The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

more than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in just the past three decades.

“Someday, perhaps not long from now, the inhabitants of a hotter, more dangerous and biologically diminished planet than the one on which I lived may wonder what you and I were thinking, or whether we thought at all.”

“Of course we did it to ourselves; we had always been intellectually lazy, and the less asked of us, the less we had to say,” he writes. “We all lived for money, and that is what we died for.”

Globally, since just 1979, the season has grown by nearly 20 percent, and American wildfires now burn twice as much land as they did as recently as 1970.

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.

Ninety-six percent of the world’s mammals, by weight, are now humans and their livestock; just four percent are wild.

But when Silicon Valley tries to imagine superintelligence, what it comes up with is no-holds-barred capitalism.

Bitcoin. The cryptocurrency now produces as much CO2 each year as a million transatlantic flights.

But the growing hypocrisy of the truly empowered—corporations, nations, political leaders—illustrates a far more concerning possibility, all the more alarming for being so familiar from other realms of politics: that climate talk could become not a spur to change but an alibi, a cover, for inaction and irresponsibility, the world’s most powerful uniting in a chorus of double-talk that produces little beyond the song.

this one hurt since my company claims to care about climate kinds of things. during a recent remodel, we were told to not take our chairs (over 1,000) which were then unceremoniously thrown into the trash.