The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

Global warming isn’t something that might happen, should several people make some profoundly shortsighted calculations; it is something that is already happening, everywhere, and without anything like direct supervisors. Nuclear Armageddon, in theory, has a few dozen authors; climate catastrophe has billions of them, with responsibility distended over time and extended across much of the planet.

at present the world’s wealthy possess the lion’s share of guilt—the richest 10 percent producing half of all emissions. This distribution tracks closely with global income inequality, which 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 in fact quite enjoy their present way of life. That includes, almost certainly, you and me and everyone else buying escapism with our Netflix subscription.

transportation and industry make up less than 40 percent of global emissions.

American inaction surely slowed global progress on climate in a time when the world had only one superpower. But there is simply nothing like climate denialism beyond the U.S. border, which encloses the production of only 15 percent of the world’s emissions. To believe the fault for global warming lies exclusively with the Republican Party or its fossil fuel backers is a form of American narcissism.

Even as we face crippling impacts from climate on human life, we still look to those animals, in part because what John Ruskin memorably called the “pathetic fallacy” still holds: it can be curiously easier to empathize with them, perhaps because we would rather not reckon with our own responsibility, but instead simply feel their pain, at least briefly.

In the nineteenth century, the built environment of the most advanced countries reflected the prerogatives of industry—think of railroad tracks laid across whole continents to move coal. In the twentieth century, those same environments were made to reflect the needs of capital—think of global urbanization agglomerating labor supply for a new service economy. In the twenty-first century, they will reflect the demands of the climate crisis: seawalls, carbon-capture plantations, state-sized solar arrays.

Twenty-two percent of the earth’s landmass was altered by humans just between 1992 and 2015.

anchoring, which explains how we build mental models around as few as one or two initial examples, no matter how unrepresentative—in the case of global warming, the world we know today, which is reassuringly temperate.

There is also the ambiguity effect, which suggests that most people are so uncomfortable contemplating uncertainty, they will accept lesser outcomes in a bargain to avoid dealing with it. In theory, with climate, uncertainty should be an argument for action—much of the ambiguity arises from the range of possible human inputs, a quite concrete prompt we choose to process instead as a riddle, which discourages us.

There is anthropocentric thinking, by which we build our view of the universe outward from our own experience, a reflexive tendency that some especially ruthless environmentalists have derided as “human supremacy” and that surely shapes our ability to apprehend genuinely existential threats to the species—a shortcoming many climate sci...

There is automation bias, which describes a preference for algorithmic and other kinds of nonhuman decision making, and also applies to our generations-long deference to market forces as something like an infallible, or at least an unbeatable, overseer. In the case of climate, this has meant trusting that economic systems unencumbered by regulation or restriction would solve the problem of global warmin...

the bystander effect, or our tendency to wait for others to act rather than acting ourselves;

the endowment effect, or instinct to demand more to give up something we have than we actually value it (or had paid to acquire or establish it).

The opposite of a cognitive bias, in other words, is not clear thinking but another cognitive bias.

That climate change demands expertise, and faith in it, at precisely the moment when public confidence in expertise is collapsing, is another of its historical ironies.

“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.”

we are more intimidated by the monsters we create than those we inherit.

“For Puerto Rico,” they write, “Maria could be as economically costly as the 1997 Asian financial crisis was to Indonesia and Thailand and more than twice as damaging as the 1994 Peso Crisis was to Mexico.”

“They” = Solomon Hsiang and Trevor Houser

The predictions of economic hardship, remember, are enormous—$551 trillion in damages at just 3.7 degrees of warming, 23 percent of potential global income lost, under very high-end emissions conditions, by 2100. That is an impact much more severe than the Great Depression; it would be ten times as deep as the more recent Great Recession, which still so rattles us.

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

In 2018, the IPCC compared the necessary transformation to the mobilization of World War II, but global. It took New York City forty-five years to build three new stops on a single subway line; the threat of catastrophic climate change means we need to entirely rebuild the world’s infrastructure in considerably less time.

Actually reducing the world’s carbon concentration using these machines, of course, would cost considerably more still; Broecker’s estimate was $300 trillion—or nearly four times total global GDP.

In 2018, a paper by David Keith demonstrated a method for removing carbon at a cost perhaps as low as $94 per ton—which would make the cost of neutralizing our 32 gigatons of annual global emissions about $3 trillion.

estimates for the total global fossil fuel subsidies paid out each year run as high as $5 trillion.

The idea of superintelligence is such a poorly defined notion that one could envision it taking almost any form with equal justification: a benevolent genie that solves all the world’s problems, or a mathematician that spends all its time proving theorems so abstract that humans can’t even understand them. But when Silicon Valley tries to imagine superintelligence, what it comes up with is no-holds-barred capitalism.

— the science fiction writer Ted Chiang

In 1987, the year he won the Nobel Prize, economist Robert Solow famously commented, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”

Over the last twenty-five years, the cost per unit of renewable energy has fallen so far that you can hardly measure the price, today, using the same scales (since just 2009, for instance, solar energy costs have fallen more than 80 percent). Over the same twenty-five years, the proportion of global energy use derived from renewables has not grown an inch.

We are now burning 80 percent more coal than we were just in the year 2000.

As the futurist Alex Steffen has incisively put it, in a Twitter performance that functions as a “Powers of Ten” for the climate crisis, the transition from dirty electricity to clean sources is not the whole challenge. It’s just the lowest-hanging fruit: “smaller than the challenge of electrifying almost everything that uses power,” Steffen says, by which he means anything that runs on much dirtier gas engines. That task, he continues, is smaller than the challenge of reducing energy demand, which is smaller than the challenge of reinventing how goods and services are provided—given that global supply chains are built with dirty infrastructure and labor markets everywhere are still powered by dirty energy. There is also the need to get to zero emissions from all other sources—deforestation, agriculture, livestock, landfills. And the need to protect all human systems from the coming onslaught of natural disasters and extreme weather. And the need to erect a system of global government, or at least international cooperation, to coordinate such a project. All of which is a smaller task, Steffen says, “than the monumental cultural undertaking of imagining together a thriving, dynamic, sustainable future that feels not only possible, but worth fighting for.”

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.”

In 2003, Ken Caldeira, now of the Carnegie Institution for Science, found that the world would need to add clean power sources equivalent to the full capacity of a nuclear plant every single day between 2000 and 2050 to avoid catastrophic climate change. In 2018, MIT Technology Review surveyed our progress; with three decades left to go, the world was on track to complete the necessary energy revolution in four hundred years.

if they work, 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.

Already, it’s fair to say, we have at least two Climate Mao leaders out there, and both are imperfect avatars of the archetype: Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, neither of whom is anti-capitalist so much as state capitalist.

There is also, of course, the possibility of disequilibrium—or what you would normally call “disorder” and “conflict.” This is the analysis put forward by Harald Welzer, in Climate Wars, which predicts a “renaissance” of violent conflict in the decades to come. His evocative subtitle is What People Will Be Killed For in the 21st Century.

Already, in local spheres, political collapse is a quite common outcome of climate crisis—we just call it “civil war.” And we tend to analyze it ideologically—as we did in Darfur, in Syria, in Yemen.

China now pulls criminals out of pop concerts with facial recognition software and deploys domestic-spy drones indistinguishable from birds.

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.

In Against the Grain, the political scientist and anthropologist of anarchy James C. Scott gives a more pointed critique of the same period: 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.

even Jared Diamond—whose Guns, Germs, and Steel gave an ecological and geographical account of the rise of the industrial West, and whose Collapse is a kind of forerunner text for this recent wave of reconsiderations—has called the Neolithic Revolution “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”

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. And they watched over it for much longer—nearly all of those 200,000 years. That epic era once derided as “prehistory” accounts for about 95 percent of human history.

Arthur Schlesinger, who saw American history as alternating periods of “public purpose” and “private interest”;

Perhaps contemporary Americans see history as progressive only because we were raised in the time of its empire, having more or less borrowed the British perspective from the time of theirs.

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.

“Man-made weather is never made in the present,” Andreas Malm writes in The Progress of This Storm, his powerful sketch of a political theory for a time of climate change. “Global warming is a result of actions in the past.”

In that way, climate change does make us all prisoners of the Industrial Revolution, and suggests a carceral model of history—progress arrested by the consequences of past behavior.

climate change will also send us hurtling forward into an uncharted future—so long forward, if it proceeds unchecked, and into such a distant future, that we can hardly imagine the scale. This is not the “techno-shock” first experienced by Victorians encountering an accelerating pace of progress and feeling overwhelmed by just how much was changing within a single lifetime—though we are now acquainting ourselves with that kind of change, as well. It is more like the overwhelming awe felt by those naturalists contemplating the ancient-beyond-ancient historical grandeur of the earth, and calling it deep time.

climate change inverts the perspective—giving us not a deep time of permanence but a deep time of cascading, disorienting change, so deep that it mocks any pretense of permanence on the planet.

But warming at the level necessary to fully melt ice sheets and glaciers and elevate sea level by several hundred feet promises to initiate rolling, radically transformative changes on a timescale measured not in decades or centuries or even millennia, but in the millions of years. Alongside that timeline, the entire lifespan of human civilization is rendered, effectively, an afterthought; and the much longer span of climate change becomes eternity.

The meta-lesson is that we should draw roughly the same meaning from an understanding of the imminent death of the species as the Dalai Lama believes we should draw from an understanding of our imminent personal death—namely, compassion, wonderment, and above all, love.

“I sometimes call it toxic knowledge,” Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute, where McLemore was a commenter, has said. “Once you know about overpopulation, overshoot, depletion, climate change, and the dynamics of societal collapse, you can’t unknow it, and your every subsequent thought is tinted.”