David Wallace-Wells

www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/m...

“Across Silicon Valley, the mismatch between AI capability and macro impact has become a kind of koan: Intelligence is not the bottleneck. Presumably, that goes not just for the possibility of A.I. superabundance but for the prospect of doom as well.” www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/m...

“By any concrete measure, the country threw more at the project of building AGI than it had at anything in many decades. And today the number of Americans who believe A.I. is moving too fast outnumber those who believe it is moving too slow by 33 to 1.” www.nytimes.com/2026/09/16/o...

Three quarters of the country now opposes data center construction. The coalition may be messy, the conviction somewhat thin for many. But we see mass politics like this so infrequently nowadays that we almost don’t know how to make sense of it. nytimes.com/2026/08/31/opi…

The most important thing about the data center backlash is that, in a time of intense polarization and micro-movements, it is astonishingly large—such a big tent mass politics that any time you try and an atomize or explain it you end up diminishing it. nytimes.com/2026/08/31/opi…

Heatwave deaths of older people should not be tolerated It feels like a form of 'necropolitics' Adaptation of social behaviours is essential. Maybe more Europeans, especially those older,should abandon the cherished but deadly summer seaside for the cooler mountains www.nature.com/articles/s41...

1/ "This is the pivot point in the energy transition folks. Fossil chaos drives people to electrotech, as this is the first oil shock with a superior alternative. " says @ember-energy.org @kingsmillbond.bsky.social We argued similarly last week at Wesleyan (slides here) tinyurl.com/PolycrisisWe...

Introducing AIRBORNE Issue #3! Publishing 6 May. Pre-order or subscribe today: www.break-down.org/tag/issue-03/ 🔗

Update: The Trump administration has released an outline of options for dealing with the Colorado River’s deepening water shortages, and they could dramatically cut the amount of water available for Southern California. www.latimes.com/environment/... @latimes.com

I've been well aware of this reality for years but I was still shocked to learn some time ago that 40 PERCENT of freight shipping is fossil fuels

keep thinking of a vocally anti-woke reporter who insisted that the term "environmental racism" was nonsense

I'm going to repost our oped, bc the climate discourse is even worse than when we wrote it a year ago. 1/ Biden's IRA didn't fail bc of of Sunrise, the left, etc, it failed bc it had no impact on working class lives. 2/ Green economic populism is how we win. www.nytimes.com/2025/01/07/o...

NEW from me: The US is losing blue-collar jobs for the first time since early COVID or the Great Recession—the country has lost 65k jobs over the last year as manufacturing, transport, & mining employment decline, while growth in construction has nearly zeroed out www.apricitas.io/p/america-is...

Eyes wide open, folks. They're revealing the supervillain plot.

The LA fires are probably your most vivid illustration of our new age of wildfire and all the devastation it promises. But were they even wildfires? The ignition wasn’t wild, the fuel wasn’t wild, the landscape wasn’t wildland and wildland firefighting couldn’t help. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/05/o...

Looking back to @wwattribution.bsky.social studies in 2025 showed again, in stark terms, how unfairly the consequences of human-induced climate change are distributed. The world does not have to be like this, we have a lot of agency to make it better. www.worldweatherattribution.org/unequal-evid...

"The 2008 Great Recession shifted Americans toward identifying as a lower class" pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41417466/

Climate data and historical accounts suggest that crop failures in the 1340s prompted Italian officials to import grain from eastern Europe, and this may have carried in the plague bacterium

In 2025, the murder rate was the lowest ever recorded, with records going back all the way to 1960. It also set a record for the largest single year decline in murder rate since 1960. It was the third straight year in which a new record for largest decline was set. open.substack.com/pub/jasher/p...

In YouGov polling this week, less than half of Republicans said they strongly approved of Trump. www.ms.now/opinion/poll...

After Sri Lanka struggled through one of the worst storms in its history, tea plantation workers are taking temporary refuge in government schools and temples as entire villages were buried in mud in the central highlands.

open.substack.com/pub/insideme...

“Little-known secret: Almost every earthworm in most of the U.S. came from somewhere else. Native earthworms all but disappeared more than 10,000 years ago, when glaciers from a Pleistocene ice age wiped them out.” ecosystemsontheedge.org/earthworm-in...

‘A total of 34% of Republican survey respondents between the ages of 30 and 49 answered “I am such person” when asked for their views on individuals who openly express racist views. Only 3% of survey respondents over the age of 65 answered “I am such person.”’ www.newsweek.com/millennial-r...

“More than 40% of the wealth generated since the start of the century has gone to the wealthiest 1%, while the bottom half of the world’s population received just 1%.” www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/g...

www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

“The year featured a record number of violent incidents over water around the world, far surpassing the 355 in 2023, continuing a steeply rising trend. The violence more than quadrupled in the last five years.” www.latimes.com/environment/...

“I will limit my discussion to their actual plan to handle a new virus. It was very different from the GBD and it’s foundational principle of focused protection. Dr. Bhattacharya’s new plan is much simpler: vulnerable people should stop being vulnerable.” sciencebasedmedicine.org/bhattacharya...

“Survey conducted in April 2025 and published on Sunday by the Israel Democracy Institute finds more than 25% of Israelis are now considering leaving Israel behind.” forward.com/opinion/7863...

“The lifetime emissions generated by every 3.5 Americans today will kill one person by the end of the century.”https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/measure-climate-progress-in-lives-improved-by-gernot-wagner-2025-11?

“It remains the case that we are embarking on—in fact, accelerating—the biggest chemistry experiment on the planet in 66 million years, and one of the fastest derangements of the carbon cycle in the age of animal life.” www.theatlantic.com/science/2025...

“What once sounded unthinkable is now being said openly: Tehran is not viable; and evacuation orders are imminent. As I wrote before, President Masoud Pezeshkian himself said that it might be necessary to relocate Tehranis in large number.” open.substack.com/pub/peterfra...

“At current prices, the value of those IBIT holdings sits at around $364 million.” gizmodo.com/the-harvard-...

You ever just sit down and realize that the rise of 21st century fascism is capital's answer to climate change?

“One implication of the increased growth rate of GHG forcing in the last 15 years is that the goal to keep global warming under 2°C is now implausible.” open.substack.com/pub/jimehans...

“If we drive the carbon cycle far enough from equilibrium, it will respond in kind, no matter how hard we try to subordinate it to the market, or tame it with panicked legislation.” - @peterbrannen.bsky.social (quote from Peter’s excellent new book)

“The peptide free-for-all is the logical endpoint of a healthcare system where feeling optimised matters more than being safe, and where the new HHS Secretary actively dismantles the guardrails which might protect consumers from contaminated vials and 12,000% markups.” unherd.com/newsroom/rfk...