A Familiar Disaster
A conversation with David Wallace-Wells on uncertainty, geopolitics and the future of the climate movement.
This interview was recorded remotely on 11 February 2026 between Vancouver, Canada and New York City.
ADRIENNE BULLER Your book The Uninhabitable Earth was published in 2019—something of a peak for the climate movement. Since then, that momentum and energy has waned. Why do you think that is? How do you interpret the depleted energy in climate politics of the past several years?
DAVID WALLACE-WELLS I think we have to start with an acknowledgement of that failure. If you go back in time and think about where the world was just on the eve of the pandemic—and in fact, it kind of continued through the emergency phase of the pandemic, even though the protest energy dissipated at that time—we were in a real frenzy of awakening all around the world. You could see that in the streets full of protesters, and you could see it in the remarkably global network of activists. You could also see the way that those concerns, anxieties and demands were being heard by the world’s most powerful people, who would get up on stage at places like Davos and echo the language of some relatively alarmist—even extremist—climate activists.
Much of that was of course empty rhetoric, from those powerful people, and many of the rest of us knew that at the time. But at least it was more empty rhetoric than we’d ever gotten before. And so it represented a kind of promise, even if half-hearted, which could be used to hold those people to account when they faltered: “In 2021, you described the climate crisis in these terms. Why are you [now] behaving so much less urgently? Why are you taking so much less action than you said you would then?”
We’re not in that situation at all anymore. We’re not in a place where those leaders are making promises. We’re not in a place where the world’s richest people even seem concerned about the climate. And we’re not even really in a place where people who do care about climate can hold them to account. One of the things that’s remarkable about this phase shift, or this transition, is that, according to surveys, there is as much climate concern today as there ever has been. Different countries tell the story in different ways, but across the wealthy world, there has not been a great falloff in anxiety about climate change, even as the issue has almost entirely dropped out of political discourse. It has really dropped out of the geopolitical discourse as well, such that, again, where before the pandemic it seemed to be a conventional view of the global leadership class that the management of the twenty-first century would be substantially a climate management challenge, that is simply not the way those people are speaking now. Climate advocacy is on the backfoot, too: we simply have not reconstituted the level of activism or intellectual fermentation that was present in 2019, and I’m not sure how likely it is that we’ll do so in the near future, either.
Now, that’s not to say the whole game is lost and nothing is being done to limit future global temperature rises. There is amazingly inspiring, almost eye-popping, progress happening all around the world on green energy installation. It’s not the whole story, but it is still remarkable. There’s a lot of adaptation and resilience work being done at the local level, too. But to the extent that not long ago we related to this crisis in existential, political and mythological terms—which is, I think, a fair way of describing that 2019–2020 period—there are fewer of us who are doing that in the same way today.
There are many ways of recording and measuring that decline, that loss of a particular language of climate urgency. But the thing that concerns me most is that we seem along the way to have also lost one of the climate world’s core commitments to global solidarity: the idea that the world’s most vulnerable demand the most attention and support from those who have the most. Those who care most about these issues still think and talk and theorize and mobilize in those terms. But higher up the food chain far fewer people in power have time for those appeals.
AB What do you make of the widening gap between that stalling political momentum you describe and the fact that the transition (though we might not describe it as a real transition) to green energy continues apace—is even accelerating?
DWW There are a few different threads there to pull out, one of which is the story of the transition and how we should understand it. We are not in a Green New Deal—or a Global Green New Deal—moment. But we are setting new records for global green energy installation every year. Those records are routinely breaking optimistic forecasts from just a few years ago. That is happening in many places without additional policy support. That is not just remarkable, it was also not very widely predicted. At the same time, we are still at or close to peak emissions globally, which means that at least for now that remarkable progress on green energy is a story of addition rather than substitution for the polluting energy sources. Why is that happening?