David Wallace-Wells & Spencer Ackerman

Fast Politics. David Wallace Wells, thanks so much for having me. Good to be here, very thrilled to have you. I think first we should talk about COVID, and then we should talk about let's do it. You have written a lot about COVID recently. There's a lot of interesting stuff. But the thing I want to talk to you about is learning loss. Anyone who has kids who lived through COVID, and I have many have seen a learning loss and

what an issue that is. Where are weay with addressing that because it seems like there has not been a ton done there. It depends how you want to think about a ton done. And I think it also is important to contextualize some of the losses themselves, which is to say, the data is really clear that American kids suffered setbacks over the course of the pandemic, and that's worrying. Judging by standardized testing, American students were not doing especially

well to begin with. It was especially hard for low income kids places in you know, under under resourced areas to thrive according to these standards, and those gaps got much larger over the course the pandemic. So there is damage there that we should want to address in a variety of ways. It's tricky because we don't know exactly what to do to get people to learn better. I mean, if we knew that, we'd probably be implementing those tools,

you know, long before the pandemic. And there is some evidence at the state level, at certain in certain states that already something like half or so of the learning loss that was observed over the course of the first two years of the pandemic has been recovered basically simply by kids being back in school and having face to

face um learning. But I also, you know, my own view is a little bit unorthodox here, which is that I think that we've made a little too much of these losses, which is to say, when you go into the gold standard data, the best testing data that we have, we're talking about nationally average test scores on a scale of five hundreds, falling from like to twenty to seventeen to sixteen. Like I said, those are real losses. You know, they are setbacks. They mean that many kids are behind

where they would be otherwise. But it's not like, you know, eighth graders are now reading like second graders. It's not like kids are graduating high school unable to do basic math. It means that some fraction of kids are a little bit behind where they would have been without the pandemic. On that point, I would just say, you know, the whole country is by where we should be a lot

of points because of the pandemic. And when you look internationally, you see that even places that didn't do nearly didn't have nearly as many interruptions to schooling the UK, like Denmark have had roughly comparable learning losses to the ones

that we've had in the US. So while there's a lot of people want to point the finger at school closures, and I personally think we should regret a lot of the school closures I also think that the ultimate impact of that policy was relatively limited, and it's probably I would say, and this is you know, this is speculation,

it's it's not exactly proven science. But I would say that when we look at those setbacks and those learning losses, what we're seeing is the effect of what it means to live through a pandemic as much as we are the effect of what it means to suspend schooling for a period of months at a time. Yeah, I mean, I do think there's always this idea that there's somehow people did the best psycho right during that period when

we didn't know a lot. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, especially early on, everyone was very worried about kid is getting sick. We wanted to take a lot of precautions. I think, you know, if you have been looking closely at the data, then you you could have seen that children were much lower risk than other age groups.

But of course, because we didn't have vaccines, it was also a lot harder to imagine that we could sort of prevent the virus from spreading through kids to older, more vulnerable people, and so there was a genuine public health imperative to try to limit spread in all directions and all ways, and that governed a lot of the

policy in that first year. I think, looking back on it now, we probably, if we had a chance to restart all of that, would have done more to allow those who are not themselves at all that much risk from COVID infection to live slightly more normal lives, and probably should have done more to target our protections to those,

especially the elderly, who are at much more risk. As you say, you know, it was a it was a messy, chaotic, very anxious time, and I personally think it's it's somewhat hard to judge, you know, most of our leaders for the decisions they made, especially in those months in the spring of by the fall of I think most schools should have been and we should have spent those six months or so preparing to make sure that by September all kids were in school, and the fact that in

a lot of places they weren't is bad. On the other hand, most schools were open to some degree at some point over the course of that year. So it's all messy, it's all tricky. I think in general, the harder we try to narrativise the pandemic, the more complicated those stories become. Pandemic learning loss is like one of the things that certainly happened over the last couple of years. But exactly why and exactly how to fix it, I

think is not so easy to say. Yeah, I mean, I'm reminded of when I came back from from seepack. One of my kids school nurses, because I had gotten that letter that said I have been exposed, was like, please just keep your kids home. She's like, we don't know anything. She's like, just please. Yeah, she was just like is a favorite of make which I thought, you know, people were really scared. Well, I think that it continues to this day. I mean, the truth is that many

