More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
January 28, 2021 - October 14, 2023
Just in Texas, 500,000 poor Latinos live in shantytowns called “colonias” with no drainage systems to deal with increased flooding.
the belief that climate could be plausibly governed, or managed, by any institution or human instrument presently at hand is another wide-eyed climate delusion.
In just the last forty years, according to the World Wildlife Fund, more than half of the world’s vertebrate animals have died; in just the last twenty-five, one study of German nature preserves found, the flying insect population declined by three-quarters.
the strange fantasy of Santa and his polar workshop will grow eerier still in an Arctic of ice-free summers;
when the Rio Grande is a line traced through a dry riverbed—the Rio Sand, it’s already been called.
It encompasses us; in a very real way it governs us—our crop yields, our pandemics, our migration patterns and civil wars, crime waves and domestic assaults, hurricanes and heat waves and rain bombs and megadroughts, the shape of our economic growth and everything that flows downstream from it, which today means nearly everything.
Eight hundred million in South Asia alone, the World Bank says, would see their living conditions sharply diminish by 2050 on the current emissions track, and perhaps a climate slowdown will even reveal the bounty of what Andreas Malm calls fossil capitalism to be an illusion, sustained over just a few centuries by the arithmetic of adding the energy value of burned fossil fuels to what had been, before wood and coal and oil, an eternal Malthusian trap. In which case, we would have to retire the intuition that history will inevitably extract material progress from the planet, at least in any
...more
according to one recent paper, at 1.5 degrees the world would be $20 trillion richer than at 2 degrees.
3.7 degrees of warming would produce $551 trillion in damages, according to at least one estimate—almost double the amount of wealth that exists in the world today.
Multiply four degrees by that 1 percent of GDP and you have almost entirely wiped out the very possibility of economic growth, which has not topped 5 percent globally in over forty years.
ultimately suggests a more complete retreat from economics as an orienting beacon, and from growth as the lingua franca through which modern life translates, or rather launders, all of its aspirations.
There is nothing to learn from global warming, because we do not have the time, or the distance, to contemplate its lessons; we are after all not merely telling the story but living it.
the journal Nature Climate Change, a team led by Drew Shindell tried to quantify the suffering that would be avoided if warming was kept to 1.5 degrees, rather than 2 degrees—in other words, how much additional suffering would result from just that additional half-degree of warming. Their answer: 150 million more people would die from air pollution alone in a 2-degree warmer world than in a 1.5-degree warmer one. Later that year, the IPCC raised the stakes further: in the gap between 1.5 degrees and 2, it said, hundreds of millions of lives were at stake.
150 million is the equivalent of twenty-five Holocausts.
rate of at least seven million deaths, from air pollution alone, each year—an annual Holocaust, pursued and prosecuted by what brand of nihilism?
our best-case outcome is death and suffering at the scale of twenty-five Holocausts, and the worst-case outcome makes extinction a plausible, if unlikely, future.
that the totality of climate change should make us feel so passive—that is another of its delusions.
The threat of climate change is more dramatic still, and ultimately more democratic, with responsibility shared by each of us even as we shiver in fear of it;
letting our political fatalism and technological faith blur, as though we’d gone cross-eyed, into a remarkably familiar consumer fantasy: that someone else will fix the problem for us, at no cost.
Those more panicked are often hardly less complacent, living instead through climate fatalism as though it were climate optimism.
That we know global warming is our doing should be a comfort, not a cause for despair, however incomprehensively large and complicated we find the processes that have brought it into being; that we know we are, ourselves, responsible for all of its punishing effects should be empowering, and not just perversely.
No matter how out-of-control the climate system seems—with its roiling typhoons, unprecedented famines and heat waves, refugee crises and climate conflicts—we are all its authors. And still writing. Some, like our oil companies and their political patrons, are more prolific authors than others. But the burden of responsibility is too great to be shouldered by a few, however comforting it is to think all that is needed is for a few villains to fall. Each of us imposes some suffering on our future selves every time we flip on a light switch, buy a plane ticket, or fail to vote.
