Volts podcast: David Wallace-Wells on the ravages of air pollution

In this episode, journalist David Wallace-Wells raises the alarm
about how incredibly unsafe our air is, the impact it’s having on
human welfare, and why it doesn’t get as much attention as it
should.


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transcript)


(Active
transcript)


Text transcript:


David Roberts


Back in 2020, I wrote an article about some eye-popping new
research on air pollution which found that the damage it is doing
to human health is roughly twice as bad as previously thought,
and moreover, that the economic benefits of pollution reduction
vastly outweigh the costs of transitioning to clean energy.


It seemed to me then that the findings should have gotten more
attention in the press, and I wasn't the only person who thought
so. Journalist David Wallace-Wells, who made a splash a few years
ago with his terrifying book on climate change, The Uninhabitable
Earth, also dove in to new air pollution research and produced a
magisterial overview for the London Review of Books last year.
Recently he revisited the subject for his New York Times
newsletter, asking why social mobilization against climate
change, which promises millions of deaths in decades, is so much
greater than mobilization against air pollution, which kills 10
million a year today.


It's a challenging question, and I'm not certain I have a great
answer, so I wanted to talk to David about it — what the new
research says about the mind-boggling scope and scale of air
pollution’s damage to human welfare, how we ought to think about
it relative to climate change, and what scares him most about the
process of normalization that allows us to live with 10 million
deaths a year.


David Wallace-Wells, welcome to Volts. Thanks so much for coming
on.


David Wallace-Wells


Oh, my pleasure. It's great to talk. Really good to be here.


David Roberts


So you made a big splash, several years ago, with your article on
climate change and the subsequent book, but in the last year or
so, year two, you have been writing more and more about just good
old-fashioned air pollution. And it seems like you're kind of
getting sucked in, like it keeps pulling you in. So tell me kind
of the story of how you first interacted with the story and why
you keep coming back to it.


David Wallace-Wells


Well, on some level, it's the same answer I give when people ask
me how I got worried about climate change, which is just to say I
was seeing scientific research that was really quite alarming.
And the more that I looked at it, the bigger the story seemed and
the more it seemed to demand of me as someone who wrote on
anything close to these issues. The slightly more personal
version of it is, like, I wrote my book, I spent a lot of time
talking about it, talking about climate change, and I found
myself again and again in describing the scale of the impact,
citing a small handful of data points or projections that I found
really useful to communicate what I saw as to scary it all was.


And one of those was this data point that at two degrees of
warming, we should expect 153 million additional deaths from air
pollution produced from the burning of fossil fuels. And I would
always caveat that and say, "no, that's not exactly climate
change, but it's caused by the same things that cause climate
change." And the more I said it and the more that I thought about
it, I was like, "wait, hang on a second. If the most dramatic
data point that I can come up with to explain how scary the world
that we're going to be living in is ... is not actually about
temperature rise, maybe I should spend some time thinking about
what that means and how it might change my own perspective on
warming and what that's likely to be like."


And so I wrote a piece. It actually was a very slow burn piece,
and it was actually, even though it totally contradicts what I
just said, was a story that was proposed to me by the LRB. I
wrote a piece for the London Review of Books that was published
last fall, but which they had actually invited me to write before
the pandemic began. And over the course of those couple of years,
I was just collecting more and more material. And as I sort of
had done with climate, it just felt like the more I looked, the
more I saw, the darker the picture got.


Now, there are some really important distinctions, and it's not
an easy parallel. We could talk about some of the contrasts, but
in general the sort of emotional experience of it, for me, was
the same, which is just to say I had my eyes opened out of some
amount of horror or fear, and the deeper that I looked into the
subject, the bleaker it seemed to get.


David Roberts


Right, well, I want to talk about some of those parallels in a
minute, but first let's just dwell on the research for a minute
because I feel like there's sort of a popular conception of air
pollution in the US, insofar as people think about it anymore.
It's like the river used to burn. Then we got the Clean Air Act
and the Clean Water Act and more or less tackled that problem and
now it's just a problem for overseas. I think that's kind of the
folk story of air pollution. But the recent research, it's almost
qualitative difference.


I wrote about this for Vox a few years ago, just looking at this
new research that's basically like, "it turns out the effects are
about double what we thought they were." I'm like, "damn." It
seemed like it should have been bigger news then, I kind of wrote
a little table-pounding story about it. So just talk about kind
of what scientists have concluded in these last few years about
air pollution and its effects.


David Wallace-Wells


Well, there's sort of two stories running in parallel, or maybe
parallel isn't even the right word. They're kind of running in
opposite directions at once. And one is the story that you've
summarized as the folk history, which is to say, "in the richer
parts of the world, air pollution is getting better."


That is true. If people remember 20, 30, 50, 70 years ago, the
air in the US and in Europe was a lot worse than it is now. And
it is better in part because of policy, but in part because of
activism, and for a variety of reasons, but it is better. And the
health impacts are significantly smaller today in the US than
they used to be. But at the same time, we're learning that the
health impacts generally are way worse than we thought than they
were. So I touched on this in the story I went for the Times
recently about it, but I think this is one of the complications
in processing this new data, is that we see things getting better
even as the science is giving us a darker and darker picture.


What that science says is, "every time we lower the threshold
that we want to consider safe for air pollution, we discover that
in fact, that new level of air pollution that we thought was safe
was not safe."


David Roberts


Yeah, and that's and that story is unbroken. The ratchet never
goes in the other direction, as far as I can tell.


