The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

And there is already, right now, fully a third more carbon in the atmosphere than at any point in the last 800,000 years—perhaps in as long as 15 million years. There were no humans then. The oceans were more than a hundred feet higher.

It is a very strange argument; if the planet is warming at a terrifying pace and on a horrifying scale, it should transparently concern us more, rather than less, that the warming is beyond our control, possibly even our comprehension.

The world’s natural wheat belt is moving poleward by about 160 miles each decade,

nearly all of the astonishing productivity gains of the last century trace back to the work of a single man, Norman Borlaug, perhaps the best argument for the humanitarian virtue of America’s imperial century.

Since 1950, much of the good stuff in the plants we grow—protein, calcium, iron, vitamin C, to name just four—has declined by as much as one-third, a landmark 2004 study showed. Everything is becoming more like junk food. Even the protein content of bee pollen has dropped by a third.

When you define anything outside a narrow band of likelihood as irresponsible to consider, or talk about, or plan for, even unspectacular new research findings can catch you flat-footed.

“We’re getting some intimations of how the ruling class intends to handle the accumulating disasters of the Anthropocene,” as the cultural theorist McKenzie Wark, of the New School, wrote. “We’re on our own.”

As soon as 2030, global water demand is expected to outstrip supply by 40 percent.

The global result is that as many as 2.1 billion people around the world do not have access to safe drinking water, and 4.5 billion don’t have safely managed water for sanitation.

As soon as 2020, as many as 250 million Africans could face water shortages due to climate change; by the 2050s, the number could hit a billion people in Asia alone. By the same year, the World Bank found, freshwater availability in cities around the world could decline by as much as two-thirds. Overall, according to the United Nations, five billion people could have poor access to freshwater by 2050.

In India, in just the next two years, twenty-one cities could exhaust their groundwater supply.

We frequently choose to obsess over personal consumption, in part because it is within our control and in part as a very contemporary form of virtue signaling. But ultimately those choices are, in almost all cases, trivial contributors, ones that blind us to the more important forces. When it comes to freshwater, the bigger picture is this: personal consumption amounts to such a thin sliver that only in the most extreme droughts can it even make a difference.

Off the coasts of Australia, fish populations have declined an estimated 32 percent in just ten years.

Over the past fifty years, the amount of ocean water with no oxygen at all has quadrupled globally, giving us a total of more than four hundred “dead zones”;

Globally, one out of six deaths is caused by air pollution.

We can breathe in microplastics, even when indoors, where they’ve been detected suspended in the air, and do already drink them: they are found in the tap water of 94 percent of all tested American cities. And

(Every round-trip plane ticket from New York to London, keep in mind, costs the Arctic three more square meters of ice.)

But in 2018, Burke and several other colleagues published a major paper exploring the growth consequences of some scenarios closer to our present predicament. In it, they considered one plausible but still quite optimistic scenario, in which the world meets its Paris Agreement commitments, limiting warming to between 2.5 and 3 degrees. This is probably about the best-case warming scenario we might reasonably expect; globally, relative to a world with no additional warming, it would cut per-capita economic output by the end of the century, Burke and his colleagues estimate, by between 15 and 25 percent. Hitting four degrees of warming, which lies on the low end of the range of warming implied by our current emissions trajectory, would cut into it by 30 percent or more. This is a trough twice as deep as the deprivations that scarred our grandparents in the 1930s, and which helped produce a wave of fascism, authoritarianism, and genocide.

According to one assessment, thirty-two countries—from Haiti to the Philippines and India to Cambodia, each heavily dependent on farming and agriculture—face “extreme risk” of conflict and civil unrest from climate disruptions over the next thirty years.

But most wars throughout history, it is important to remember, have been conflicts over resources, often ignited by resource scarcity, which is what an earth densely populated and denuded by climate change will yield. Those wars don’t tend to increase those resources; most of the time, they incinerate them.

The effect on the personal decisions of the consumer class is perhaps a narrow way of thinking about global warming, though it demonstrates a strain of strange ascetic pride among the well-to-do.

“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism,” the literary critic Fredric Jameson has written, attributing the phrase, coyly, to “someone” who “once said it.” That someone might say, today, “Why choose?”

