build a nuclear plant. You can roll out huge large scale solar much more quickly. We have permitting issues, but nevertheless, like much faster than for nuclear or for geothermal, which, you know, again, I'm pro nuclear, I'm pro geothermal. But it's like, if you want to like rapidly build out our electricity, what.

[Tim Miller]

About the Permian Basin? We got more natural, can we, can we get more natural gas out of the Permian Basin?

[David Wallace Wells]

My understanding is that, you know, the, the basic dynamic there is that it's kind of diminishing returns. There's, there's more that we can pull out of it, but it's not going to get cheaper. It's going to get more expensive and more complicated. And that really like the simplest solution to our growing energy needs, which is to say the economically vital input that we need to make a bet on AI work out, is to deploy basically solar power at much more rapid scale. And when you look at What China's done there, they are just annihilating us. I mean absolutely annihilating us. And we are not only as a under Trump, we are not only, you know, emphasizing fossil build out which you know, that's basically the energy policy. We're also like kneecapping the renewable progress that is possible. So it's, you know, they want to sell it as energy abundance or energy dominance, but it's not, it's just fossil dominance that they're, they're going for. And that means that, you know, the main thing that we, that could really make our sort of our energy demands for AI workable over the next five years, we're just like not even touching. And so it's just another sign that like with tariffs we are reducing everything, even what seems like economically vital considerations to culture war dynamics and that's just totally catastrophic.

[Tim Miller]

I have a million follow up questions. So just on the AI part first, the thing that's been hard for me to translate is it's almost been memeified now on the left like, oh, you shouldn't create an AI image because you just kill the tree or like hurt the climate or whatever. Like how much climate energy expense risk is there with AI versus like the other side? Right. Like if we're listening to the all in podcast right now, we'll steal me on their side. Like David Sacks would be saying, well, AI will maybe solve the climate problem because we'll create such smart supercomputers that they'll figure out how to geoengineer things in the air and it's worth it. Like where I, where, where do the smart people that you talk to fall in like that conversation?

[David Wallace Wells]

Well, there are a lot of different things in that question. Right. So just on the energy use, it's like, I think I would say that the carbon footprint of use of like ChatGPT has been overstated. Like when I put in a query, I'm not doing meaningful damage compared to everything else that I do as a modern American living in the 2025. It's not a dramatic, it's not like.

[Tim Miller]

Getting flying to Europe. Flying to Europe.

[David Wallace Wells]

Totally, totally. I'm way worse. You know, the training runs are more significant, they take up much more energy. And I think the story I would tell there is like if training the.

[Tim Miller]

Models, you mean the, yeah, the companies themselves.

[David Wallace Wells]

And when you look at the, the big, the big tech companies like five years ago they were like at the vanguard of being clean tech because they were like all we need is electricity and we could Just use green energy. It's like we're going to be net zero by 2030. They made all these promises about how they were going to cut their emissions very dramatically. It was quite encouraging. A lot of them have like actually tried to do some amount of carbon removal stuff, but even just putting that aside, they were like they were doing much better than the rest of the American economy at getting carbon out of their electricity systems. And that just stopped like three years ago. And they've all gone into reverse. And none of them are anywhere near the targets that they set for themselves in 2025 because of the energy demands of AI and trying to, you know, meet those energy demands. Given the mix of the system that we have in the US today, which is, has a fair amount of clean energy in it, but is also a lot of fossil. Then there's like, what can I do for us? Let me take one step back and just if you project that out a decade or two down the line, you could plausibly tell yourself, well, if we get to a clean, a net zero electricity system, we don't need to worry all that much about how much we're using because none of it is affecting the future climate of the planet. And that's true of everything. It's like if we have, you know, carbon free jet fuel, we don't have to worry about flying to Europe. That's like the optimistic case for all of this is like we can get to some point or we don't have to worry about our guilt on any of these points. And that was technically like Joe Biden's clean electricity plan was to get us there. And we're now not on that path. And that means that for the foreseeable future, especially in the us we're going to be dealing with some amount of, you know, guilt and about feeling of guilt and responsibility for what we do with AI now. What can this tech do for us in the future? I mean, AI has already done an enormous amount for climate science, for clean energy. You know, I think we often get a little confused because we talk about like AI as though it came out with ChatGPT in 2022 or whatever. And it's like scientists have been doing machine learning stuff for decades and that's a big part of the whole scientific research apparatus. It's a big part of climate science. It's a big part of, you know, energy innovation. Like, you know, when we talk about managing the grid better, a lot of that has to do with, you know, something you could call AI. Even though it's not being done by a chatbot. And I do think that there's enormous potential there in the same way that there's enormous pot for AI with medicine and drug discovery and development. I think it's undeniable. Like, the more firepower we have to throw at a problem, like, the easier it'll be to solve. I'm somewhat more skeptical on the like, LLMs are going to do all this stuff for us. And honestly, I'm a little bit out of my depth talking about it in detail, but I think that in my personal use, the amount of and, you know, false stuff that chat GPT and even deep research and whatever throws at me, I'm just like, I'm not going to hand my, the future of the planet over to these machines anytime soon. Like, that would be completely irresponsible. And yet here we have like, here's the Pentagon signing a huge 200 was a 200 billion dollar deal with Grok. And it's like, I know last week Grok was calling it.