David Wallace-Wells


Totally. And it's it's very much the parallel there is there with
lead, where just every few years there's a new standard. And then
researchers are like, "actually, let's make it even lower." So
the WHO just released last fall a new global standard, in which
they said that anything higher than five micrograms per cubic
meter of particulate matter is dangerous to your health. The
previous level had been ten. In the US, the official standard of
safety is twelve, still to this day.


David Roberts


That's battled over and battled over. What was Obama trying to
make it like? What were we trying to ...?


David Wallace-Wells


I actually don't know those details. Maybe you'd know them better
than I do.


David Roberts


Yeah, I want to say ten or eight.


David Wallace-Wells


I mean, it would make sense that they were just trying to pull it
into line with the WHO standard, which had been ten so that
probably makes sense.


David Roberts


And have failed repeatedly.


David Wallace-Wells


And I don't want to overstate what this means for people in the
US who are breathing unhealthy air, which is to say, if the who
standard is five and we're at, as a country, nine or whatever, or
you're in a particular locality where it's seven or eleven, it's
not like you're going to be dealing with the same level of health
impacts as people living in Delhi, for instance, are. There's a
spectrum, and the more of it there is, the worse off you are.


But one of the things that's been most interesting to me, at a
sort of conceptual level in thinking about all of this, is also
that while the effects on an individual life can be relatively
small or even invisible, when you unroll the impact or the menace
over a large population, the totals really add up. So a big study
that came out of Harvard, about a year and a half ago, and the
headline there was that 8.7 million people around the world died,
and I think it was 2019, just due to the air pollution from the
burning of fossil fuel. So 8.7 million a year, globally, just
from the burning of fossil fuels. Putting aside all other causes
of air pollution, they found that just within the US, the total
was 350,000, a year, which is roughly as many Americans as died
in the first year of COVID officially.


So we are, even here, breathing our relatively clean air and
telling ourselves that things are getting better on the pollution
front. Even here, 350,000 lives, or so, are being cut short every
year due to these impacts.


David Roberts


There's a parallel, I think, to the climate discussion, in that
you can say climate causes X deaths, but deaths never present
themselves as from climate, right? What climate is doing is
raising the odds of other bad things happening. And in a sense,
it seems like, kind of, conceptually, air pollution is the same
way. Like air pollution is not on your death certificate, right?
Air pollution just raises the odds of this immense range of other
bad things happening.


David Wallace-Wells


Yeah. It basically makes everything about the human body and the
human brain worse. And that means that across a large population,
there's a much greater mortality risk than there would have been
without it. And it's important to keep that in mind. It's not
like we're talking about someone dropping a bomb on a city when
we say, "10 million people die a year, globally, from air
pollution.' The causes are more diffuse, the impacts are more
diffuse, and the way that we experience those impacts are also
more diffuse in the sense that yeah, like the person, you know,
who might have died, given the world as it is, but wouldn't have
died in a world without air pollution, you probably attribute
their death to cancer, or respiratory disease, or heart disease.
But those rates are just much higher in the presence of this
environmental contamination.


David Roberts


Yeah. And people think about, I think, air pollution as
exacerbating, you know, like asthma and stuff like that, stuff
with your lungs, maybe even cancer. But, you know, you cite
research that ties air pollution to a wild array of outcomes like
health, psychological, social crime, like name it. Just tell us
about some of the sort of craziest things you found in those
studies.


David Wallace-Wells


I'll say the crazier stuff in a minute, but I think the most
important thing is just, like, it's just everything. So it makes
everything worse. So that's — the things that may seem familiar,
it's just important to sort of reiterate respiratory disease,
pulmonary disease, cancer. Then there's all stuff about cognitive
performance, and you can look at like surgeons perform worse when
there's more air pollution in the air, umpires and baseball games
make worse calls, when there's more air pollution in the air.
Crime goes up, domestic violence goes up. And there are these
pretty striking findings about mental health, and depression,
suicide, self-harm.


It really goes, like, all down the list of absolutely everything
that you could sort of define as a standard of human flourishing
is made worse, at the population level, when there's more of this
stuff floating around in the air. And the way that that rolls
out, or folds out, or plays out, in a place like the US, is one
kind of scale of effect. But in places where there's just a mass
amount of pollution, it's really dramatic. So in the US, the
estimate is that as a country, even though we're losing 350,000
people a year, on the whole, that only adds up to a loss of about
0.2 years of life expectancy, which is that like a few months on
average for every person. But it doesn't change the shape of your
life in a truly profound way. In Delhi, it is ten years, which
means that — this is a city of 20 million people. They are, on
average, losing ten years of life.


David Roberts


Yeah, that's wild. And losing, in some sense, before they're even
born, like, that's some of the most kind of depressing research
we cite.


David Wallace-Wells


Yeah, the research it's been, like, sort of a second active
research for me has been the effect on fetal health, and maternal
health, newborn health, which is growing a little bit, but it
just also happens to be something I've been focusing on more
lately. And I was writing this piece for the Times in the
immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court's decisions on Dobbs in
West Virginia versus EPA. And it felt like, "well, God, if only
we could show there was some connection between air pollution and
the well-being of newborns." So, yeah, globally, 500,000 newborns
die every year in ways that are attributable to air pollution.


So in South Asia alone, there are 350,000 stillbirths and
miscarriages every year attributable to air pollution. And the
effects are not just whether fetus lives, or dies, or survives.
The pregnancy emerges intact. It's also it affects premature
birth, low birth weight, which are strongly correlated with a lot
of measures of human well-being later in life. So, again, it's
really, no matter where you look, no matter what standard you're
trying to apply, or what question you're trying to ask about
whether people are flourishing in this world, air pollution is
almost certain to give a darker picture than we'd be able to
give, or have, or live through without it.


