Everybody's Climate Change Book

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The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells

Tim Duggan Books, Crown Publishing Group, 2019

 

David Wallace-Wells has been getting a great deal of attention with his best-selling climate change wake-up call, The Uninhabitable Earth, and for good reason. It’s not every day that a book about climate change makes it to number one on the New York Times Best Sellers List. So I was curious what Wallace-Wells did to break through the reading public’s stubborn aversion to what is arguably the most urgent global issue of our time.

 Very quickly into it, it became clear to me that I am not the intended audience. The book begins with the words, “It is worse, much worse, than you think.” For me, that didn’t turn out to be true. Wallace-Wells is actually quite a bit more sanguine than I am about humanity’s ability to work its way to, if not sustainable, at least shy-of-apocalyptic levels of warming. He describes being concerned and excited in equal measure when looking at his infant daughter, considering that hers will be the generation to face humanity’s greatest survival challenge. When it comes to climate change, I am unable to muster the “excitement” part of that equation. As one who swings continuously between panic and despair over the staggering lack of human progress toward controlling greenhouse emissions, I am more in need of a tranquilizer than a wake-up call.  And yet, I stuck with this book, more than anything to give Wells-Wallace his due.

It is a remarkably gutsy thing to take on a detailed, exhaustively researched depiction of our current global danger; to relay in great detail how two to four degrees of average temperature rise will devastate human civilization. It takes even greater chutzpah to launch such a project without a solid scientific background. Wallace-Wells admits in the opening pages that he is no scientist, “not an environmentalist,” nor even “a nature lover.” A former editor of the Paris Review, Wallace-Wells comes from that shrinking academic world under growing financial assault and pressure to defend its continued existence, the Humanities. He is relatively new to writing about the climate crisis, having only very recently broken through with his 2017 article in New York Magazine, which became that publication’s most viewed article ever.

 In some ways, not having a scientific background gives Wallace-Wells an advantage in his ability to connect with a wide range of readers. He has an impressive ability to creatively narrate the crisis with vivid examples, rendering this all-encompassing threat to literally everything we know comprehensible. He earns the trust of readers when he admits that writing about the global climate crisis is horrifically difficult, even for the most accomplished writers. Stating the facts on the subject is nearly impossible without the appearance of sensationalism, exaggeration, or hyperbole. As he puts it, “the facts are hysterical.” He takes it on anyway, as in one of the book’s most terrifying revelations, that 80% of the human-produced carbon that is heating up our planet today has been pumped into the air by fossil fuels we have burned only since the end of World War II. In case that doesn’t register, he adds, “The majority of the burning has come since the premier of Seinfeld.” The implication of this is shattering on two levels – not only the ghastly pace of acceleration of the crisis, but, as Wallace-Wells told The Guardian in June this year: “This means we have burned more fossil fuels since the UN established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) than in all of the centuries before – so we have done more damage knowingly than we ever managed in ignorance.”

 In short, sounding the alarm bell on climate change has done exactly jack squat to reduce our fossil fuel emissions, rates of deforestation, or human consumer habits. We are destroying our planet in full knowledge of what we are doing.

 Wallace-Wells spells out humanity’s terrifying future in separate chapters with names like: Heat Death, Drowning, Hunger, Dying Oceans, Economic Collapse; so the reader can take them on one at a time, like opening the seven seals of the Apocalypse. At just two degrees warmer average global temperatures, a scenario most climate research points to as very likely, countries like Bahrain, Dubai, and Oman – where highs have already surpassed 120 degrees Fahrenheit over the past two years  – will become places where people will simply die outdoors without air conditioning. Tropical countries like Ecuador, Columbia, and Costa Rica will regularly experience highs of 105 degrees with over 90% humidity. These are conditions where it is lethal to walk around. Considering that Costa Rica has become one of the most popular retirement destinations for North Americans, there is nothing far-off or conjectural about the bad news. It is as real as it gets.

We can also say goodbye to many of our favorite foods. Coffee is far too delicate a crop to survive the rising temperatures in the regions where it grows. Oysters and clams will no longer be able to grow shells as the oceans continue to warm and acidify. Over ninety percent of the fish we eat will be gone, and rising oceans will kill most of the world’s rice paddies with salt.

 In the hands of most writers, the sheer volume of horrific news would cause most readers to toss the book away. But What Wallace-Wells does best is storytelling, and perhaps this is what is necessary to get people to grapple with the terrifying reality of the climate crisis. He delivers the death sentence to us in well-crafted vignettes, asking us what it will mean thirty years from now when the trees no longer turn beautiful colors in the fall, but simply turn brown and drop their leaves. How will we understand the paintings of the great impressionists when we see them in the museums? How will it feel in twenty or so years, when the Greek islands of Homer’s Odyssey are reduced to lifeless, searing, barren rocks surrounded by dead, fishless seas? How will we make sense of what we are as a civilization?