[Tim Miller]

I thought it was Hitler last week.

[David Wallace Wells]

And now it's like the Department Defense.

[Tim Miller]

Is like, all right, sign me up, machine Hitler. Getting a military is no problem. Nothing to worry about there.

[David Wallace Wells]

Yeah, no, it's like that old Norm MacDonald routine about Germany taking over the world again. So I think a lot of this is TBD. I think it's possible in 50 years that we think that AI has really helped us address a lot of aspects of climate planning, climate resilience. I think that's certainly possible, but I don't think it's going to be coming out of a chatbot. I think it's going to be coming out of more constrained, more focused models.

[Tim Miller]

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[David Wallace Wells]

Well, I mean I would say, you know, I, there's an awful lot of blame and responsibility to lay at the feet of Donald Trump and the Republican party and Doge and all that. But it's actually a bigger story than that because even despite Joe Biden making a huge push on climate, making the IRA his signature piece of domestic legislation, the US was still falling dramatically behind in those years. And one way that I like to tell that story is like, you know, we basically had these subsidies in the Iraq and that those subsidies were calculated to allow American producers to match the Chinese market. It was basically like, this is how much subsidy we have to give in order to make our domestic green economy competitive. And then like nine months after the bill passed, Joe Biden's putting significant tariffs on top of that against Chinese green tech. And the reason he's doing that is because, oh, our calculation was also. Was actually way off. We have to, like, the gap is like, twice as big as we thought, and we need to make. We need to fill that gap with something else. And then, you know, it's like a few months after that, I see an essay by Brian Deese, who's you know, one of Biden's central economic advisors, but has a clean energy background and so really focused on these things. And he's like, we actually need America to subsidize the rest of the world buying our stuff from our clean stuff from us, like a green Marshall Plan, in order to compete with China. And that's like, that's basically. It's an acknowledgment that even with the tariffs, we're still not catching up. People in South America and Africa are still going to be buying directly from the Chinese. We need to be, you know, subsidizing it on top of that. So every few months we take a new assessment and we're even further behind. That even is before Donald Trump comes into office and basically cancels the IRA.

[Tim Miller]

And their optimistic assessments about, like, how much it was going to cost to build and abort the stuff, like, all of that and, you know, everything ends up becoming more expensive and less efficient than they thought. Right. For a variety of reasons.

[David Wallace Wells]

And we think about it in terms of cars and I mean, you know, a lot of very smart people think that basically the Chinese car industry is going to destroy the European car industry in a very short order. The US May hang on a little bit longer just because we have such a much larger domestic market. But we also think about it a little bit in solar panels. But it's also, you know, it's batteries in general. It's like all of these inputs to all these things. It's the refining of rare earth, it's the pieces of solar panels. So even if you're a, you know, manufacturer in South Asia or Southeast Asia, you're still buying the raw stuff from China. They're just dominating every aspect of the green supply chain globally. Something like every single input is like 60, 70, 80% controlled by the Chinese. And when you get up to finished solar panels, it's even. It's even larger than that. So the US is just, you know, hopelessly behind. And I think there's a way of thinking about this is just, you know, this is the great story of our time. It's bigger than climate, but it's expressed in climate. It is a giant industrial superpower waking up. You know, we thought that like the story of modernity was a Western story, but we may be learning that in fact we're handing the baton to China. That's not to say that like they're going to become, you know, in geopolitical terms or military terms, the dominant power in short order. Who knows exactly how that'll all play out. But just when you think about what the global market is, what people trading in goods, where they are focused, where they're drawing from, it's like China is just building stuff out at such a different scale than anywhere else in the world. And it's just humbling because even 10 years ago, 12 years ago, we really thought we were in a dominant position here. You know, when, when Obama was trying to pivot to Asia and do the tpp, he was like, I can keep China in this little box if I get people to sign onto this deal. And now we're just in a world where like much of the world is just like, forget the U.S. just forget them.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah. The thing I think about listening to you just as sort of like the domestic political challenge in dealing with all this is it's kind of interesting that there isn't. If I said who is the person, who is the politician or political figure or leader outside of politics who best represents almost like a jingoistic or patriotic flag waving. We need to, like the US needs to compete and win around the world. Like, we need to kick the Chinese ass. It's important that we do this for economically and geopolitically, you know, Hulk Hogan, like, we've got to go, you know, dominate in this space. That person doesn't exist really. And I do wonder if that, like, if like kind of the failure of the ira, like is maybe related to that at all. I don't know. Do you have any thoughts on either of those points?