David Roberts


Let's talk a little bit about kind of what to do about it, where
it comes from. People think mostly about burning fossil fuels,
which I think is probably the bulk of the problem. But you point
out that there are other sources as well, big, large remaining
sources, even if you tackle fossil fuels.


David Wallace-Wells


Yeah, well, I would say actually there has been a bit of a shift
towards an understanding of the predominance of fossil fuels as
the cause over the last few years. I think, you know, rewind five
or ten years and people probably would have guessed that a lot of
it had to do with bad indoor cooking in the developing world and
agricultural burning. And those play a role too. But yeah, at
least according to this Harvard study, we're talking about the
large bulk of air pollution deaths being attributable to fossil
fuels, and that's in particular coal plants and cars.


But the natural world produces a fair amount of particulate
matter too. We have dust pollution. And so in the piece I
mentioned one study, that I actually think this may be slightly
pessimistic, but they said that if we entirely eliminated all
anthropogenic activity, half of the world would still be
breathing unsafe pollution levels.


David Roberts


No kidding. Because of dust, or fire, or what?


David Wallace-Wells


Yeah, a combination of dust and fire. And then there's just some
other stuff that, like vegetation, just gives off some particular
matter, which I didn't even know about before looking at this
work. So there's some stuff that we can do to somewhat take
control of that. Dust is a problem that can be, to some degree,
controlled through agricultural practices, and ecosystem
restoration, and that kind of thing. But probably we're going to
be living with some amount of this gunk floating around in our
air forever, and that's in certain ways dispiriting and
despairing. But to bring it back to something I said a few
minutes ago, it really is different if you're like, at ten
micrograms per cubic meter versus 40.


David Roberts


Right.


David Wallace-Wells


And we should be able to bring a lot of those really dangerous
levels of pollution down if we take control of the things that we
are doing as humans. Which is to say, burning stuff. In the LRB
piece, I had like a line that was, "everything we burn, we
breathe.' And I think that's a pretty good rule for thinking
about how to combat air pollution. Anytime you're lighting a
match to something, it'd be better if we didn't do that.


David Roberts


We light fewer matches. What do you say — I remember this kind of
old-school conservative thing, kind of before climate change took
over everything when air pollution used to be kind of a bigger
thing. I remember kind of the conservative take on it being based
on this Kuznets Curve, based on this idea that "the more
prosperous a society gets, the less it burns things," basically.
And so the solution to this is just to make those developing
nations as rich as possible, as fast as possible, rather than
focusing on the air pollution itself. What do you make of that
argument?


David Wallace-Wells


I think it's a relatively accurate description of the path of
development that most countries in the world have taken to this
point. But I find it pretty disingenuous as a guide, or rule, to
the way that we should be thinking about the present tense or the
future, in the sense that, especially, acknowledging how large a
role fossil fuel burning is playing in these issues. If we
believe, as the IEA and many other analysts tell us, that solar
power is the cheapest electricity in history, and 90% of the
world lives in places where renewables are cheaper than dirty
energy. There is no longer this trade-off, where living greener
and breathing cleaner air is going to come at the cost of
economic growth.


It's now the case that all else being equal and of course, there
are complications, but all else being equal, if we're drawing
development trajectories for anybody anywhere in the world at the
moment, we would be rapidly downgrading, downsizing, our
dependence on fossil fuel in those places and rapidly embracing
renewable power, which is going to produce many, many fewer of
these impacts. So I think going forward, and thinking about
policy, and culture, and economic activity going forward, I think
that that old rule is a little bit foolish and, essentially,
council's complacency, when, in fact, the landscape as we
understand it should push us in the other direction, to move much
more quickly to get off these sources.


David Roberts


It seems like even if you just take the same cost-benefit
analysis, the same equation, and just plug the new information we
have about pollution into it, just out of that, you would get
counsel for much more aggressive pollution reduction, right?


David Wallace-Wells


Yeah. I mean, this is something that you've written about too
when you wrote about the testimony that Drew Chandell gave, and I
can't remember if it was Congress or the Senate, during the
pandemic, but where he said that "the cost of the green
transition in the US would be entirely paid for and then some,
just through the public health benefits of the cleaner air that
that transition would bring about." So we don't have to worry.
You don't even have to put into the equation all the jobs we're
going to get. You don't even have to put into the equation the
climate benefits we're going to get. You just have to think about
the cleaner air, and that immediately pays for the whole project.


David Roberts


Yes, it would pay for everything. And also, now that we know more
about the damaged pollution side, it's the same story with lead,
right? As you said before, ever since we stopped using it, or
even before we stopped using it, we've just been learning, "oh,
it's worse, and worse, and worse, and worse, and worse than we
thought." And we've traced crime waves, tons and tons of stuff to
lead, basically, lead in the water. It's amazing how much you can
attribute to it.


And now the same thing is happening with particulates in air
pollution, which means when you look back, a. that the pollution
we have had in this country, decades ago, actually did more
damage than we knew. And b. something like the Clean Air Act —
they keep doing these cost-benefit analyses on it, and every time
you get new information about pollution, the overwhelming benefit
of the Clean Air Act just grows, and grows, and grows. To the
point now, that it's sort of like if it were popularly
appreciated, what a wildly successful piece of legislation that
was, there would be so much more outrage about what the Supreme
Court is doing, right? Like, in retrospect, we know it was even
more successful than anyone dared hoped, even until just very
recently.


David Wallace-Wells


Yeah. I want to go back to something you said just a minute ago
because I think it's really, really important, which is we can
talk about the public health impacts. We have talked about a lot
of them. But I think it's also important to understand just how
much these forces shape our social, and political, and cultural
lives through their public health impacts. So when we think about
lead, there's a quite plausible account that lead pollution,
which was concentrated in poorer, browner, blacker communities in
the US.