 Another thing he manages quite well is clarifying how much of climate change prediction involves juggling conjectural futures. How bad will things be if, in the next five years, we get carbon emissions under control and level them off? Answer: Still very bad. Coastal cities will still need to invest billions of dollars in flood control, and super-storms on the scale of Hurricanes Maria and Sandy will become commonplace. How much worse will it be if we don’t meet those emission reduction targets, and two degrees of warming becomes three or four? This is where the nightmare scenarios come in, and they are all too possible for comfort: famine, unchecked epidemics, coastal cities permanently under water, and a billion climate refugees in need of new homes.

 And in case you’ve been holding out hope that the genius trust of Silicon Valley will come to the rescue with some technological deus ex machina, Wallace-Wells offers us an example of what the technocracy is more actively concerned with. The cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, now has a carbon footprint larger than the city of Las Vegas. This is due to the structure of blockchain digital technology, which involves a decentralized mode of verification of every trader’s transaction by people hooked into the system using special, highly energy-intensive software. So much for the vague public perception that online businesses somehow consume less energy than their traditional brick-and-mortar counterparts. The reality is generally the exact opposite.

This is also true of the “gig” economy. Although Wallace-Wells doesn’t discuss them specifically, Air B&B and Uber are good examples of businesses that attracted startup capital and eager investors, in part, on the promise that these new business models would eliminate the need for energy-burning hotels and take more cars off the road. Unfortunately, for people who fly more than once a year, airline travel now makes up the greatest portion of the individual carbon footprint, and Air B&B has made expanding that footprint a lot easier for the average traveler. Meanwhile, Uber has made recent headlines, as new studies show the ride service actually adds to traffic congestion and auto emissions in cities like San Francisco and LA, as ever more Uber drivers join the app, idling their gas-burning engines, waiting for fares. And what of the tech sector venture capitalists who made all this possible? Always ready with a visual accompaniment, Wallace-Wells provides this image for us to take home: the California wildfires of 2017, when “the West Coast’s wealthy still showed up for their tee times, swinging their clubs just yards from blazing fires in photographs that could not be more perfectly staged to skewer the country’s indifferent plutocracy.”

But despite these well-aimed barbs at the upper crust, Wallace-Wells seems to have difficulty making a thorough economic critique of the climate crisis. He skirts a deep takedown of capitalism, seeming to believe that such an approach belongs to a narrow, Left vs. Right polemic. While he has all the facts at his disposal, he is at pains not to stake out a firm position. This, unfortunately, prevents him from pointing readers toward anything like a path forward to resolve the climate crisis. While he admits that the richest 10 percent of countries produce more than half of all greenhouse gas emissions, he hastens to add, “[this] is one reason that many on the Left point to the all-encompassing system, saying that industrial capitalism is to blame. It is. But saying so does not name an antagonist; it names a toxic investment vehicle with most of the world as stakeholders, many of whom eagerly bought in. And who quite enjoy their present way of life.”

 In other words, because we who live under capitalism are enmeshed in the consumer lifestyle it has generated, nobody is really to blame. And if nobody is to blame, the call to dismantle capitalism in order to save the planet is…misguided, somehow? The logic doesn’t actually hold up here. “Meanwhile,” he adds, it simply isn’t the case that the socialist countries of the world are behaving more responsibly with carbon.” Here is one of the few assertions Wallace-Wells makes where he provides no data whatsoever for backup. He doesn’t even tell us what he means by “socialist countries.” North Korea? Sweden? Venezuela? The former Soviet Union? When it comes to economics, it seems Wallace-Wells simply doesn’t want to take sides, and this, unfortunately leaves a rather large hole in the book when it comes to offering readers and alternative to despair in facing the climate crisis.  He mentions carbon capture technology several times in the book, even while acknowledging that the technology is so inefficient, that in order to make a real dent in the excess of carbon in our atmosphere, we would literally have to cover entire countries with carbon capture machinery. Yet, he still seems to think it worth adding to a list of things that might help. At the same time, he makes no mention of the Green New Deal being pushed by Democratic Socialist representatives in Congress, and several socialist organizations in the United States.

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 This refusal to get into politics is a common side effect of an academic Humanities background (all too familiar to me, because I share that background), where a well-meaning desire to stay above the fray and not lend one’s voice to “a cause” can result in cultivating some terrific blind spots. Wallace-Wells acknowledges that fossil fuel consumption and capitalism are “deeply entangled,” but he only yanks on enough of those strings to unravel the question: “can capitalism survive climate change?”

 Unfortunately, it is the wrong question. What we really need to ask is, can we meaningfully reduce carbon emissions within any economic system that is dependent on continuous growth, fueled by the ever-increasing consumption of the earth’s resources? Can we mobilize entire countries to phase out fossil fuels and over-consumption under a set of economic imperatives aimed, not at meeting the needs of the human population, but at maximizing the wealth of a tiny global elite? Call it capitalism, oligopoly, plutocracy (and Wallace-Wells uses all of these terms) such a goal is untenable. The very demands of capitalism itself mitigate against restricting consumption and growth. But with all his painstaking research, Wallace-Wells avoids looking too deeply into this contradiction.

 Possibly even more concerning, he seems to take almost as many swipes at environmental activists as he does at those blasé Bel-Air golfers. He blames anti-nuclear activists in Germany for being too successful in pushing for the closure of nuclear power plants, because the energy companies responded by burning more coal. He describes activists mobilized by bee colony collapse as being enraptured by “a fable” that took hold across the internet fueled by “the complete powerlessness of individuals facing down inevitable, civilization-scale suicide.” He then admits offhandedly that flying insects might indeed be disappearing because of global warming: “seventy-five percent of them may have died, drawing us closer to a world without pollinators, which the researchers called an ‘ecological Armageddon’ – but colony collapse disorder has basically nothing to do with that.” Is it really necessary to belittle those working to save domestic honeybees because their deaths have a different collection of causes than those of their wilder cousins? Is it even true that the problem has “basically nothing to do” with climate? On this assertion, readers may prefer to take the word of those who have a scientific background.

 Wallace-Wells even takes time to knock activism against plastic, a petroleum product that releases methane into the atmosphere as it breaks down for hundreds of years in landfills and on the surface of the oceans. For Wallace-Wells, the bag-banning “plastic panic” is a distraction for people who can’t seem to focus on the biggest greenhouse gas contributors. This is a writer who clearly grasps the magnitude of the ecological crisis we are in, and its complex interconnections to the overarching warming of our planet. So it’s hard to understand why he goes out of his way to disparage those who are actually trying to make things better, even in a limited way. Perhaps it is in an effort to fold us all into his overall narrative; that as a species, we have yet to find the stories that will motivate us to take the central threat of climate change seriously, or to accept its implication: a radical restructuring of the way we live. Fair enough. But I found myself wishing he didn’t feel compelled to mow down so many people in his way.

 Of course, it is easy to criticize one who has taken on something so audacious, maybe even bitten off more than he could chew. The Uninhabitable Earth has already achieved something great, simply in getting a large chunk of the reading public to finally sit down and read their first book about climate change. Many, no doubt, will be inspired by its stark revelations to take some action. They may not have done so for a book written by a climate scientist. They may not have even picked it off the shelf. As Wallace-Wells puts it, and I couldn’t agree more, “there is no single way to best tell the story of climate change, no single rhetorical approach likely to work on a given audience, and none to dangerous to try. Any story that sticks is a good one.”

Death on a North African Beach - Kamel Daoud Takes on Camus

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(The Meursault Investigation -in English Translation, Other Press, 2015 - Kamel Daoud, Translated by John Cullen)

 

 

In 1946, when Albert Camus published The Stranger, his thin and devastating novel about a French Algerian Pied Noir who murders an Algerian Arab on a beach, it launched half a century of debate and speculation. Was it an indictment of French colonialism? An excessively even-handed look inside the mind of a casual killer? A cynical pronouncement on human morality? Sixty-seven years later, Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud published The Meursault Investigation, a story told from the point of view of the murdered man’s brother. While Doud’s novel is no longer quite new, the questions it raises are as urgent as the day it was published in 2015.

It turns out that the only way to fully absorb Daoud’s book is to read it back-to-back with Camus’s. It doesn’t matter if you read The Stranger years ago. Read it again. It’s short. Ideally, one should keep the two novels side by side, close the book on the last page of The Stranger with one hand, then pick up Daoud with the other and continue reading. The stories are connected in ways both subtle and brilliant that will be missed if too much time elapses between reading each. The Stranger is narrated in first person by a man named Meursault who returns from overseas to a home for which he admits he feels nothing, attends his mother’s funeral tearlessly, then kills without remorse, ending up on trial for his life. Through it all, this narrator’s pulse never seems to go above 60, even as he describes murdering a man who remains strangely nameless and out of focus. Daoud’s novel, in contrast, is an emotional upheaval, a backward journey through violence, pain and loss, as if Daoud were watering the plains of Camus’s parched, alien landscape with the living blood of a present people.

Harun, Daoud’s aging protagonist, leads the reader down the deserted allies and sun-baked streets of an Algerian city haunted by an unsettled and bloody past. Where The Stranger begins with a declaration of death; “Maman died today,” Daoud’s first line insists not just on life, but on memory. “Mama’s still alive today;” and so are the undead memories her and Harun’s minds, even though he’d sometimes like to drink them away. He spends his days in one of the few bars left in the city of Oran (where Camus set The Plague) and drops hints to the reader that one of the waiters might be a ghost, though by the end of the novel, one begins to wonder if the real ghost might not be Harun himself.  

Like any good barroom storyteller, Harun skips around, dredging up details and anecdotes outside the sequence of time. Conversing with, and sometimes challenging his drinking partner, the reader, he spins a narrative that comes together from more than one angle at once, like a puzzle. Sometimes he flies into rages, as if his brother’s murder were only yesterday. He demands to know why only one of those two men who met on the beach that day is given a face in Camus’s book. He asserts, “Well, the original guy was such a good story teller, he managed to make people forget his crime, whereas the other one was a poor illiterate that God created apparently for the sole purpose of taking a bullet and returning to dust. An anonymous person who didn’t even have the time to be given a name.”

Daoud gives him one – Musa. And as Musa’s story unfolds, the layers of Algeria’s history are peeled back to that moment on a beach, in the white-hot north African sun, when a French colonist put a three bullets into Harun’s brother as he sat in the sand. It is the moment that Harun cannot reconcile, and it seems fitting that he wasn’t there to see it happen. And because he was offstage, like an audience member viewing a Greek tragedy, he’s had to piece his brother’s death together from long-yellowed news clippings and court records. He keeps the reader in the bar by buying him drinks, his voice swaying from bitter irony to humble gratitude that at last someone is listening to his tale.

Harun tells of his childhood, following his mother around a French neighborhood as she banged on doors searching for Meursault’s family. Mistakenly believing an elderly French woman to be related to the murderer, she screams in her face, terrifying her. She then drags Harun behind her to the beach where her Musa died and cries out to God on the hot sand.

In Daoud’s world, Camus’s murder scene on the beach both takes on new dimensions and leaves us in a deeper pit of unanswered questions. Daoud puts flesh on the bones of the colonized Algerians that Camus kept at an aesthetic distance, a literary style that earned him accusations of Orientalism and Eurocentrism from historians and cultural critics like Edward Said and Samir Amin. Rather than taking on Camus in a polemic, however, Daoud turns to his country’s past, unearths the dead and gives voice to the living, allowing them to confront Meursault in their own voices. The resulting effect is an unleashed chorus of pain, mouths suddenly ungagged. But despite the anger with which the Harun demands to know why Meursault gets all the attention, the title of Daoud’s book pretty much gives away the answer (after all, it’s not called The Musa Investigation.) In the end, Harun himself cannot escape the long shadow of that murdering Pied Noir, repulsive for his lack of humanity, yet somehow an irresistible enigma to readers. “That story,” he says, “a corpse wrote it, not a writer. You can tell by the way he suffers from the sun and gets dazzled by colors and has no opinion on anything except the sun, the sea, and the surrounding rocks…. You know, his crime is majestically nonchalant.” Harun would love nothing better than to stop thinking about Muersault, but he simply can’t.

Something I didn’t expect happened to me in the middle of reading Daoud’s novel.
While idly channel-surfing, I caught part of a TV documentary showing an interview with Jeffrey Dahmer. It had been more that fifteen years since I’d seen any footage of this particular serial killer. It brought back a flood of memories. I grew up in Wisconsin – Dahmer country. He did most of his butchery in Milwaukee.

The journalist was asking him why he’d done it. What possessed him to lure 17 young men to his home to murder and dismember them? Dahmer’s flat affect, his polite, emotionless way of speaking, his matter-of-fact, unadorned description of killing as if it were as mundane as making a purchase from a vending machine was as repellent as it was mesmerizing.

But worse, with his upper Midwest accent he sounded just like every guy I grew up with. And how come I never noticed before how much he looked like one of my cousins? It was as if I needed fifteen years of distance to see how close to me this monster was. He swam up through the same bland, blonde, German, gene pool as I did. Only a few years older than me, he could have easily been someone my brother went to school with. I shut the TV off, but all I did was pace around my apartment, unable to get that voice out of my mind. “I don’t know why I did it. I wish I knew.”

When The Stranger first came out, people could not stop talking about Meursault. Who was he? What motivated him? Didn’t people also try to dissect Dahmer, from that first night the police in Hazmat suits rolled those hideous plastic barrels out of his apartment under the lights of TV cameras? Weren’t his victims just as invisible and nameless as Meursault’s Arab on the beach?

Dahmer followed the typical pattern of a predatory killer, hunting in a range close to where he lived. His victims were male, gay, and overwhelmingly youth of color – African American and Southeast Asian, mostly. And for the Milwaukee police in the late 80’s and early 90’s, the disappearance of people like this was simply not a policing priority. No surprise, then, that Dahmer was able to get away with it for eleven years without getting caught. Everybody from my generation knows Dahmer’s name. But I have yet to meet one who knows the name of any of those seventeen young men. They remain every bit as invisible as Meursault’s victim.

One thing that sets Dahmer apart is that he knew he wasn’t right in the head (belying conventional belief that truly insane people don’t know they’re insane.) Meursault, on the other hand, insists, “I was exactly like everybody else.” In The Stranger, when he’s questioned at trial as to why he showed no emotion at his mother’s funeral, he replies, “everybody at one time or another has wished for the death of their loved ones.” When the prosecutor directs the jury to observe his lack of remorse, Meursault reflects, “I had never been able to truly feel remorse for anything.”

Obviously, Meursault is not Dahmer. There’s a big difference between killing seventeen and killing one. Between killing for sexual pleasure and killing for no reason at all.

Isn’t there?

And what if Meursault is right? What if he really is just like everybody else?

Daoud takes Harun, and the reader, to a place where we must confront that very question. Everything in the book makes us feel it is necessary that we be brought there, just as his mother brought him to that blazing, desolate beach where his brother lost his life.
Most of us remember the photo of another famous death on a beach, the 2015 photo the Syrian refugee child washed up on Turkish shores. A study by the National Academy of Sciences reported that donations to refugee relief agencies increased 55-fold in the weeks after that horrific photo was published. However, the effect was short-lived. After six weeks, the increase was only double, and two years later, entered into a steady decline, which is now being attributed to what we call “compassion fatigue,” a numbing of our ability to be aroused by the suffering of others. Daoud would have us ask ourselves if we’ll notice the day when we entirely lose our ability to feel. When sun might as well be shade, life might as well be death, and the sea melts like lead into an undistinguished, blazing horizon.

In The Stranger, Camus ultimately makes the point that it is not immorality that is the opposite of morality, but amorality. The true evil is not malice, but apathy - not caring. Largely through this little novel, Camus achieved a place among the 20th century’s most influential humanist thinkers. In taking on The Stranger, Daoud asks whether the facelessness of the powerless might not make that amorality a little easier.

But this is no moral tract. Daoud’s is a voice of the generation of Algerians who were born during the first days of independence and lived through the horrific civil war of the 1990’s, when the nullification of an election won by the Islamic Salvation Front resulted in a bloodbath. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed in indiscriminate door-to-door massacres. Many of the same revolutionaries who decried the inhumanity of the French were quick to call for the heads of Islamists in this horrific political bloodletting. Harun’s story is dislocated in time and seems to take place before all this, but a tuned ear can catch the origin of the bitterness, the tone of earned humility in his voice. Harun kept himself out of the revolution that threw the French out of Algeria. He could not join the militants and risk leaving his mother with no living sons left – it would have killed her. But eventually, he exacts revenge on stranger, a fleeing Frenchman. With an irony Voltaire would have appreciated, he gets into trouble with the Algerian authorities, not for the killing itself, because its timing, two weeks after the fall of the French colonial government. “The gratuitiousness of Musa’s death was unconscionable. And now my revenge had been struck down to the same level of insignificance!”

In the long wake of revolutionary dreams deferred, Daoud takes his story beyond the dichotomy of colonizer and colonized, just as Camus takes his story beyond the dichotomy of sin and salvation. The reader gets the sense that not only will things never be clear-cut for our protagonist, but that in a place like Algeria, one never really leaves history behind. Daoud’s book is something both bigger and better than a literary polemic against Eurocentrism and Orientalism. Daoud goes out alone and meets Camus like a gunslinger on that same white-hot, blood stained beach, bringing with him all the terrible beauty of his people, and says, yes - we have something to say, too. And you and I will always be in this together.