The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

the matter of blame could become an especially potent and indiscriminate political munition—residual climate rage.

The cost is large: a decarbonized economy, a perfectly renewable energy system, a reimagined system of agriculture, and perhaps even a meatless planet.

the threat of catastrophic climate change means we need to entirely rebuild the world’s infrastructure in considerably less time.

The longer we wait, the harder it will be. If we had started global decarbonization in 2000, when Al Gore narrowly lost election to the American presidency, we would have had to cut emissions by only about 3 percent per year to stay safely under two degrees of warming.

intensive infrastructure projects at every level and in every corner of human activity, from new plane fleets to new land use and right down to a new way of making concrete, production of which ranks today as the second most carbon-intensive industry in the world—an industry that is booming, by the way, thanks to China, which recently poured more concrete in three years than the United States used in the entire twentieth century. If the cement industry were a country, it would be the world’s third-largest emitter.

carbon capture plants will deliver industrial absolution for industrial sin—and initiate, as a result, a whole new theological romance with the power of machine.

globally, pollution kills as many as nine million each year.

But the main lesson from the church of technology runs in the other direction, instructing us in subtle and not-so-subtle ways to regard the world beyond our phones as less real, less urgent, and less meaningful than the worlds made available to us through those screens, which happen to be worlds protected from climate devastation.

“Staring into the screen so we don’t have to see the planet die.”

In Silicon Valley, even tech critics tend to see the problem as a form of addiction; but, like all addictions, it expresses a value judgment, if one that makes the unaddicted uncomfortable—in this case, that we find the world of our screens more rewarding, or safer, in ways so hard to justify and explain that there isn’t really a word for it other than “preferable.”

In the United States, there have been six protests by self-immolation since 2014; in China, the gesture is even more common,

On perhaps no issue more than climate is that liberal posture of well-off enlightenment a defensive gesture: almost regardless of your politics or your consumption choices, the wealthier you are, the larger your carbon footprint.

they are calling attention to the structure of a political and economic order that not only permits the disparity but feeds and profits from it—this is what Thomas Piketty calls the “apparatus of justification.”

If the world’s most conspicuous emitters, the top 10 percent, reduced their emissions to only the E.U. average, total global emissions would fall by 35 percent.

GMOs aren’t a sign of a sick planet but a possible partial solution to the coming crisis of agriculture; nuclear power the same for energy.

“philanthrocapitalism,” which seeks profits alongside human benefits,

Today, we don’t even have to gaze into the future, or trust that it will be deformed by climate change, to see what that would look like. In the form of tribalism at home and nationalism abroad and terrorism flaming out from the tinder of failed states, that future is here, at least in preview, already. Now we just wait for the storms.

India’s share of climate burden was four times as high as its share of climate guilt.

China is in the opposite situation, its share of guilt four times as high as its share of the burden.

But on the matter of climate change, China does hold nearly all the cards. To the extent the world as a whole needs a stable climate to endure or thrive, its fate will be determined much more by the carbon trajectories of the developing world than by the course of the United States and Europe, where emissions have already flattened out and will likely begin their decline soon—though

In other words, a completely Mad Max world is not around the bend, since even catastrophic climate change won’t undermine all political power—in fact, it will produce some winners, relatively speaking.

There is no good thing in the world that will be made more abundant, or spread more widely, by global warming.

The list of the bad things that will proliferate is innumerable.

wheat cultivation, he argues, is responsible for the arrival of what we now understand as state power, and, with it, bureaucracy and oppression and inequality.

the sedentary life agriculture produced eventually led to denser settlements, but populations didn’t expand for millennia afterward, the potential growth from farming offset by new levels of disease and warfare.

We are still, now, in much of the world, shorter, sicker, and dying younger than our hunter-gatherer forebears, who were also, by the way, much better custodians of the planet on which we all live.

so much do we still live within the propaganda of human progress and generational improvement.

the dark ages would arrive within one generation of the light—close enough to touch, and share stories, and blame.

We have for so long, over decades if not centuries, defined predictions of the collapse of civilization or the end of the world as something close to proof of insanity, and the communities that spring up around them as “cults,” that we are now left unable to take any warnings of disaster all that seriously—especially when those raising the alarm are also, themselves, “giving up.”

“inhumanism”: the belief, in short, that people were far too concerned with people-ness, and the place of people in the world, rather than the natural majesty of the nonhuman cosmos in which they happened to find themselves.

take part in a very ancient practical and spiritual tradition: withdrawing from the fray. Withdraw not with cynicism, but with a questing mind. Withdraw so that you can allow yourself to sit back quietly and feel, intuit, work out what is right for you and what nature might need from you. Withdraw because refusing to help the machine advance—refusing to tighten the ratchet further—is a deeply moral position. Withdraw because action is not always more effective than inaction. Withdraw to examine your worldview: the cosmology, the paradigm, the assumptions, the direction of travel. All real change starts with withdrawal.

many of even those who define themselves as practical technocrats of the environmental center-left believe that what is needed to avert catastrophic climate change is a global mobilization at the scale of World War II. They are right—that is an entirely sober assessment of the size of the problem,

And how widespread alarm will shape our ethical impulses toward one another, and the politics that emerge from those impulses, is among the more profound questions being posed by the climate to the planet of people it envelops.

To the average citizen of each of these countries, the criticism may seem extreme, but it arises from a very clearheaded calculus: the world has, at most, about three decades to completely decarbonize before truly devastating climate horrors begin.

Yes, political depressives feel as if they don’t know how to be human; buried in the despair and self-doubt is an important realization. If humanity is the capacity to act meaningfully within our surroundings, then we are not really, or not yet, human.

Unless forest-health is our health, we’re never going to get beyond appetite as a motivator in the world.

“The greatest challenge we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead.”

by drawing our circles of empathy smaller and smaller, or by simply turning a blind eye when convenient, we will find ways to engineer new indifference.

Climate science has arrived at this terrifying conclusion not casually, and not with glee, but by systematically ruling out every alternative explanation for observed warming—even

But, all told, the question of how bad things will get is not actually a test of the science; it is a bet on human activity.

How much will we do to stall disaster, and how quickly? Those are the only questions that matter.

“end of nature”—that it is human action that will determine the climate of the future, not systems beyond our control.

If we allow global warming to proceed, and to punish us with all the ferocity we have fed it, it will be because we have chosen that punishment—collectively walking down a path of suicide.

If we avert it, it will be because we have chosen to walk a different path, and endure.

But for the moment, at least, most of us seem more inclined to run from that responsibility than embrace it—or even admit we see it, though it sits in front of us as plainly as a steering wheel.

The fact that climate change is all-enveloping means it targets all of us, and that we must all share in the responsibility so we do not all share in the suffering—at least not all share in so suffocatingly much of it.

which will be the first great pandemic to be produced by global warming.

Fermi’s paradox: If the universe is so big, then why haven’t we encountered any other intelligent life in it?

In a universe that is many billions of years old, with star systems separated as much by time as by space, civilizations might emerge and develop and then burn themselves up simply too fast to ever find one another.

The mass extinction we are now living through has only just begun; so much more dying is coming.