We found a way to engineer devastation, and we can find a way to engineer our way out of it—or, rather, engineer our way toward a degraded muddle, but one that nevertheless extends forward the promise of new generations finding their own way forward, perhaps toward some brighter environmental future.
is 4 or 5 degrees warmer over the course of the next several centuries—large swaths of the planet unlivable by any definition we use today—that degraded muddle counts, for me, as an encouraging future.
I’ve also often been asked whether it’s moral to reproduce in this climate, whether it’s responsible to have children, whether it is fair to the planet or, perhaps more important, to the children. As it happens, in the course of writing this book, I did have a child, Rocca. Part of that choice was climate delusion, that same willful blindness: I know there are horrors to come, some of which will inevitably be visited on my children—that is what it means for warming to be an all-encompassing, all-touching threat. Part of it was climate privilege: knowing the horrors will be less intense for
...more
I am also excited, for everything that Rocca and her sisters and brothers will see, will witness, will do.
we are destroying our planet every day, often with one hand as we conspire to restore it with the other. Which means, as Paul Hawken has perhaps illustrated most coolheadedly, we can also stop destroying it, in the same style—collectively, haphazardly, in all the most quotidian ways in addition to the spectacular-seeming ones.
The project of unplugging the entire industrial world from fossil fuels is intimidating, and must be done in fairly short order—by 2040, many scientists say.
Fully half of British emissions, it was recently calculated, come from inefficiencies in construction, discarded and unused food, electronics, and clothing; two-thirds of American energy is wasted;
globally, according to the IMF, we are subsidizing the fossil fuel business more than $5 trillion each year. None of that has to continue.
Slow-walking action on climate, another optimistic paper found, could cost the world ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
“climate nihilism” is, in fact, another of our delusions. What happens, from here, will be entirely our own doing.
I toss out tons of wasted food and hardly ever recycle; I leave my air-conditioning on; I bought into Bitcoin at the peak of the market. None of that is necessary, either.
Seventy percent of the energy produced by the planet, it’s estimated, is lost as waste heat.
If the average American were confined by the carbon footprint of her European counterpart, U.S. carbon emissions would fall by more than half. If the world’s richest 10 percent were limited to that same footprint, global emissions would fall by a third.
America’s rump climate party aside, that scaling should not be impossible, once we understand the stakes. In fact, the stakes mean, it must not be.
Annihilation is only the very thin tail of warming’s very long bell curve, and there is nothing stopping us from steering clear of it.
we have not yet begun to contemplate what it means to live under those conditions—what it will do to our politics and our culture and our emotional equilibria, our sense of history and our relationship to it, our sense of nature and our relationship to it, that we are living in a world degraded by our own hands, with the horizon of human possibility dramatically dimmed.
Little of the book is about “nature” per se, and none concerns the tragic fate of the planet’s animals, which has been written about so elegantly and poetically by others that, like our sea-level myopia, it threatens to occlude our picture of what global warming means for us, the human animal.
may be in the minority in feeling that the world could lose much of what we think of as “nature,” as far as I cared, so long as we could go on living as we have in the world left behind.
At six, summer labor of any kind would become impossible in the lower Mississippi Valley, and everybody in the United States east of the Rockies would suffer more from heat than anyone, anywhere, in the world today.
The sea level rise made inevitable by that amount of warming would, over centuries, flood or drown hundreds of major cities.
Since 1980, the planet has experienced a fiftyfold increase in the number of dangerous heat waves;
By the end of the century, the World Bank has estimated, the coolest months in tropical South America, Africa, and the Pacific are likely to be warmer than the warmest months at the end of the twentieth century.
air conditioners and fans already account for fully 10 percent of global electricity consumption.
in 2015 the heat index registered temperatures as high as 163 degrees Fahrenheit.
No intelligent life that we know of ever evolved, anywhere in the universe, outside of the narrow Goldilocks range of temperatures that enclosed all of human evolution, and that we have now left behind, probably permanently.
It has become commonplace among climate activists to say that we have, today, all the tools we need to avoid catastrophic climate change—even major climate change. It is also true.
At present, there are 195 signatories, of which only the following are considered even “in range” of their Paris targets: Morocco, Gambia, Bhutan, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, India, and the Philippines.
China commands half of the planet’s coal-power capacity,