[David Wallace Wells]

Well, I think there, there is like a rising that there is like that in like the, you know, Ezra and Derek abundance spirit. Like that is sort of like their vision.

[Tim Miller]

It's hard to think of Ezra as like a Hulk Hogan type figure though, you know, totally well.

[David Wallace Wells]

But they have, you know, they have a lot of friends sort of in various places on the political spectrum, some of whom are a little bit more jingoistic. Marc Andreessen would certainly like, you know, you know, I think of him as in many ways a villain.

[Tim Miller]

But yeah, now we're tipping over from jingoism into kind of like, like I'm sure it's interested in white, white identity politics. Politics and fascism. Right. So I'm trying to, we're trying to find someone else on that.

[David Wallace Wells]

But it is interesting because, you know, a big pitch by OR for the tech, right. In the run up to the November election was like, we need unencumbered, you know, development of these key industries centrally AI, but also everything that serves AI. We need to get the crypto, all that they get, get all this, all the regulation that Biden piled on us, which I think has been hugely overstated by these people. But just, I'm just ventriloquizing their point of view. Sure, we need to get all of that red tape cut, we need to get some more money flowing in from the government. But basically we need a hands off approach to let Silicon Valley take over the future on behalf of the United States. And you hear that not just people talking narrowly about AI, but like all of the Palantir Andrew folks like, they are like, we need to do this for military tech. We need to design, you know, what's the name of the Alex Carp book, You know, the, the Technological Republic or whatever. Although he's not really imagining a republic at all. He's imagining something much more authoritarian than that. But in any event, you know, there was this huge energy coming out of Silicon Valley that actually was doing exactly what you were saying, but it was aligned to the Republican Party.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah.

[David Wallace Wells]

Now why was that? It was because, like, those people felt insulted by cultural signals coming out of like the Democratic Party under the Biden administration. I mean there, there was Lina Khan doing some antitrust stuff. But like, you know, these people, they just seem so insane to me. They talk about because they weren't invited.

[Tim Miller]

To the White House or it's like.

[David Wallace Wells]

You guys all made hundreds of billions of dollars. You are the richest, most powerful people in the world. What are you complaining about? What kind, like, what treatment did you expect? And this is not new among business people, but it seems so grotesque.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, no, I asked Cuban about this and Cuban was like, it's rational to me. It's like they didn't get their phone calls returned. And I'm like, okay, so I was like, I didn't have a prom date either. You know, I haven't turned to fascism, but. I hear you, but that, but again though, maybe that is maybe a narrative. I Guess if we're going to give a more generous, not generous, you know, a critique of the Democrats that's like more rational. Right. Is it because they didn't offer, you know, something that felt like a narrative framework that felt like it was about, you know, whatever, like economic growth and prosperity for people and that you could like with, you know, we can solve these big problems and we can do it with private. Right. Like, I don't know. I don't know.

[David Wallace Wells]

I mean, my view, I'm more on the left than you, but my view is like, that is the Green New Deal. Like that pitch was like, we're going to.

[Tim Miller]

There are a lot of dumb rules in the Green New Deal, though.

[David Wallace Wells]

Well, I mean, we never got to a real policy proposal.

[Tim Miller]

Right. So, like there are a lot of dumb rules and things that people, random people put on white websites, you know.

[David Wallace Wells]

Yeah. And you know, there are pieces of the climate coalition and the liberal left coalition that are degrowth. Yeah. That have that impulse in them. But at its basic level, what it is like, do you remember the New Deal? We're going to do that for clean tech. We're going to spend a lot of money to build out a new infrastructure that will allow us to live cleaner, safer, like, you know, more prosperous lives. We're going to invest through public means in the public well being of the country and the planet. That was like, that's the basic conceit there, that a new industrialization could be brought about by climate concerns. And that is what we're seeing in China.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah.