kids have died. I don't want to downplay that. The ultimate cost of this pandemic to children. You know, the numbers around over a thousand, which is a horrible tragedy, and thousands of horrible tragedies, and the grand scheme of things, kids are much safer than older people. That the age key was really quite dramatic, such that you know, unvaccinated people are in their eighties or like thousands of times

more risk than little kids. And yet of course we have all of these intuitive, reflective, protective gestures that you know, because we believe kids are vulnerable in general, we have a hard time seeing them as safe and resilient. And you know, those were reasonable feelings to have to It was just, you know, everybody felt really unsure. Nobody had lived through a pandemic like this before, and you know, in those cases it's a perfectly reasonable thing to say

the precautionary principle should be the governing principle. Here. Have we lived through a pandemic now? You mean we on the other side of it? Yeah? Or are we in

this sort of messy endemic period. Well, you know, we still have over two hundred Americans dying a day these days, and for about six or eight months it's been steadily between three hundred and five hundred, and that's an annualized total of over a hundred thousand Americans dying a year, which would make COVID the third leading cause of death. It will be the third leading cause of death in any two and it presumably will be the third leading

cause of death in too. So you know, I think a lot of that, a lot of the question of where we are is a bit of a semantic one. I mean, COVID will be for the foreseeable future a meaningful additional mortality burden on the country. All of the vaccination, of the boosters, all that, you know, all that, all that stuff, all the pexlovid can only get us so far, and it's not going to eliminate this from our disease landscape.

But you know, the COVID deaths are well below cancer and heart disease, and we don't obsess about cancer and heart disease in the same way that we obsessed about COVID even now. So there's probably some degree to which we're coming to terms with this new normal, on this new abnormal to quit a phrase, um and exactly how we live through that says a lot more about what are sort of priors and biases and values are than it does about the state of the disease, which is

pretty clear. It's like the disease is spreading pretty rapidly. We're not really doing anything at all to stop it spread. Um. The cost of that in terms of lives is much much lower than the same number of infections would have been a year or two ago. That that that risk is concentrated very heavily in the elderly um which means that people who are under the age of sixty five and are vaccinated are at extremely low risk, and yet at the social level, at the national level, it's still

killing a lot of people. And what you make of that and how you again, how you narrativise that is sort of up to you. But the data doesn't say that it's over. The data just says we're in a new phase. So I want to talk to you about this United Nations Climate Conference which went off without a whimper, really and what happened there because Glasgow was such a big deal and this one sort of fizzled, puttered along. Yeah,

part of that is by design. So the way that these conferences work, they happen every year, but each one is meant to do a different kind of a thing. In the Glasgow one was designed to be the five year anniversary of the Paris Accords. They ended up pushing it back a year, so it was six years after, not five years. On the five year anniversary of the

Paris Accords. Basically all the countries of the world, we're supposed to come back and for the first time since Paris formally announced more ambitious pledges of decarbonization, which meant that in the lead up to Glasgow, we just had a whole number of promises being made by the biggest countries, the biggest emitters in the world, and they added up to something quite significant, you know, now, something like I think it's about of all on GDP and global emissions

at least are governed by these net zero pledges, which is countries promising to get all the way to carbon neutrality by sixty And those are paper pledges. They're empty at the moment, you know, they're in most cases they're empty, but they're still it was still a quite significant rhetorical step forward that happened in Glasgow, with all those countries making all those promises. This conference was never designed to

do that. It wasn't in the in the sort of rhythm of the COPS, the Conference of the Parties which goes by cup. In the rhythm of these cups, this was not meant to be one in which countries announced

more ambitious pledges. It was meant to be what was called an implementation cup, which meant that the countries were sort of trying to figure out what they needed from one another to meet the promises that they had made in Glasgow, and that meant that there was basically no news on the like a mission pledges or decarbonization front

this time around. No no significant news, but there was some movement that I think is actually quite remarkable on some other issues relating to climate justice and what's called loss and damage, which is basically the idea that you know, the rich countries in the world are responsible for almost all the world's emissions today, they're especially responsible for historical emissions which are still hanging in the atmosphere and heating the planet, and yet they're not the ones who are