David Roberts


Always.


David Wallace-Wells


Drove the US crime wave of the 60s and 70s, or at least powered
it, gave it some extra push. As a result, we can say that that
crime wave was more racialized because of the racialized effects
of lead. And the result of that was "white flight" out of
American cities, the growth of quasi-reactionary, quote —
unquote, "centrist suburban politics" in this country.


David Roberts


Right. Reaganism in the 80s. I mean, you could spin it out.


David Wallace-Wells


The whole story of America over the last 50 years, and
especially, the American politics of the last decade or so. You
can actually quite neatly draw that line from lead pollution,
which is to say, to an environmental contaminant which we knew
was bad for you a century and a half ago, and we chose not to
worry too much about it because we didn't really appreciate the
scale. And there were other reasons not to take action. And so we
let the paint companies put lead in their paint, and we let the
gasoline companies put lead in their fuel.


And that whole time we knew. And the effect wasn't just corrosive
to the public health, particularly, of Black and Brown Americans,
poor Black and Brown Americans in the middle of the century. But
it is one of the driving forces in our entire national narrative
over the last five decades. And when you think about air
pollution in the same context, again, the impacts are not as
dramatic in the US as they are elsewhere, but the whole picture
that we have of early-stage industrial development in the late
20th, early 21st century in the Global South, so much of that is
tied up in the toxicity of the pollutants that are produced
there.


And if we could wind back the clock and run those development
patterns differently, the whole picture of the future, as it was
perceived in places like North India, would be really, really
different. And our perspective on those places, looking at it
from the Global North, would be really different, too. We
wouldn't regard life in the slums of the Global South as nearly
as dark and grim as they are, beyond which those, at least
implementing what we know now about the economic benefits of
clean energy, they may well be moving up the economic ladder much
faster than they are today, if they hadn't gone down that path.
So all of these stories from the incredibly local, individual
lives lost up through the geopolitical and the sort of mythic
level that we operate on often in our national politics, all of
those are affected by these forces.


And that's not to say that, like, "if you walk down the street in
Delhi, you're going to peel over and die", although I have walked
down the street in Delhi, and it can be hard to breathe. But it's
just to say, that when we put even a small-scale effect on a
population of 20 million, or in the case of India as a whole, 1.4
billion people, those effects really, really add up. And we are
just beginning, I think, to appreciate how much those stories of
environmental contamination are shaping all of these bigger
narratives that we've treated for so long as, if not quite
neatly, "great men theories of history", then stories about
national character or whatever.


David Roberts


Right. And you look back, and it also makes every bit of sort of
corporate lobbying, like in the lead story, every bit of
corporate lobbying, every backroom deal that let it go on a
little bit longer. Those now, knowing what we know about the sort
of first, and second, and third-order effects that spun out from
that, those just look like monstrous crimes. Like, the amount of
human suffering attributable to those decisions, looks enormous
now, with the full scope of history, to look at it, and it sort
of makes you think now, like, "here we are arguing again in our
politics right now over air pollution."


Like, do we think we're going to find out in the future? Again,
we should be learning prospectively now, from the past, that
these are very big decisions, and the benefits of reducing them
are so much larger, once you've taken the full picture than
anyone imagined like it ought to be transforming politics.


David Wallace-Wells


Yeah. And it's interesting because I come at this from a pretty
unusual position. I write about climate, I write about the
environment, but I'm such an urban person who does not think
about the rights of nature and the bounty of the planet that
needs to be protected. Those are not my emotional impulses. My
emotional impulses are to think about human suffering, but the
more that we learn about not just air pollution, but the effects
of pollution of all kinds. Yeah, I think you're exactly right.
The more that we bring ourselves back into line with what was
that sort of old-timey seeming environmentalist impulse, which is
just to say, "we should be protecting natural world at all
costs." I wouldn't quite go as far as to say at all costs, but we
know so little now about what all these microplastics are going
to do to us.


David Roberts


Yes, I know, but we've had enough experience to guess.


David Wallace-Wells


It's not going to be good.


David Roberts


Which direction the results are going to go, right? That's the
thing. At some point it seems like you need to start learning
from these things, looking forward, right? And not making the
same damn mistakes over and over again.


David Wallace-Wells


Yeah. And I wonder, I mean, I don't know exactly how you'd put
those odds, but it does feel like we're more in a position of
making the same mistakes all over again than we are really.


David Roberts


Oh, yes, we are in an age of making mistakes all over again. I
think that is our era. Well, let's get into maybe what might be
kind of a slightly awkward or controversial subject, I guess,
depending on how we want to put it. But I'll just put it this
way. Knowing what we now know, the current global effects of air
pollution are as bad as anything climate models project in terms
of deaths and illnesses, even decades in the future, from climate
change. Do you think that's fair?


David Wallace-Wells


Well, I would say that that's my understanding of the science.
There are some climate models that are already tallying deaths in
the millions, but I tend to think of them as sort of outlier
assessments. Now, they may prove to be more prescient, in the
same way that alarmist assessments of air pollution have proven
to be prescient, too. So I think it's, at a baseline, very safe
to say that there are more people dying, as we understand it
today, from air pollution. In 2022, and 2023, and 2024, there are
going to be more people dying from air pollution than are dying
from the whole range of climate impacts.


And that, to get to a point where climate death ever overtakes
these numbers that we have today, which is to say 10 million
people a year, which is 100 million in a decade. To get to that
point with climate, would require, perhaps, both a real
unraveling of the global climate system, that would require some
of the higher-end possibilities to come true, and also probably a
much more robust accounting measure beyond that which we have
devised, to this point, to tabulate those impacts. Most of the
sort of alarming comprehensive assessments of climate mortality
suggests that, in this climate scenarios that we can sort of
expect in the next 50 to 75 years, we will never reach this level
of death on an annual basis from climate.


David Roberts


Right. And that's just like striking. I really want to put an
exclamation point on it, like, the world is mobilizing against
climate change. Obviously, not to the degree anybody wants or
that is sufficient, but there's immense social upheaval, and
mobilization, and political mobilization against a possible
future danger that is not as deadly as ones we are living through
right now, which are not causing anything like the same
mobilization. How do we explain that? What story do we tell
ourselves about that? And what story should climate people be
telling themselves about it? Like, do you think it makes sense
to, just on a utilitarian level, turn your activist attention,
and your advocacy attention, away from climate to air pollution?


David Wallace-Wells


There are a lot of different questions embedded in there, and,
actually, I'd be really curious to know how you think about it. I
would say a few things. To begin with, I've never written two big
pieces on air pollution, and I actually underwent something of a
perspective shift in the interim. Which is to say, when I wrote
the first piece, which was just last fall, I put forward the line
that activism against air pollution might be, at the very least,
useful to include in a more significant way in our climate
advocacy.


These things are really correlated. If we solve one, we solve the
other. And talking about air pollution really makes the cost of
inaction really, really clear, in a way that talking about
climate change independent of air pollution doesn't make quite so
clear.


David Roberts


And much more localizable, right? Much more sort of like
traceable to particular communities, right?


David Wallace-Wells


And immediate. So if you cut emissions today, the effect on
global temperatures may not be so visible, but the effect on air
pollution from your local coal plant will be immediately visible.
It's also, like, there's a visual that's really powerful,
literally like the ugly gunk in the sky and in the waters, like
all that stuff. It lends itself to advocacy and has in the past
pushed people, in countries like ours, to take action, in a way
that climate has proven a little harder to gain that sort of
traction right.


David Roberts


And is mobilizing people in China and India now, I think, in a
way that maybe climate isn't.


David Wallace-Wells


Actually, it's an interesting comparison to make. The most
dramatic reductions in air pollution over the last decade or two
have come in China. India has taken some steps, and there is some
advocacy growing, but they haven't meaningfully reduced their
pollution levels. In China, they really have. They've cut their
pollution by, I think, something like 40% in seven years, and it
was from a very high level. I think, one estimate I cited in this
piece was that 30 million Chinese people died between 2000 and
2016. 30 million people in a single country.


David Roberts


That was the coal binge, right? I mean, that coal binge had so
many effects on so many things, but like among them, the
mortality of the Chinese.


David Wallace-Wells


And they took large scale policies, they made large scale policy,
made a large scale response and to deal with that. They move the
coal plants, to begin with. They've also started moving off of
coal. They keep building the plants, but they're running them at
much lower levels of capacity, as I'm sure all your listeners
know. But the question of what produced that, I think, is a
complicated one and not — I don't personally feel like I know the
answer clearly because everything we know about Chinese
environmental policy comes to us through so many layers of ... I
don't know exactly what to call it. It's just hard to know the
real story there.


David Roberts


Right.


David Wallace-Wells


My understanding is that there has there has been some amount of
grassroots activism, and people were upset about the air
pollution, in the middle of the last decade. But I also think
that there's a pretty strong role being played here from the
top-down powers as well, who are looking at the mortality data
and are just like, "well, why would we want these people to die
if we can not have them die?"


David Roberts


Well, it seems like the whole point was, "we're going to use coal
to grow the economy, bring a bunch of people out of poverty, and
then we're going to pivot and start addressing the problems of
coal," right? You hate to say that they accepted all those deaths
from air pollution on purpose, but they kind of did in exchange
for the extraordinary number of people brought out of poverty
during that same period, right?


David Wallace-Wells


Yeah. Again, it's another thing I'm not sure that I can attribute
that logic to Xi or his advisors. That is the operational
revealed logic of their path. For sure.


David Roberts


Right.


David Wallace-Wells


So for all those reasons, I thought like, "yes, making a bigger
deal out of pollute," and it poles way better also. Literally,
every American you ask is like, "yeah, we should be taking
measures to keep our air."


David Roberts


It wasn't like everybody switched to climate because climate
poles so much better than air pollution.


David Wallace-Wells


Right. The opposite. And relatedly, it is much less tied up in
culture war b******t.


David Roberts


Yes.


David Wallace-Wells


Than climate is. And theoretically, if the climate movement made
air pollution a much bigger deal, maybe that would change, maybe
it would become polarized in the same way. But at the moment,
it's in a very happy place where basically everybody's excited to
sign up for most measures that promise to reduce pollution.
Although there are some issues about — it's still the poorest,
Brownest, and Blackest communities that are hit hardest, and it's
not always the case that other people want to help them. But at
the national level, people want to deal with pollution. They want
their air to be cleaner.


So for all those reasons, I thought this is a strategic win.
We've probably left something on the table by focusing on
climate, as opposed to pollution. And we don't have to talk about
the future, we can focus on the present. We can see it all very
clearly. It motivates people. We have a track record of success
here.


But I've started to think much more that the story of air
pollution is less about, yeah, mobilization and more about
normalization. We have been living with these impacts in certain
parts of the world, really quite dramatic levels, for a very long
time. And while there are some success stories — the US Clean Air
Act, the equivalent in Europe, and now it's happened in China —
it's also the case, as you point out, that there just isn't a
global movement around this. And in fact, we've come to regard, I
think, in places like the US and Europe at least, we've come to
regard the pollution levels that people are dealing with in South
Asia, and parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and to
some degree, East Asia, and China as just like normal. And that's
the flip side of the Kuznets Curve story that you told.


