This week, David Wallace-Wells is back on the show for a wide-ranging conversation on the climate crisis unfolding in 2025. I was struck by David’s recent essay, “We Can Adapt and Prepare for Floods. But Will We?” in the wake of the horrific flooding in Texas. As David explains, the climate disasters we face today are increasingly unpredictable and widespread, challenging our traditional understanding of what our climate risks are where they can happen.

Despite the rising frequency and cost of these disasters, David notes that increasingly it appears that our most commons response is largely to normalize these events. He suggests that instead of being jolted into action, we are adapting to these new realities mostly by just accepting it as inevitable.

In this conversation, we also discuss a number of other recent events, from the repeal of major parts of the Inflation Reduction Act to budget cuts to federal services to China’s big clean energy in push in recent years. It’s wide-ranging and the kind of fascinating talk you can always expect when David joins the show.

David Wallace-Wells is the New York Times essayist, best-selling science writer and author of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. His subscriber-only newsletter he explores climate change, technology, the future of the planet and how we live on it. His recent piece on the tragic floods in Texas “We Can Adapt and Prepare for Floods. But Will We?”

Check out our past conversations with David, first in 2021 and later with Ty in 2023. He’s always an exceptional guest and a very considerate person.

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Our music is "Gotta Get Up" by The Passion Hifi, check out his music at thepassionhifi.com. Rate, review and subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify, and more! Subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Why were there so many serial killers in the US in the 1970s and 80s? Why were so many in the Pacific Northwest?

This week, we explore the Lead Crime Hypothesis with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Caroline Fraser. In her new book, Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, she explores the potential link between mid-20th century pollution from leaded gasoline and industrial smelters and the spike in violent crime. We also examine how the reduction of lead in the environment could explain the subsequent drop in crime rates since the 1990s, but how we still face a threat today. We discuss how lead pollution became such a problem, its known impacts on human behavior, and why our understanding of pollution can challenge some conventional crime reduction strategies and beliefs.

Caroline grew up outside of Seattle in the 1970s, while Ted Bundy and other murderers were in the area. We talk about her personal history with the area and how it's driven her work on the topic.

Caroline Fraser is the author of Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, which won the Pulitzer Prize as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Heartland Prize, and the Plutarch Award for Best Biography of the Year. She is also the author of God’s Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church, and her writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, and the London Review of Books, among other publications.

Check out Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers

Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to our newsletter/podcast, The Climate Weekly, to help support this show. Your contributions will make the continuation of this show possible.

Our music is "Gotta Get Up" by The Passion Hifi, check out his music at thepassionhifi.com. Rate, review and subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and more! Subscribe to our YouTube channel.

We’re living through a time of extraordinary change to the US energy landscape. As Robbie Orvis, Senior Director of Modeling and Analysis at Energy Innovation argues, the combination of surging demand for electricity with new policies designed to slow the build out of cheaper, cleaner, faster energy sources like wind, solar, and batteries will result in higher utility bills, fewer jobs, and slower economic growth. And that will impact everyone, likely in more ways than you’d expect.

Orvis joins The Climate Pod this week for an in-depth examination of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. How much less clean energy will actually be built in the coming years? How much could it increase energy costs? What will be the economic losses suffered as a result? Will international momentum towards clean energy continue in absence of the United States’ leadership? Orvis answers all these questions and more as we get into the weeds of the new energy environment.

Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to our newsletter/podcast, The Climate Weekly, to help support this show. Your contributions will make the continuation of this show possible.

Check out more of Robbie's work at Energy Innovation here.

Our music is "Gotta Get Up" by The Passion Hifi, check out his music at thepassionhifi.com. Rate, review and subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and more! Subscribe to our YouTube channel.