suffering most from the impacts of climate change. That is, the poorest countries in the world who are who have

done the least to create the damage. So to put a number on that, Pakistan which has this incredible months soon flooding this year that left by some measures, about the third of the country underwater, certainly a large fraction of the country underwater, displaced over thirty million people, and produced a huge wave of infectious disease because of all the malaria and denga that was spreading because of mosquitoes

and the stagnant water. This is a country that suffered the most devastating climate impact this year two and it's a country that has produced in its entire history only as much carbon emissions as the US produces every single year. And that kind of dynamic holds true across South Asia and in Southern Africa, to to some lesser degree, Southeast Asia. It's really this perverted, inverted moral logic where the countries that did this damage are not suffering all that much,

in the countries who didn't are suffering most. And for a decade or two, those vulnerable countries have been coming to climate conferences and saying something needs to be done about this, like you guys need to help us recover. These are countries like the Maldives, right, yeah, Muhammad Nashi who is the former president of the Maldives, I believe he's now the prime minister. There was one of the leading figures beginning about two decades ago and doing this.

Mia Motley, who is the Prime Minister of Barbados, is now one of the leading figures. But you know, there was always on the margins of these conferences that it was the small vulnerable countries who are saying we need some help, guys, and really over the last few years, but especially over the last year and then kind of culminating at this conference, there's been a kind of significant shift in the discourse where this is now pretty central to the way that almost everybody is talking about the

challenge of climate change. How is it that we can help those countries were most in need? And there was a landmark agreement reached in this conference to build what's

called a loss and damage facility. The details aren't exactly clear yet, they're going to be negotiated over the next couple of years, but basically it was a commitment of the world's wealthy countries to provide some way through an institution like the World Bank or the i m F, to direct funds to climate vulnerable countries so that they wouldn't be suffering as nakedly or as brutally the impacts of climate change that the wealthy nuctries countries the world

actually produced so interesting, So did anything besides that come out that was good? I mean, it strikes me as a sort of outside of the road that there's more focus on on greenwashing and some of the sort of the housekeeping that makes it look like people are doing more for climate than they are. Do you think that's accurate? And how anxious are you about that? Yeah? I think in general, you know, on on one hand, it's a sign of progress that countries and corporations are making promises

and feeling obligated to make promises. Relatedly, it's also a sound of progress that many people are looking at those promises and really really being strict about them and saying, actually, you're not on track to meet these goals, and there's no plausible pathway to the decorganizations speed that year applying here, you need to either really dramatically up your ambition and make serious investments, or be a little bit more honest

and transparent about where you're actually heading as opposed to where you're where you want us to believe you're heading. That's a shift that's happening in the culture as a whole, I think as part and parcel of climate change becoming more and more central to the way that people think about politics and policy and geopolitics over the last five

years or so. But there's been sort of significant movement within the u N Climate community to a scent of guidelines that was published during the Charmel Shake, cop led by Catherine McKenna, who is a former Environment Minister of Canada, but with the support and endorsement of the Secretary General Antonio Guterres, that basically outlined a series of standards for companies, in particular saying like, if you don't meet these standards, you can't say that you're going to get to net zero.

And there's not yet an enforcement mechanism that would actually, you know, hold them to that. But I think it's the first step to say, here are the basic sets of standards we should be applying here. You know exactly what that where That leads in terms of whether corporations will up their anti will increase their ambition, or we'll just back away from the rhetoric. I think we don't

really know. A few years ago, as a major major it was celebrated as a major step forward when black Rock, which is this unbelievably large invest in investment firm, I think it's like, I don't remember the numbers off the top of my head, but it's something like it would

be one of the world's biggest economies. They promised that they were going to be holding all of their portfolio companies too much stricter climate standards and then like a year and a half later, they were basically like, actually, forget it, We're not going to do that. So you know exactly what happens as a result of these new

holding these people's feet to the fires unclear. And you're seeing in the US a lot of Republican attorneys general suing to push back against climate policies so republican, it's disgusting. It's especially disgusting because we're the beginning of partisan shift here, which is to say, especially because of the ira but also because of all the green energy investments that have

