The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

But in the aftermath of the 2008 crash, a number of historians and iconoclastic economists studying what they call “fossil capitalism” have started to suggest that the entire history of swift economic growth, which began somewhat suddenly in the eighteenth century, is not the result of innovation or the dynamics of free trade, but simply our discovery of fossil fuels and all their raw power—a onetime injection of that new “value” into a system that had previously been characterized by unending subsistence living. This is a minority view, among economists, and yet the précis version of the perspective is quite powerful. Before fossil fuels, nobody lived better than their parents or grandparents or ancestors from five hundred years before, except in the immediate aftermath of a great plague like the Black Death, which allowed the lucky survivors to gobble up the resources liberated by mass graves.