[David Wallace Wells]

And we turned away from it. Now, as both of us are saying, you know, the Green New Deal was for many reasons a hard sell. It was, it was not presented always in that way. But even when I think about what Joe Biden actually did accomplish with chips and the infrastructure bill and the Iraq, I mean, these are basically large scale public spending programs to try to bring about a new era of economic prosperity. And it had, all of them, had clean aspects to them. But it's like, you know, he's just basically saying, here's a tax credit to buy an ev. Here's a tax credit to buy solar panels. You know, it's like it wasn't oppressive. It was all carrot, no stick. And I think that helps explain why there was no broad public backlash to it. It was hardly mentioned on the campaign trail. It certainly wasn't mentioned in the midterms.

[Tim Miller]

There's no backlash, but there's also no rallying around it. Right. Like nobody, Nobody. There's no backlash. But also Nobody seems too mad. Like I'm mad, people are mad. But like there's no mass movement of anger about the fact that it's being taken away either. Right. I guess would be my point.

[David Wallace Wells]

I think, you know, a lot of, a lot of folks, including folks who are involved in the writing of the ira, are saying, like it, this is not just a catastrophic setback for climate or for the American economy. It's, it's a, it's a. It undermines our whole theory of politics. Like we thought we were going to send money to purple districts in purple states and that like that was going to win people over to the cause of climate. And you know, at the local level it has done some of that. If you look at what, what's happened in Texas where they've had, you know, their electricity bills have been lowered by 50% by green energy buildout and they've had their risk of blackouts cut from like 16% to 1% over just based on the new clean energy that they brought online in the last couple of years. Every year now there are Texas legislators who try to undermine that program in the Texas state house and every year they get defeated. But at the national level we've just got so which goes back to what we're talking about, the beginning of the conversation. There's just so much other stuff that we're talking about that crowds up our mind that even if people in Georgia or Texas are a little bit more supportive of green energy than they were five years ago, it doesn't ultimately matter for their presidential vote. And it's not the main way that they think about what's happening in Washington.

[Tim Miller]

The other thing, I don't think this is the Democrats fault, a less fault really. But like getting coded left also is just part of this. It gets lumped into climate, ends up getting lumped into the omni. Cause of all the other things that people think that they don't like about the left, right? And so you got into this situation where these fucking tech assholes who are pushing for this, as you mentioned, this revolution and this investment and getting rid of any shackle, government shackles and the expansion of AI and crypto, like they didn't include green tech in part of it because it felt like, oh, like that's lib, right? Like, and maybe, and that is maybe associated with polarization or maybe the disinformation, right? Like this might be tied into disinformation story where they've like decided that they don't think climate change is real anymore. You can't be a real conservative if you care about this.

[David Wallace Wells]

I don't know, it sort of depends how who you're talking about and how you slice the coalition. I mean I've been, I've noticed certainly since Elon and Trump had a falling out that Elon has like, like routinely been posting about how much China's kicking our ass on, on green electricity and solar and that kind of thing. And you do hear that from a lot of people who are like in and around the tech. Right? They do talk about the need to build an electro state, the need to build a type one civilization, they call it like they do, they do use that language and what that means, these nerds. Yeah, well, it's just like they want to live in a sci fi. Now I remember, you know, I, I, a bunch of years ago I did a long interview, I did the Paris Review interview with William Gibson and he was talking about how he sort of first imagined the, he first kind of came up with the idea of cyberspace which is like, you know, he, and he said, I walked past a bus stop and I saw like an ad for a personal computer. And I was like, wow, that's really cool. And then I walked past an arcade and I saw all the kids leaning into the machine and he was like, they want to live in the machine, they want to live inside the machine. All these people designing the future of the world in Silicon Valley, they all want to live in sci fi and fantasy novels and their understanding of the future is so defined in those terms. Nevertheless, they will often talk about the need for clean energy. They'll also talk about nuclear, they'll also talk about geothermal, but like they're not opposed to solar. But like the main thing they need is just volume of electricity. I do think that we're seeing in this period of the Trump, you know, it's so hard to talk about the way this coalition is breaking up and you know, the Epstein thing is like one other chapter in that. But in this particular period where you have some, you know, led by Elon, some frustration with Trump in the way that the BBB went through, I think you are starting to see some concern from the tech titans about how underserved or poorly served their needs were and are by a fossil only approach. But it hasn't yet shattered the coalition at a national level by any stretch of the imagination.

[Tim Miller]

Maybe this is why I feel so disconnected from this debate sometimes because you're right, the tech guys do want to live in a machine. And you listen to the Peter Thiel interview. And you can tell he kind of wants the human race to end and that he wants us to become cyborgs. And then, you know, you've got the. And he sees his enemy. He thinks Greta is the Antichrist. I don't think Greta is the Antichrist, but I think if anybody in the conversations, the Antichrist is probably Peter. But I don't think Gret. I don't believe there is an Antichrist, but I don't think Greta is the Antichrist. But I also, like, there is like a kind of a dehumanizing element sometimes to the conversation coming from the climate left, too. Right. That it's like, we need fewer humans. We need less, you know, less of that. Right. And so I'm like. I'm like, these two people are fighting at each other, and I'm like, I don't think any of them actually really care that deeply about, like, human prosperity in the future at a deep level.

[David Wallace Wells]

Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I have. I have more sympathy for the. For the folks on the climate far left, I think, than you do, but.

[Tim Miller]

Obviously I wasn't trying to create a. Even parallel. I just mean that like. Like this idea of. Right. Like, of not centralizing individual human flourishing, like, versus caring more about.

[David Wallace Wells]

When I. When I started writing about climate, this is one of the things that I really leaned into and leaned on was I would say, like, I'm, you know, I'm a New Yorker. I'm, you know, in a lot of ways, like a neoliberal. I do not come to this because I care about polar bears or, you know, forest or trees. I care about this because I started to realize how significant the impacts would be on humans and indeed on humans like me. But, you know, the interesting thing to me about the questions that you're raising is that, like, everybody in talking about the failure, the American failure here, points to China and says, look how much they're doing. And whether it's like Marc Andreessen lamenting how quickly they're building out their drone industry, or whether it's Adam 2's talking about the rapid build out of solar, everybody's like, this is the country that's really building the future. And there are huge problems with China politically in terms of concern for individuals, human rights, all that stuff, individual human.

[Tim Miller]

Flourishing is not actually a huge priority for Chairman Xi either.

[David Wallace Wells]

But, like, this is an illustration of how climate concerns can fuel radical transformation, at least in the context of a still growing, relatively young industrial economy. And I think that should make us all Think a little bit harder about the, you know, whatever simplistic stories we might tell about what works and what doesn't because, you know, you're just like, you know, it's just any claim that you make that is based on America or Europe doing it right or wrong is just obliterated by the example of China. Like, nothing that we are doing in any direction almost has any bearing on, you know, debates about what the correct approach about climate is, because China's just doing so, so, so, so, so much more of it. And, you know, exactly what we can learn from them. I don't know, it may be limited, but, you know, I don't think, like, I don't know, I don't think we should just go around name calling about, you know, about the people who are undermining it domestically. We just have. We have to think much bigger if we really hope to, like, move into another, safer, more habitable phase.

[Tim Miller]

David Wallace, well, is trying to turn me red. And I think this is going to be the first blog podcast to go viral on TikTok. The Chinese are like, okay, now they're finally making some sense over there at the Bulwark. You know, they'll put their finger on the algorithm there. You mentioned Epstein. You have an Epstein article yesterday. I want to just talk about that briefly. We're going to obviously talk about Jeffrey Epstein on every episode for the foreseeable future until we figure who killed him. And your headline is the Epstein story is both conspiracy theory and genuine scandal. What parts the scandal for you that.

[David Wallace Wells]

So many of the world's most powerful people were associating some in pretty ongoing, you know, regular ways with a notorious sex offender, even in a period of time when the culture was really hostile to the idea of, you know, male sexual predation. So you have, especially after 2015 when a lot of extra stuff came out. But even going back to his first arrest, when people knew that he had been soliciting dozens of underage prostitutes and, you know, where you still have a huge cast of incredibly influential power brokers who were really, really close to Epstein. And I don't think we have any good explanation for that. You know, the. The sort of most naive answer is that he was at least seen to be an extremely wealthy, powerful person, in part because he had all of these connections and he was able to convene other wealthy and powerful people, in part because they were happy to be in his company in a kind of a private space and, you know, talk with each other as though they were real people that is to some extent defensible. But it's like if I'm imagining myself, I'm Larry Summers, I'm Kathy Rumler, I'm Bill Burns. I'm Nathan Myhrvold, I'm Bill Gates, I'm Reid Hoffman, I'm Peter Thiel. I'm. Any of these people, people. Ehud Barack, you know, Prince Andrew, Mohammed bin Salman. Any of these people who we have at least pretty good reason to believe had some ongoing relationships with him. I'm like, in 2015, 2016, 2017, like, am I really gonna say it's okay to go to his house for dinner? Like, why? Why is that? Somebody who I'm going to be associating.