At present, the economic impacts of climate change are relatively light: in the United States, in 2017, the estimated cost was $306 billion. The heavier impacts await us. And if, in the past, the promise of growth has been the justification for inequality, injustice, and exploitation, it will have many more wounds to salve in the near climate future: disaster, drought, famine, war, global refugeeism and the political disarray it unleashes. And, as a salve, climate change promises almost no global growth; in much of the world hit hardest, in fact, negative growth.

“You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”

The same can be said, believe it or not, for the much-heralded green energy “revolution,” which has yielded productivity gains in energy and cost reductions far beyond the predictions of even the most doe-eyed optimists, and yet has not even bent the curve of carbon emissions downward. We are, in other words, billions of dollars and thousands of dramatic breakthroughs later, precisely where we started when hippies were affixing solar panels to their geodesic domes. That is because the market has not responded to these developments by seamlessly retiring dirty energy sources and replacing them with clean ones. It has responded by simply adding the new capacity to the same system.

We think of climate change as slow, but it is unnervingly fast. We think of the technological change necessary to avert it as fast-arriving, but unfortunately it is deceptively slow—especially judged by just how soon we need it. This is what Bill McKibben means when he says that winning slowly is the same as losing: “If we don’t act quickly, and on a global scale, then the problem will literally become insoluble,” he writes. “The decisions we make in 2075 won’t matter.”

The second insight is more challenging—that the climate crisis demands political commitment well beyond the easy engagement of rhetorical sympathies, comfortable partisan tribalism, and ethical consumption.

Eating organic is nice, in other words, but if your goal is to save the climate your vote is much more important. Politics is a moral multiplier. And a perception of worldly sickness uncomplemented by political commitment gives us only “wellness.”

But however manipulated by marketing consultants, and however dubious its claims to healthfulness, wellness also gives a clear name and shape to a growing perception even, or especially, among those wealthy enough to be insulated from the early assaults of climate change: that the contemporary world is toxic, and that to endure or thrive within it requires extraordinary measures of self-regulation and self-purification.

But conscious consumption and wellness are both cop-outs, arising from that basic promise extended by neoliberalism: that consumer choices can be a substitute for political action, advertising not just political identity but political virtue; that the mutual end-goal of market and political forces should be the effective retirement of contentious politics at the hand of market consensus,

That epic era once derided as “prehistory” accounts for about 95 percent of human history. For nearly all of that time, humans traversed the planet but left no meaningful mark. Which makes the history of mark-making—the entire history of civilization, the entire history we know as history—look less like an inevitable crescendo than like an anomaly, or blip. And makes industrialization and economic growth, the two forces that really gave the modern world the hurtling sensation of material progress, a blip inside a blip. A blip inside a blip that has brought us to the brink of a never-ending climate catastrophe.

The possibility that our grandchildren could be living forever among the ruins of a much wealthier and more peaceful world seems almost inconceivable from the vantage of the present day, so much do we still live within the propaganda of human progress and generational improvement. But of course it was a relatively common feature of human history before the advent of industrialization. It was the experience of the Egyptians after the invasion of the Sea Peoples and the Incas after Pizarro, the Mesopotamians after the Akkadian Empire, and the Chinese after the Tang Dynasty. It was—so famously that it grew into caricature, which then spawned decades of rhetorical critique—the experience of Europeans after the fall of Rome. But in this case, the dark ages would arrive within one generation of the light—close enough to touch, and share stories, and blame.

“Dark Ecology.”

If you do this, a lot of people will call you a “defeatist” or a “doomer,” or claim you are “burnt out.” They will tell you that you have an obligation to work for climate justice or world peace or the end of bad things everywhere, and that “fighting” is always better than “quitting.” Ignore them, and 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. It’s

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. You can’t halfway your way to a solution to a crisis this large.

The problem, it turns out, is not an overabundance of humans but a dearth of humanity. Climate change and the Anthropocene are the triumph of an undead species, a mindless shuffle toward extinction, but this is only a lopsided imitation of what we really are. This is why political depression is important: zombies don’t feel sad, and they certainly don’t feel helpless; they just are. Political depression is, at root, the experience of a creature that is being prevented from being itself; for all its crushingness, for all its feebleness, it’s a cry of protest. 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.