David Roberts


Yeah, that's what I was going to say. That kind of falls out of
that, right? If you believe that story, then you look at that
pollution and say, "well, ah, that's the phase they're in."


David Wallace-Wells


"And it'll solve itself."


David Roberts


"And what are you going to do?"


David Wallace-Wells


Totally. That's really what worries me about climate these days,
too. You know, I used to think that if people saw the story
clearly, they would take action. And even at the time, I sort of
knew that that was, to some degree, naive.


David Roberts


We were such a sweet summer children back then, a few years ago.


David Wallace-Wells


And now I think, "oh, most of the stuff that people like you and
I have been warning about for a while is probably going to come
true." There is going to be a lot more suffering and a lot more
disruption. It may not be quite as bad as maybe me in particular
has warned, but it'll still be like quite large-scale negative
impact on all forms of global flourishing, to have climate change
of two and a half degrees, maybe even three degrees of warming.
But the response there, I come to think, more and more, is going
to be dominated not by, you know, mitigation, to be sure, not by,
you know, adaptation and resilience, but just by normalization.
We're just going to find ways to treat.


David Roberts


Not by a global uprising of spontaneous grassroots energy.


David Wallace-Wells


Yeah. Or even technocratic like, "oh, we're going to build a sea
wall here, and we're going to regrow the mangroves here, and
we're going to ... " Even that kind of thing is, I think, a
smaller form, is a smaller part of our sort of adaptation toolkit
than normalization whereby we were —— like people living in
California. They talk about the fires, they talk about the smoke,
but here we are. I don't know exactly. Depending on how you want
to count, like, we've quintupled the amount of acreage that is
routinely burned in California from wildfire, and everybody's
just like, "yeah, it's a little worse."


And that coping mechanism, I think, is really quite deep and is
the way that we adjust.


David Roberts


If we had been talking about this five years ago, it'd be one
thing, but now we've seen this illustrated in so many forms now.
Basically, people's ability to take what once would have seemed
crazy, or out of bounds, or too far, or too bad on board, as long
as it's incremental. And it turns out we can normalize things
really quickly. Like, we got used to, I mean, COVID is still
going on, right? Hundreds of thousands of people are still dying,
but we got used to that so fast. As I look back now, the climate
idea that climate campaigners had, especially in like the early
2000s or whatever, like, "once it gets really bad, people will
mobilize," just seems so wildly naive now. It takes so much to
get people to mobilize. And anything that's incremental, even
something as fast as, like, democracy falling apart around us,
look at what we've taken on board as normal in the last five
years, in terms of democracy and the rule of law.


David Wallace-Wells


And that's in the domestic context, which is also something that
would have surprised me. It's one thing to say Americans don't
care about dictators in the developing world, it's another thing
to come to terms with what we've seen here. I totally agree. I
think the pandemic, we could have a whole second conversation
about the lessons of the pandemic on these questions. I think
that normalization has been a huge and underappreciated part of
the story.


I'm working on a piece now about the sort of the "endgame" that
we have apparently, according to the people who really know this
stuff, somewhat settled into here, which is to say 100,000 to
250,000 deaths annually from this disease. And I'm now working at
the New York Times. When we hit 100,000 deaths in the US from
COVID, they put a huge banner headline on the front page, which
used the phrase "an incalculable loss". Well, how do you
calculate ten times that loss, or having that loss every year,
forever after, going forward?


David Roberts


It so quickly becomes abstract.


David Wallace-Wells


But there's another lesson on the climate, and I have a dog in
this fight, just to, like, declare it up front that I think is
really interesting from the pandemic, which is to say — the
moment of most intense interest and greatest capacity for large
scale behavioral and political change, in response to this
threat, was at the very beginning, when people were most scared.
Now, saying it that way suggests a slightly neater case study
version of what we've gone through than I really want to suggest.
But it is, I think, important to keep in mind that, actually, the
capacity for change was quite dramatic at the beginning of the
pandemic.


David Roberts


Yes. And the corollary of what you're saying, which is that it's
going to get more and more difficult to address as it gets worse
and worse, right? Not easier to address, not the spontaneous
global mobilization. It's going to be harder and harder. I mean,
this is what we know about chaos, and just general disorder,
like, it does not make people more far-seeing, and more concerned
about the next generation, and more open to cooperation with
other people, right. All the things you need in place for a
global solution to this, get more difficult the more climate does
that threat multiplication thing it does.


David Wallace-Wells


Well, I think there are those who might say, "it's a little more
complicated than that." I mean, Rebecca Solnit has written a lot
about the way in which disorder and disarray can call forward are
better impulses. I think the truth is that we can't count on any
single narrative pattern emerging and holding in any one
direction, through the series of climate disruptions that we're
likely to see over the next few decades. And I do think that
there is probably some amount of response that will be called
forth, more dramatic response. I mean, we've seen it already. The
world is moving faster than it was five years ago, even though
climate impacts are getting worse.


But I also don't think that we can just say that, "well, that's
going to take care of things." There are a lot of ugly impulses
out there. We need to do what we can to make sure that the
responses are targeted and guided towards prosocial, productive
goals, rather than zero-sum, competitive scrambling over what we
perceive to be limited resources. I think it's just a big mess.
That's not to say that no progress is possible in that mess, but
the landscape itself is a mess.


