The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future

by David Wallace-Wells

Seventy percent of the energy produced by the planet, it’s estimated, is lost as waste heat.118 If the average American were confined by the carbon footprint of her European counterpart, U.S. carbon emissions would fall by more than half.119 If the world’s richest 10 percent were limited to that same footprint, global emissions would fall by a third.

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.15

By 2080, without dramatic reductions in emissions, southern Europe will be in permanent extreme drought, much worse than the American Dust Bowl ever was.26 The same will be true in Iraq and Syria and much of the rest of the Middle East; some of the most densely populated parts of Australia, Africa, and South America; and the breadbasket regions of China.

Irakli Loladze has isolated a dramatic effect of carbon dioxide on human nutrition unanticipated by plant physiologists: it can make plants bigger, but those bigger plants are less nutritious. “Every leaf and every grass blade on earth makes more and more sugars as CO2 levels keep rising,”

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.34 Everything is becoming more like junk food. Even the protein content of bee pollen has dropped by a third.

The last time the earth was four degrees warmer, as Peter Brannen has written, there was no ice at either pole and sea level was 260 feet higher. There were palm trees in the Arctic.

With CO2 at 930 parts per million (more than double where we are today), cognitive ability declines by 21 percent.

Twenty-two percent of the earth’s landmass was altered by humans just between 1992 and 2015.24 Ninety-six percent of the world’s mammals, by weight, are now humans and their livestock; just four percent are wild.25 We have simply crowded—or bullied, or brutalized—every other species into retreat, near-extinction, or worse. E. O. Wilson thinks the era might be better called the Eremocine—the age of loneliness.

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.

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.”

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