[Tim Miller]

With and they'd known for 10 years at that point.

[David Wallace Wells]

Yeah. And, you know, and so what are they getting out of it? What is the nature of that relationship? I actually don't have a especially paranoid view of it, I don't think. I mean, we'll see. Or maybe we won't see it, probably. Actually we won't see. But like, I'm. I'm sort of like disinclined to believe the. That he was like, essentially running a pedophilia sex ring blackmail operation. I think that's quite extreme. My understanding of at least what his life in New York was like was that there wasn't much like, sort of sex in it involved. A lot of that was really focused in Florida where he was so in some ways, like, living separate lives. Nevertheless, just like, what? Why are all these people here risking public condemnation for what? And there are these more fundamental questions, like, how did he get the money that he seemed to have? How did he become into possession of the largest house in all of Manhattan? You know, how, you know, it's like, how did he become apparently a billionaire, all these things. What is the nature of his relationship, if any, with various intelligences services, etc. But I think the big scandal is we just have and still have an American elite, a global elite that counted him as a confidant and associate and just doesn't seem to add up to me. And I don't think. Well, like, a lot of the conspiracy stuff feels really extreme. This isn't QAnon. It's not, you know, Pizzagate. I'm still like, yeah, like, why? Why is Steve Bannon spending 15 hours talking to Jeffrey Epstein on camera? What. What the fuck is that about? And then to see him last weekend on stage being like, we need a special investigator, special special counsel investigating this. It's like you were like, A good friend of his.

[Tim Miller]

Shouldn't you have been in on the investigation or like.

[David Wallace Wells]

Or. Or at least. At least release the videotapes.

[Tim Miller]

At least release the videotape. Steve Bannon. You release the tapes. Here's the thing that people in that world, whatever you want to call it, the kind of contrarian, more conspiratorial world, the Rogan world. I just would go a step further from what you're saying about what the scandal is, which is we know all of these people were involved with them at some level. We know at least some of them were involved with him with regards to the sexual predation of young girls. And there's been no social penalty or no legal repercussions for anyone associated with Jeffrey Epstein besides Julian Maxwell. Not a single person like one of them became elected president and is the current president since then. What, a longtime relationship with him? As you mentioned in your article, one of them was a past president, still is speaking at the Democratic National Convention last year. I'm not saying that there should be a specific social penalty for any of these people, but the fact that there is none, that there's been none, and there's been no legal penalty, and that the first time Jeffrey Epstein got caught, he got a sweetheart deal, it is not illegitimate for regular people around the world to be like, this is rich fucking elite people protecting each other. Like, this is. Maybe Jeffrey Epstein wasn't running a blackmail racket, but there's a protection racket of some kind happening around all these folks.

[David Wallace Wells]

Yeah.

[Tim Miller]

And that is a real scandal, and that's a legitimate thing for people to be upset about. And clearly Donald Trump was involved in that, and he's the current President of the United States.

[David Wallace Wells]

It, you know, it's elite impunity showcased in a very direct way in an era when that has been one of the most. One of the things that the public has been most outraged about. You know, I don't want to speak too much in defense of Donald Trump, but it does seem like they had, you know, their falling out was in, like, 2004, 2005.

[Tim Miller]

So that is true. His falling out was before he was first arrested. That is true.

[David Wallace Wells]

According to Michael Wolf, that falling out happened in part because, according to Michael Wolfe, Jeffrey Epstein thinks that Donald Trump turned him in to prevent Epstein from dropping a dime on Trump for doing money laundering in Florida. So there is, like, it all. It is all, like, tangled up. I don't know exactly how seriously to take that story. But, yeah, I mean, I would say more broadly, you know, that Plea agreement that Epstein signed in Florida in 2008, I think explicitly, you know, barred the federal government from prosecuting anyone related to the case in the future. And that is the. That even more than the sort of short prison sentence which he was mostly able to serve in his mansion, that part of the plea deal just seems a little curious and I think hasn't ever really been adequately explained. And even beyond that, I think, you know, putting aside the legal repercussions, I think actually I may be a little bit more skeptical than you are that there are many other people who are involved in the sex crimes here. There may be some, but I'm.

[Tim Miller]

I'm obviously, there were people committing the sex crimes. It wasn't just Jeffrey Epstein that was fucking the girls.