been made over the last decade. You know, there's just there's a lot of money being made in clean energy in red states right now, and I genuinely don't think that five or ten years from now, you know, wind power and solar power are going to be coded in the same blue, red left right way that they are now, Which means you're kind of shooting yourself in the foot if you're a red state saying you're going to push

back against the ira A tax credits. It's like your state's going to be in a much better position if you take those actual credits and build out a new energy system, right right right, That makes a lot of sense. I do think that partisanship will stay because Republicans have, like we saw during the pandemic, been largely anti science. You know, you had people who are actually dying and they were like, no, they're not. You know, it's a

larger percentage of Republicans dying of COVID than Democrats. Still, so there's probably this anti science way of thinking will continue, you but certainly there'll be financial incentives hopefully. I look at it like, you know, we had these three bills the past over the last year that touch on climate, and the biggest was the i ra A, the Inflation Reduction Act, and that got no Republican votes in part

because it was understood as a climate bill. But there was also the Chips Act and there was also the Infrastructure Bill, both of which were not pitched as climate bills and yet had a lot of climate spending in them, and those both got a fair number of Republican votes because it was really you know, it's kind of like pork barrel spending. It's like, you guys are gonna get your your battery factories, you guys are going to get your money for your transmission lines. And it's hard to

turn that down. If the temperature on the culture were part of climate can be turned down a little bit, I think that there's a chance to get Republican support for that kind of stuff going forward, even if I don't think we're gonna get a second I or anytime soon. Right. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. This was super interesting and I hope you'll come back. Of course, you had great to talk and let's talk

against Spencer. Ackerman writes the news letter Forever War Forever Wars, and is the author of Reign of Terror, Welcome Too Fast, Politic Expense or Acraman. Thanks very much, Molly. First, we're going to talk about the Biden administration. We are two years into the Biden administration. Tell us about the good,

the bad, and the very weird two years in. I think like we can draw a kind of large, if preliminary judgment, which is like looking at the two years worth of Biden handling of foreign policy, I think we've got like a clear story of what this administration will ultimately be known for when obviously a whole lot of unexpected stuff could happen in the next two years, or you know, if they get re election the following four.

But all of that said, I think this administration is going to be remembered for both inheriting and then taking ownership of what we'll look back on in the future as two coal wars at the same time, Russian and China. You see this a lot in the much criticized national security strategy that they put out, which is getting the kind of like typical sort of blob reaction that you know,

this doesn't make any actual priorities between stuff. This doesn't tell you what it is that the administration would actually choose if sort of stacked against each other in terms of blood, treasure, attention, stuff like that. Nevertheless, you had an historic decision by the Trump administration to say that, in fact, the long term enemy of the United States is China. Probably, you know, with the exception of the Abraham Accords that took the Mid Eastern anti Iran coalition

out of the shadows. No Trump decision was applauded on the foreign policy side more readily than than that one pivoting the United States towards a twenty one century and they like to use the term great power competition with China um as well as the Biden administration upon taking office, seeing the Russians in you know, not the same weight class as the Chinese, but the same I guess like mentality that these are enormous geopolitical actors, obviously China more

so than Russia, that the United States needs to array itself against. They don't like to use the term cold wars for I think pretty obvious reasons. But you know, if you look at for instance, US officials going to the Manama Conference in Bahrain in November. While you know, those officials took really great pains to tell like the Golfees and the Israelis that you know, we're not actually

doing cold wars. We don't want blocks, they were simultaneously saying, do not hedge against US with Chinese, particularly communications or military purchases. So the administration really is saying, regardless of the presentation that great power competition doesn't have to be a cold war, that when they go talk to client states or states that you know, maybe client states, the message is fundamentally you you should choose us and not

them for these varieties of reasons. I think that to an astonishing degree, given the two Cold Wars at the same time, framework. Thus far, I think they're succeeding on their own terms. We're not seeing the enormous downstream negative consequences not just on economies that factionalize around the world, but the blood that Cold Wars mean outside of the

imperial center. You know, think of what the Cold War meant in practice for Latin America, for Africa, for the Caribbean, for Southeast Asia, as well as you know, for Europe,

and then domestically in American politics. But that's gonna, I would argue, that's going to come that inevitably in a instruct like this, you are going to get more and more dire choices of this sort that the American officials, you know, Collin call Brett McGurk, you know, very respected, you know, professionals on the Democratic side, with a whole lot, you know, in Brett's case in particular, a ton of

