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David Wallace-Wells

@dwallacewells

25 Mar

@HelenHet20

“The ‘energy transition’ tag is a misnomer. Radically reducing fossil-fuel energy will represent an energy and an economic revolution.” The great ⁦@HelenHet20⁩: (1/x) engelsbergideas.com/essays/the-geo…

“When the first UN Climate Change Conference was held in Berlin in 1995, fossil fuels constituted 86 per cent of the world’s primary energy consumption. By 2019, that proportion had fallen by just two per cent.”

“In 2018, the increase in fossil fuel production was more than three times higher than the increase in renewables. The following year, the annual increase in fossil fuel energy consumption was slightly under that of renewables.”

Read 12 tweets

David Wallace-Wells

@dwallacewells

24 Mar

@MichaelEMann

“More than 18,000 people had to be evacuated in Sydney and the mid-north coast, thanks to what amounted to a ‘100-year flood.’” ⁦@MichaelEMann⁩ on the harsh climate present and brutal climate future of Australia. (1/x) theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

“For the unwashed, that’s a deluge so Noachian in character that it shouldn’t, on average, happen more often than once in a hundred years.”

“But those sorts of statistics are misleading. The statistician in me notes that they make the very tenuous assumption of a ‘stationary’ climate, that is to say, a climate that isn’t changing.”

Read 6 tweets

David Wallace-Wells

@dwallacewells

16 Mar

One thing I left out of yesterday's big COVID piece: a press critique. Hardly any of the retrospective journalistic accounts of the last year have even acknowledged that the U.S. had not an exceptional but a typical experience. A thread (1/x) nymag.com/intelligencer/…

In its way, this is not surprising—Americans contemplating the pandemic year would be foolish to overlook the many failures, mistakes, and unusually American problems that seemed to shape our experience of the disease, beginning with a sociopathically indifferent president.

Those failures are many: the FDA rejecting a coronavirus test the WHO had authorized, the CDC developing a faulty one of its own, the CDC meddled with and muzzled by federal higher-ups...

Read 30 tweets

David Wallace-Wells

@dwallacewells

15 Mar

“Western invulnerability was a myth, of course, but what the pandemic revealed was much worse than just average levels of susceptibility and weakness. It was these countries that suffered most, died most, flailed most.” (1/x) nymag.com/intelligencer/…

“This fact, though not unknown, is probably the most salient and profound feature of what has been a tremendously uneven pandemic with the world’s longtime ‘winners’ becoming by far its biggest losers.”

“For decades, the richest nations of the world had told themselves a story in which wealth and medical superiority offered, if not total immunity from disease, then certainly a guarantee against pandemics, regarded as a premodern residue of the underdeveloped world.”

Read 8 tweets

David Wallace-Wells

@dwallacewells

15 Mar

"In the U.S., the story of the pandemic has been dominated by the president who presided over it so ineptly. But for all his sociopathic indifference, if the story were all about Trump, American failure would look exceptional, too. It doesn't." (1/x) nymag.com/intelligencer/…

"In fact, before the arrival of vaccines, the American experience of the coronavirus was not exceptional but typical — at least among those European nations it typically considers its peers. "

"The metric of deaths per capita is crude, but by this basic standard the U.S. has suffered less than the U.K., Portugal, and the Czech Republic. It sits clustered with a number of other European nations — Italy, Spain, France — near the E.U. average."

Read 40 tweets

David Wallace-Wells

@dwallacewells

15 Mar

There have been, practically, three distinct global pandemics. In Europe and the Americas, disaster. In the global South, high caseloads and low death rates. In East Asia and Oceania, inarguable success containing the disease. A thread (1/x): nymag.com/intelligencer/…

"You can compare countries within these clusters, and wonder why Canada has outperformed the U.S. or why Uruguay has outshone Argentina, why Iran suffered so much or how Japan, which never locked down and never tested all that widely, succeeded so brilliantly."

"But the differences in outcomes between the groups of nations are far greater than those within them, so much so that they appear almost as the burn scars of entirely different diseases."

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