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David Wallace-Wells

@dwallacewells

19 Jan

Climate change is much bigger than the U.S., and addressing it much more complicated than electing a new president. But on the eve of the inauguration, a thread to show just what a different world the new president is inheriting. (1/x) nymag.com/intelligencer/…

"The price of solar energy has fallen ninefold over the past decade, as has the price of lithium batteries, critical to the growth of electric cars."

"The costs of utility-scale batteries, which could solve the “intermittency” (i.e., cloudy day) problem of renewables and help power whole cities in relatively short order, have fallen 70 percent since just 2015."

Read 18 tweets

David Wallace-Wells

@dwallacewells

26 Dec 20

The alarming lead story in the New York Times this morning concerns the growth of COVID-19 through Africa, where the cumulative death total from the disease is less than 45 per million. In the U.S. it is 975 per million—more than 20 times worse. nytimes.com/2020/12/26/wor…

The story is primarily about caseloads, since the age structure of Africa means the disease has been much less lethal there.

While official counts underestimate the number of true infections throughout Africa (as they do in the U.S.), the contrast in cases is just as stark: 2,000 per million there, 56,000 per million here.

Read 7 tweets

David Wallace-Wells

@dwallacewells

25 Dec 20

From June, “Why Don’t Americans Trust Public-Health Experts?” (1/x) nymag.com/intelligencer/…

“In January, as the earliest scary research into the outbreak in Wuhan began arriving from China, public-health officials downplayed the threat and systematically advised coronavirus panic be channeled into vigilance about the flu, which they considered a bigger problem.” (2/x)

“In February, as initial data arrived from China showing a dramatic age skew in mortality, with the old at far greater risk, and the very old at greater risk still, political leaders and public-health officials did practically nothing to protect the most vulnerable.” (3/x)

Read 9 tweets

David Wallace-Wells

@dwallacewells

18 Dec 20

@davidfickling

“For all the euphoria that rightly greeted Chinese President Xi Jinping’s announcement in September of a peak in carbon emissions by 2030 and a decline to net zero by 2060, the promise of that declaration is at risk,” ⁦@davidfickling⁩ writes (1/x). bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

“To see why, consider Xi’s follow-up speech to the international Climate Ambition Summit on Dec. 12. While reiterating his earlier promises, it fell short on the most important point: How much China is prepared to spend decarbonizing its power system.”

“The installed capacity of solar and wind power will rise to at least 1,200 gigawatts by 2030, he said, compared to 440GW at present. That represents pedestrian growth of around 76GW a year, roughly in line with installations during 2018.”

Read 10 tweets

David Wallace-Wells

@dwallacewells

7 Dec 20

The most promising of the vaccines was fully designed before the first confirmed American case and was manufactured for testing before the first American death. How much faster could we have moved to deliver it? How many lives might've been saved? (1/x) nymag.com/intelligencer/…

"To start, this is—as the country and the world are rightly celebrating—the fastest timeline of development in the history of vaccines. It also means that for the entire span of the pandemic, which has killed more than 250,000 Americans, we had the tools we needed to prevent it."

"That a vaccine was available for the entire brutal duration may be, to future generations trying to draw lessons from our death and suffering, the most tragic, and ironic, feature of this plague."

Read 27 tweets

David Wallace-Wells

@dwallacewells

5 Dec 20

"The virus could mutate at any time. We don’t know how long it’s going to take this virus to escape immunity. But we do know that we have effectively created one vaccine — all of these vaccines are identical." (1/x) nymag.com/intelligencer/…

"We are putting so much ecological pressure on this one virus with these vaccines. And all it takes is one virus out of the quadrillions of viruses that are being produced across the globe right now in people’s bodies..."

"All it takes is for one of those viruses to say, you know what? I want to figure out how to evade this person’s immune response. It’s astounding to me that this isn’t, like, considered a crisis."

Read 5 tweets

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