David Roberts


Once you abandon the idea that accumulated, empirical information
is going to spark social change, then you're sort of at sea,
right? What will? What does? The one thing your air pollution
story illustrates really well, which is something that's been
demonstrated to us over, and over, and over again these past few
years — which is that humans are terrible at assessing risk. We
don't treat all deaths the same. We don't treat all risks the
same. Our individual and collective response to risk is not
totally disconnected from the scale of the risk, but, you know,
90% disconnected from the true nature and scale of the risk.


So it seems like we need something like a study of what does
break through? What does cause social mobilization? What does
make a threat, in addition to the empirical information that
demonstrates it's a threat? What makes it socially sticky and
catchy? Do we know anything about that?


David Wallace-Wells


Well, you might know better than I do, but when I look at the
last few years and think about this question on a few different
fronts, not just climate, the thing that strikes me is not the
question, "does anything work?" It's, "is there anything that can
work in an ongoing way, sufficient to really disrupt the
established structures of power and authority?"


So when I think about climate, I think, "oh wait, we did have an
incredible global mobilization around climate change." We had
millions of people all around the world marching in the street,
mostly young people. We had more aggressive climate activism in
the form of, to some degree, Sunrise, certainly XR.


And the sum total of those movements, I do believe, really did
change the discourse around climate change among the world's most
powerful people, both in the private and public sectors. And so
you see a lot of this lip service now being paid by presidents
and prime ministers, but also by CEOs, and our sainted
billionaire class. Nobody is a climate denier anymore. And they
all say, they even say when you're to get to net zero by 2050,
basically, if you ask them, and many of them make a big deal out
of that. But we actually haven't gotten on that track at all.


So we've just sort of to the extent that we've forced anything,
we've forced a rhetorical shift in people who are interested in
making progress, but not interested in making progress quickly
enough. And I think that maybe it's the pandemic, maybe it's
other political forces, but I look at the climate movement as
somewhat exhausted now compared to where it was a few years ago.


David Roberts


Yes.


David Wallace-Wells


And then I think about, okay, so thinking about in the domestic
context, the response to Dobbs and the reversal of Roe, and I
feel this and I see it among many, you know, like-minded liberal
Americans, there's just this sort of exhausted, almost
acquiescence. When you compare the response to that decision to
the Women's March, which came out of the election of Donald
Trump, you can argue about what impact the Women's March had and
whether it was sustainable, etc. But you saw over the course of
whatever the ... that is like six weeks, between eight weeks,
between maybe it's ten weeks, but between the election and the
Women's March, the building of a "from scratch" protest
infrastructure, which at the very least signal to other
Americans, we as a mass are outraged.


David Roberts


Yeah, it just didn't seem like there was the institutional, you
know like somebody needs to pick up that ball and run with it on
the right. If there's a spark of social uprising, like there's
billionaires ready to heap money on it, and bus them around, and
put them on TV all day, every day. But it just didn't seem like
there's any infrastructure to pick that energy up and carry with
it. So it just seemed like it kind of dispersed.


David Wallace-Wells


Yeah, I think that that's definitely part of it and that we would
be better off with some more effective, large-scale organizing
infrastructure on the Left. I also, although, I've read some
things recently about the way in which the Bloomberg gun
philanthropy has sort of like hoovered up what was, essentially,
grassroots movement into a corporate environment, in ways that
may not be all that helpful. But I also just think about, I sort
of go back to what we were talking about a few minutes ago about
the response to the pandemic and the way in which an initial
burst of outrage and commitment can just dissipate on its own.
And I worry that we sort of mobilized on the Center-Left and Left
against Trump because we understood that to be such a profound
threat to a lot of things that we assumed or wanted to assume
about the nature of the American Democratic experiment and the
public at large — I just worry we sort of spent that energy for a
generation, and that we may now be depleted.


David Roberts


Well, it's kind of the nature ... I mean, I returned again and
again. This is a little bit of a cliche, but I return again and
again to sort of psychology of abusive relationships, and that's
part of how they work, is you can only deal with so many crises
at once. The financialization of the economy is a crisis. Like
inequality is a crisis. Climate is a crisis. Now, here you are
telling me air pollution is also a crisis. Like democracy falling
apart. It's a crisis. Any of those I could justify spending my
entire energy and passion towards.


David Wallace-Wells


But are you familiar with the term "polycrisis" or "permacrisis"?


David Roberts


Yes. And people just can't process it or focus at a certain
point. Your phrase is exactly right. Exhausted acquiescence. It
just, that seems to be sort of the energy these days, which is
disastrous. But I don't know what to what to do about it.


David Wallace-Wells


Well, on the Dobbs and Roe point, I mean, I do really believe
that there is some real failing here on the part of Democratic
leadership.


David Roberts


Yes, better leadership would help.


David Wallace-Wells


It just seems, like, I don't know, it's a tough hand to play, but
people are really furious. They're really outraged, and playing
the long game just isn't the right message to give them.


David Roberts


Right. And it's not even clear they're doing that. It's not clear
that if they had a long-term plan, that'd be one thing. They just
don't seem to have a plan at all other than sort of this
instinctive move to the center attempt, the sort of twitch at
this point that establishment Dems have. It's like the only
reaction they have left.


David Wallace-Wells


I don't remember who in the White House said it, but just a
couple of the last couple of days, somebody said basically like,
"we're not here to appease the activist wing of the Democratic
party."


David Roberts


The activist, which is like 80 %, 90% of the freaking party.


David Wallace-Wells


Absolutely. Like, it's the whole party. Like, what are you
talking about?


David Roberts


It's nuts.


