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

The Bulwark Podcast

The Bulwark

Politics, News, News Commentary

4.6 • 8.9K Ratings

🗓️ 17 July 2025

⏱️ 72 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

While the Trump administration is doubling down on fossil fuels, China is annihilating us in the clean energy space. Right now, 75% of all renewable projects anywhere in the world are being built by a Chinese company. China is dominating the green energy supply chain with solar panels and batteries, and its electric car can charge in five minutes. The U.S. may be betting on AI, but that build-out needs cheap, fast energy—like wind or solar. We may have thought modernity was a Western story, but that may not be the case. Meanwhile, inland flooding could be the new face of the climate crisis, Silicon Valley overlords want to live in a sci-fi novel, and the Epstein story has legs because it's about elite impunity.

David Wallace-Wells joins Tim Miller.
show notes

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the Bullard podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
0:16.6	Delight 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
0:24.7	The Uninhabitable Earth published in 2019, a very uplifting piece of literature. It's David
0:31.6	Wallace Wells. What's up, man? Really good to be here. Good to see you. Good to see you, too. I
0:35.7	guess I just want to start in the micro about the Texas floods, which is one of the reasons I reached out to you recently and then
0:42.7	kind of get a little more macro on climate stuff after that. But as of last night, we have 132 dead
0:50.1	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.
1:00.2	Maybe it's because we were both on holiday recently, and I just kind of miss it. It feels like the scale of the reaction to this has been like kind of mild compared to the scale of the devastation. But I kind of want to just put a
1:13.7	quarter in and give any thoughts you have on what we saw in Texas. Well, just to start with what you
1:18.4	mentioned, the scale of reaction, I think that that's basically the standard now. I mean, I think a lot
1:24.2	about the fires that swept through L.A.
1:29.0	That was just six months ago.
1:34.3	It's like a huge, incredibly wealthy neighborhood in one of the most kind of globally,
1:39.3	culturally relevant places in the entire world, full of lots of famous, well-connected, powerful people.
1:40.4	The entire neighborhood was incinerated.
1:43.2	And six months later, it's not like a major story about
1:47.8	our climate, about our politics, about our society. Even when I talk to my friends in L.A.,
1:52.6	it's like a third or fourth order concern for them. And you see the same thing as, you know,
1:57.5	the now we fires that you mentioned from a couple of years ago, which, you know,
2:02.4	okay, it's a wildfire, it's a tragedy.
2:05.9	It was the deadliest North American wildfire in more than a century.
2:11.0	It destroyed the indigenous capital of the island.
	...

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