[David Wallace Wells]

I don't think we can say that for sure. I mean, the main. The main accuser, who is.

[Tim Miller]

Several accusers have accused other people, including Prince Andrew and others.

[David Wallace Wells]

I don't want to get into a position where I'm defending, defending anything.

[Tim Miller]

I don't want to make it. I'm just trying to understand.

[David Wallace Wells]

Well, you know, a lot of these people have questions about their credibility that are meant that they have not been called in any of the proceedings going forward. I think one of them actually made a public apology to Alan Dershowitz for accusing him. I have no sympathy for Alan Dershowitz, but just to say, you know, a lot of this, I would say, is in the realm of ambiguity rather than unknown fact.

[Tim Miller]

I sat with Alan Dershowitz at a dinner, one of these dumb dinners, where he talked about this for like, 40 minutes. And defending himself, which on the one hand makes you feel like, man, a hit dog barks loudest. On the other hand, it's like, I don't know if I was falsely accused of pedophilia in the news, like, maybe I would not be able to talk about anything else either. I don't know which way you fall on that, but it was noteworthy.

[David Wallace Wells]

But to get back to my point, which is more about this sort of the culture of elite impunity in general, and it's more about the social approbation that you're talking about than the legal consequences, which is like, this was a public fact that Jeffrey Epstein was a sex trafficker and sex offender. That was known. It was known to me, you know, as a reader of Gawker, like, it was known to me. It was like, as a readers of the New York Post. It was known to readers of the New York Post. It was a public fact and that anybody would Say, just a little peccadillo. I can just go over to dinner at his house. It's all fine. Maybe he's being scapegoated. Maybe he's being.

[Tim Miller]

We'll let him sponsor our charity. Our charity ball. Yeah, I mean, we'll let him sponsor our university, you know.

[David Wallace Wells]

No, I mean, the Harvard and MIT connections are really quite astounding. And I think, you know, it's just like, how could anybody, putting aside those who are directly associating with him, how could anyone. Like, how could deans and provosts be, like, looking at, like, where this money is coming from and think, oh, that's fine. It's coming from a acknowledged sex trafficker and sex offender who's murky with a murky job. Yeah. And, like, where's the money coming from? Yeah.

[Tim Miller]

Totally unclear source of money.

[David Wallace Wells]

And that. That, to me is like, the real issue is that even if there's no fire there, it tells you that in these circles, at least among these particular people who we know about, there was nothing like the kind of reflexive scrutiny that you or I might apply to a figure like Jeffrey Epstein if confronted with him. And instead, it seems like they basically thought, he's one of us. And whether that means we commit crimes like this, too, which I think is unlikely, or whether it just means someone who does this, these kinds of things, is okay. Is cool, is, you know, worth spending time with. That's an indictment itself. And I think very few of those people have adequately answered for that lack of oversight.

[Tim Miller]

We're way over. But I'm going to ask you one more question, and then I'll just let you cook on it, and then we can take it out. It's kind of a dark topic, which is in your ouv. You've been writing a lot about the kind of COVID post. Covid trauma, too. And I was thinking about. I was interested in asking you how you think about it in the context of your work, about climate. Because I think about the COVID stuff, and a million people died in the country over it. And yet when we look back at it, it seems like the cultural remembrance is that we did too much to guard against it. And I just want to even admit I have to fight against that because the brain part of me knows that we didn't do enough if a million people died. But there's a visceral part of me that's like, why was my kid still wearing a mask in fall of 2021 when she probably shouldn't have been? And so. So I understand why that is. And so I think about that, what we learned from that, and then you compare it to the climate situation where it's like, there's part of you that's like, okay, well, maybe we'd get really more serious about it if New Orleans went underwater or something. But I look at the COVID thing now and I think, I don't know if there's a scale of devastation that would change people's view towards it. So, anyway, I wanted to get your take on that thought and we'll leave it there.

[David Wallace Wells]

Yeah, in the really big picture, I have much the same view that you do. I, I actually think in a lot of ways we did overreact on particulars, and there's probably a lot to learn about the things that we. That were unnecessary, that we went through. But I think in the really big picture, you have to say that on that. You can't just toss out the whole project of limiting the spread of this disease as wasteless, you know, as, as. As useless and wasteful. And the way that I know that for sure is that when I go back to 2020 and I see Anthony Fauci saying 100,000Americans could die, and everybody's like, what an alarmist.

[Tim Miller]

Right?