David Wallace-Wells


But I also think that you know ... I also think that there's a
failure on the part of the public here, which is to say the
protests have been pretty small and uninspiring, and every woman
I know, and a lot of men, are really, really upset about it, but
it's not actually translating into the same level of public, you
know — we're not projecting that outrage, in a visible way, that
makes the decision seem untenable. We're just sort of crying
privately, and that's ... it's just not ... I mean, you know,
we're coming off a pandemic. We've been, as you say, there's one
crisis after another.


On a personal level, I understand someone being like, "I'm not
about to organize a march on this myself to some degree," but
when you add up that exhaustion, you're just like, "well, then
who's leading the way?"


David Roberts


Yes. My dark story is the exhausted acquiescence after the theft
of the 2000 presidential election, basically, was the starting
gun, for a century thus far, of exhausted acquiescence to
incremental ratcheting up of these authoritarian impulses and the
reactionary backlash, just that was where to draw the line,
right? And ever since then, it's just been retreat, pulling the
lines back, back, and like, look where we are now. There was a
freaking coup, and we can barely act collectively like it was a
bad thing, much less hold people accountable, or whatever.


David Wallace-Wells


Yeah. I mean, the perspective on the Left, on the hearings is
almost like, this is good TV.


David Roberts


Oh, God.


David Wallace-Wells


Which I don't mean to, it is good TV. They've been much better at
it than previous people doing previous versions of the same
thing.


David Roberts


Well, I feel like we should have learned by now that nobody
involved cares about being outed, or shamed, or scolded, or
exposed. Like, none of that matters. Consequences matter, and
that's it. And there just haven't been any.


David Wallace-Wells


Yeah. I would say I think that the hearings have damaged Trump's
chances of the nomination.


David Roberts


Yes, they have helped DeSantis quite a bit, I think.


David Wallace-Wells


But they haven't hurt Trumpism.


David Roberts


Okay. We've wandered so far afield, David, I'm going to bring it
back. I'm going to bring it back for the final question then,
which is related to this, which is, do you think that ... this
air pollution story that you're telling, that you're sort of over
there pounding on your table, telling which trying to break
through, is very striking, and I think new to people.


And so I wonder, and as you say, addressing it and addressing
climate change are basically the same damn thing. You're trying
to stop burning fossil fuels, right. So do you think that the
sort of global climate community, a. ought to or b. can use this
new air pollution story as an accelerant in the effort on
climate? Or do you think that normalization is such that it's
just like the shock pads on the dead body, you just can't get any
more juice out of anything? Do you think it's going to help or
work?


David Wallace-Wells


I think it's already helping. I think that global political
leaders have a growing understanding that burning fossil fuels
has really terrible health effects that are concentrated in their
own countries, which is to say, that they can control those
effects in the way that they can't control the global climate
change dynamics. I think that the climate movement could bring
out this imperative a little more clearly, and I think to some
more effect. But I also wonder, really, how much more the curve
can be bent. The way I see the changing climate dynamics is that
we may be moving relatively, already relatively close to a kind
of best-case decarbonization pathway.


And that's not to say that I think disastrous climate change will
be averted. It's just to say that when we start imagining even
faster paths of decarbonization that have already been promised,
I start to worry and wonder whether those are even
technologically feasible. Like, getting the whole world to net
zero at 2050, or 2060, is a really gargantuan task. I think it's
beyond our capacity. And so one version of the question is like,
"if we're already committed to those incredibly fast pathways,
what difference does it make to be yelling about air pollution a
bit more?" Another version of the answer, though, is to say,
"well, the problem is not the commitments we've made, it's how
fast we're moving to fulfill them."


And I do think that on that point, in some of the ways that we've
been talking about, the localness of the effect, localness of the
control, and the sort of immediacy that most people feel about
like choking on bad air as opposed to breathing clean air. I do
think that there there can be some difference made there. I do
think that especially people lobbying to close down local coal
plants, for instance, can make a difference through appeals from
air pollution.


David Roberts


Any context in which cost-benefit analysis is involved, this
swamps it, right? Like, once you bring this new air pollution
data in, you're like, you win all those arguments, right? It's
ridiculous.


David Wallace-Wells


Yeah, I mean, you know, the US government officially sets the
value of human life at something like $7 million, which means
that, like, if we have 350,000 lives lost every year, that's a
lot of money.


David Roberts


I can't do that math on the flight deck. I was going to see if
you could do it.


David Wallace-Wells


It's a couple of trillion dollars a year that should be, in
theory, should be spent to clean this up.


But I would say in the big picture, it's also, just one little
last point on that decarbonization stuff, is like there's a huge
difference that's going to be made through EV adoption and
electric bikes in other parts of the world too. And we're going
to pick up a lot of those gains that way, which is a story that's
unfolding. It could be accelerated by policy. But it also seems
to be, to me at least, to be unfolding, almost independent of
policy pressure, at least in the US right now. And I think that's
also useful to keep in mind, that whether or not the climate
movement can weaponize air pollution to accelerate the green
transition, whether or not they can do that, the air will be
cleaner 30, 50 years from now than it is now.


David Roberts


The benefits will happen.


David Wallace-Wells


Some benefits, like we can get there faster, we can get farther
along. But to the extent that it can feel oppressive to
contemplate the climate future and think that all we're doing is
choosing between degrees of disaster, the air pollution story
tells us slightly different and more optimistic story, which is
to say, it is probably now worse than it will ever be in the
future. And in that sense, not to sound too much of a cliche, but
there's something we can look forward to there.


David Roberts


Well, that's a delightfully optimistic place to wrap it up.
Thanks for coming on, and thanks for your work bringing attention
to this. I feel like it should be talked about a lot more than it
is.


David Wallace-Wells


Thanks for having me to talk about it's. Great to schmooze.


David Roberts


Alright. See you, David.


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