you know, bipartisan you know, foreign policy credentials. That's the choice that ultimately the aligned world or would be aligned world faces, and the downstream consequences of this haven't manifested yet. And I think the danger of that is that looks to the blob, for lack of better term, like success the administration. The Biden administration, I think is also benefiting from like it looks like what foreign policy professionals kind of think of when they think of a coherent and

cohesive foreign policy team. You know, the classic example is, you know, the one that exists um in the rosie memories of the US policy establishment. Is like the way the National Security Council worked under you know, George Bush, the father, a very coherent, minimally factionalized team. And you know, you are not seeing what you saw with you know, like, for instance, the Bush administration deeply factionalized and unable to

get the outcomes it wanted on the world. You're not able to you know, it doesn't look like the Obama team deeply deeply factionalized, where a tremendous amount of the Security States simply did not trust and sought to undermine Obama. And also the team typically didn't you know, get certainly in the first term what it thought it would achieve, and usually simply acquiesced to the Security States priorities. And then you're also not getting what you got under Trump,

which is tremendous factionalization. Yet again, and with the exception of like arraying for the Cold War, and for the Abraham Accords, not really something that you would say achieved its objectives either. The incoherence was the proof of the factionalization, whether that had to do with Syria, whether that had to do with Afghanistan and so on and so forth.

So the Biden team is what I guess I'm trying to say, is like for the first two years, certainly you are just seeing a lot more of the you know, major players growing in the same direction. And accordingly that looks although that's an input like success in an output, and I think all of this is going to turn out to be sort of dangerously illusory. Okay, you had many thoughts there, we have, so we're gonna slow down

and break this all down. The central tenant of what you're talking about is that the Biden administration, I would say that they are more aligned than previous administrations, even I think with the Trump administration it's hard. I mean, I don't think they're a good example of anything, because I mean, basically they did a little foreign policy that Jared liked, right, Trump loves autograds. But I mean there wasn't like a unifying foreign policy there. But with the

Biden administration. You sort of think that the biggest danger of the Biden administration is that their foreign policy is too unified. I think it's more that there is a tremendous amount of consensus around the idea that what the United States needs to do in the twenty one century is to the term they like to use is great power competition. I think in real terms that means too cold wars at once. They won't be the same sorts of cold wars that you know, the United States wage

against the Soviet Union. But when you see senior officials saying to long time US allies, don't hedge against us, meaning don't start buying a lot of Chinese stuff, particularly on the communications and security side. Stay with what we already have deep in our alliance. We unlike China. And this was another argument that Brett McGurk and Collin call

in Bahrain in November. Have your regional interests against the Iranians in mind, the Chinese will not, and the Russians are now for you know, drones in Ukraine dependent on the Iranians. So you're not going to get those sorts of support for your priorities. And so the thing is is that if that continues to succeed, and again lots of consensus for it, then we get a kind of tripartite division of the world at a time in which to be a little bit you know, dramatic about it.

You know, the viability of human life is really running out unless we unite, Yeah, which is a climate stuff. Yes, And like there is simply no way not withstand. We're recording this right after this like massive fusion breakthrough that the Department of Energy announced yesterday. I when I was at Wired, had to write a whole lot about like enter G generation through lasers, but I'm still not qualified to be able to talk about the implications of what

like a major resource transition of the century. But you know, putting all of that aside, there is simply no way that humanity will come out of the twenty one century with anything like the sustainability necessary for continued human civilization unless there is a kind of posture, primarily of cooperation with these feuding great powers, and we are driving further

away from it. And that, I think is is what I mean when I say that, That's what I mean when I say the danger of this foreign policy and the consensus that it represents is that while it is succeeding on its own terms at the moment, from the big picture perspective, that moves us in a direction that like our grandchildren will curse us for moving in and then on, you know more are quotinion ways in which I shouldn't say Quotinian, but like ways in which you know,

the disastrous effects of which will manifest earlier. You know, Biden I think has done um a pretty good and