[David Wallace Wells]

That was the public response. It's like that. You have Neil Ferguson in England saying maybe a couple million Americans could die. And people are like, that is completely crazy. But if that were true, of course we would want to take maximal precautions to protect one another. Then we end up in a world that is actually like the one that the alarmists projected. And we are telling ourselves in that post pandemic emergency period that it was all unnecessary and that the threat was trivial and that we have been much better off just letting it burn through the population at great speed. And, yeah, I think when I compare it to the climate crisis, I think there's something really amazing and inspiring about the first period of the pandemic response when for a few months, all of us in America, and really all of us around the world, did an enormous amount to protect one another and ourselves. It was a really. It was produced by fear, but it was a. An incredible global gesture of solidarity that I think is basically unparalleled in modern history. And yet we responded to that performance of solidarity by then resenting the fact that we had to do it at all, and resenting it so much. And this is the thing that really frustrates me, resenting it so much that we just don't see clearly what we actually did. And the burdens that were actually imposed on us. You know, we talk about lockdowns. First of all, lockdowns were not policed. It was all recommendations. When people talk about Sweden and their voluntary lockdowns, that's what the US Did. You know, you can maybe point to a few people who got tickets, like maybe a few dozen people in a country of 330 million people. People. This was not an authoritarian response. It was a. We were given a set of advisories, and in part because we were so scared, we basically respected them for a period of time. How long? A couple of months. A couple of months.

[Tim Miller]

Unless you lived in Oakland, in California.

[David Wallace Wells]

And a couple of other places, they were. They were. Things lasted a little bit longer. Certainly the school closures went on much longer than, you know, in retrospect, we would have liked. All of that is absolutely true. But the idea that, you know, in the early months of 2020, you had all of these people on the conspiratorial right, saying, like, this is the beginning of a new world government. They're taking away all of our freedoms. And it was like, you know, I was eating out with friends in the summer of 2020, and I was like a. I was someone who was scared of the virus. You know, in a place that was run by a pretty aggressive governor, Andrew Cuomo. Can't believe he's back in the news. And, you know, people were socializing in parks and exercising. By the summer of 2020, there were restrictions. You were advised to wear masks. Schools were closed way too long. But when you think about, you know, on the. On the grand scheme of things, like, do we want to go back in time and do absolutely nothing in 2020, would that have been better? Would it have been better to have. Instead of one and a half million Americans die, three or four or five million Americans die? Like, that is a much, much, much more catastrophic footprint that it would have left. And, you know, I just think if you had put that precise dilemma to the country as a whole in early 2020, they would have said, let's bunker down. They would not have said, let's let it burn. And the fact that we came out of the process thinking that was a mistake, collectively thinking that was a mistake, I think is really sad, problematic. I think it's a.

[Tim Miller]

A.

[David Wallace Wells]

It's also a sign of the basic trauma of the whole experience, which is that, above all, this thing taught us that however rich we are, however advanced our technology is, however far from the times of the Black Death, we really thought we were. We are still biological creatures. We are still vulnerable to forces larger than us, which we cannot perfectly control. And I think, by the way, this is like one reason why Maha really springs up is because it tells you you can control your own health when the scary message of the pandemic is you can't really control your own health, certainly on your own. But unfortunately, the social response that we've taken from it was that we're not going to try to do it collectively either. And that really scares me about climate and so much else.

[Tim Miller]

All right, Alan Dershowitz, Defender, David Wallace. I was just joking. Just joking. David Wallace. Wallace, New York Times. That's. Subscribe to his newsletter if you want climate stuff. Tom Doing my best to keep informed of our bleak future across a separate vertical from the one I cover every day. Appreciate you very much. Come back. Unfortunately, I think we'll probably have reason for you to come back soon.

[David Wallace Wells]

All right, Cool man. Talk to you soon.

[Tim Miller]

All right. Hope that was uplifting for you. It's David Wallace Wells. Appreciate him very much. We'll be back tomorrow with one of your favorites. So we'll see you all then. Peace.

[Unknown]

Well, I dreamed I saw the knights in armor coming Saying something about a queen There were peasants singing and drummers drumming and the archers split the tree There was a fanfare blowing to the sun that was floating on the breeze look at Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s look at Mother Nature on the run in the 1919 70s. I was lying in a burned out basement with the full moon in my eyes I was hoping for replacement when the sun burst through the sky There was a band playing in my head and I felt like getting high.

[David Wallace Wells]

I.

[Unknown]

Was thinking about what a friend had said I was hoping it was a lie Thinking about what a friend had.

[Tim Miller]

The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.