David Wallace-Wells is a lifelong New Yorker. He is not a lifelong environmentalist—“at all,” he says. He came of age in the ’90s, drank a lot of “that development, globalization, neoliberal Kool-Aid and really felt the world was getting better and richer.” But learning more about climate change scrambled a lot of his assumptions about the world and our place in it. Today, Wallace-Wells is a columnist and deputy editor at New York magazine and the author of the critically acclaimed number one New York Times bestseller, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. In this conversation with Elise Loehnen, he explains what lies ahead, what policies should be changed, what possible solutions and technologies give him reason to feel optimistic, and what we need to learn from COVID-19 in order to equip ourselves to respond to pandemics of varying natures. (For more, see The goop Podcast hub.) To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices