Everybody's Climate Change Book

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.

 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.”