responsible job of limiting the American commitment in Ukraine. But once you commit to arming, you know, the Ukrainians to defeat, you know, an aggressor's invasion that has itself all built in escutory pressures, and like you can just imagine a successor administration where this administration under greater pressure from a Republican Congress changing their Yeah, just just being like, you know, we've been adjusting the range of the high Mars artillery launcher,

which can basically like hit nearly if you were fire it from you know, New York where we are, it would basically like hit somewhere just shy of Baltimore, right, Like we're not like the the administration is mono find like the range on the high Mars, so that like the Ukrainians don't hit inside of Russia, but they could, but you know, perhaps not forever. You know, right now

there is an active discussion. You know, we're recording this, you know, right as the Pentagon is still saying like we've made no decision yet, but to provide patriot batteries for you know, greater air defense. All of these escortatory pressures are built in the longer the war goes on, and that will require on the one hand, you know, very careful management, but also an administration and a political

climate that's interested in that kind of careful management. It's interested in limiting the commitment, like limiting the range of possibilities within already a pitiless war. Okay, so stop for a minute. I want to ask you the Cold War is Russia and China. There are two Cold Wars, right, One is Russia, one is China. These two foreign powers are not the same. Certainly not China. That's a forever war, right, I mean, Russia is like on the verge of being a hot war. Would you even try to like make

some kind of Dayton was China? I think you know Dayton with China and also we should mention like you know, as part of the Biden administration waging this you know cold war against China, it's launched like a massive bet to decouple its economy from the Chinese, which is that's one way in which the China US competition just doesn't resemble the US Soviet competition, Like the trade ties are intense, like the manufacturing relationship is like, there's just nothing like

that with the US and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century. But the Chinese say quite often like this is an unfortunate posture of the United States, and we would just you know, discuss this more with them, And that I think probably has to be the way in which both this administration and future administrations adjust to the

rise of China. That management of all of its different suite of issues has to be the subject of constant diplomacy, because you know, history tells us as the economic might of China increases, so well the foreign ambitions of China so well, its resource dependence. So will also the ways in which, much like the United States before it, the terms of like infrastructure, doing what the Chinese called, you know, the Belton Road Initiative become debt traps become the ways

in which satellites are formed. All of this has to be negotiated between Beijing and Washington, between you know, larger macro political structures, international structures ultimately deal with one another, not because this is an easy thing to bridge, but because the needs of everyone are so massive and so

dependent so urgently on this happening. So you know, it's simply has to be kind of particularly if the United States is going to sort of stay with a construct of the Chinese being a principal adversary and then the Russians being kind of the next guy down, that that is the geopolitical relationship that matters the most and requires the most attention. One thing I would say a consequence of all of this, I've said, this has gone pretty

well for Biden so far. One enormous consequence that right now you could cut either way, but I don't know in the future if it will stay that way, is you know, last February four the Chinese and the Russians agreed to what they called and no limit friendship. Now that's been very complicated for the Chinese by Russian like seeing that as a green light to invade Ukraine. But on the other hand, you know, while a lot of people focus on how you know, Russia can't really help China,

China can really help Russia. If I'm Russia and I have an economy smaller than Italy, what my best possibility here is to become an adjunct of Chinese power basically the lead. Basically this analogy doesn't work for a lot of ways, but just politically I think it it'll capture it somewhat be Britain to China's United States. I don't think China has much appetite for that. From a resource perspective,

it surely does. China is already becoming a massive energy customer of the Russians, and that will likely continue that. It's also what Hijin Peng's recent visit to Saudi Arabia's winding up that the Chinese want what the United States didn't really see a need for until nineteen seventy three,

which is a diversified energy supply. And that's a sense in which the Chinese and Russian relationship won't be equal, but is something that really does kind of makes sense on its own terms, and really makes sense in the context of the United States declaring, we see both of these major powers, one obviously bigger than the other, as our principal adversaries. That drives China and Russia together in

precisely the way that I think of the meme. You know, the worst person you know made a great point, something like Henry Kissinger made a point of saying like, just as a matter of basics, we cannot have China and the Soviet Union aligned with one another. We have to break that, and right now that's broken against the United States. Spencer so interesting. Well, thank you, Molly, I appreciate you letting me go on my little spiel. That's it for

this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to your the best minds and politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. And again, thanks for listening.