The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future

by David Wallace-Wells

By 2100, sea-level rise alone could displace 13 million Americans—a few percent of the country’s total population.

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.

Behavioral economics is unusual as a contrarian intellectual movement in that it overturns beliefs—namely, in the perfectly rational human actor—that perhaps only its proponents ever truly believed, and maybe even only as economics undergraduates.

From that perspective, the only threat to technology must come from technology, which is perhaps why so many in Silicon Valley seem less concerned with runaway climate change than they are with runaway artificial intelligence: the only fearsome power they are likely to take seriously is the one they themselves have unleashed.

the market has not responded to these developments by seamlessly retiring dirty energy sources and replacing them with clean ones. It has responded by simply adding the new capacity to the same system.

(since just 2009, for instance, solar energy costs have fallen more than 80 percent).

To the market, this is growth; to human civilization, it is almost suicide.

We are now burning 80 percent more coal than we

were just in the y...

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

making concrete, production of which ranks today as the second most carbon-intensive industry in the world—an industry that is booming, by the way, thanks to China, which recently poured more concrete in three years than the United States used in the entire twentieth century.

more than 10,000 people die each day, globally, from the small-particulate pollution produced by burning carbon.

And it justifies quite a lot. If the world’s most conspicuous emitters, the top 10 percent, reduced their emissions to only the E.U. average, total global emissions would fall by 35 percent. We won’t get there through the dietary choices of individuals, but through policy changes.

But conscious consumption and wellness are both cop-outs, arising from that basic promise extended by neoliberalism: that consumer choices can be a substitute for political action,

the growing power of markets, particularly financial markets, in the liberal democracies of the West over the second half of the twentieth century; and of the hardening centrist consensus within those countries committed to spreading that power, in the form of privatization, deregulation, corporate-friendly tax policy, and the promotion of free trade.

Ansel Adams, Edward Weston—

But for the moment, at least, most of us seem more inclined to run from that responsibility than embrace it—or even admit we see it, though it sits in front of us as plainly as a steering wheel.

Drake equation—which builds a prediction about the possibility of extraterrestrial life off assumptions about things like the fraction of planets conceivably able to support life that actually do support life, the fraction of those planets that develop intelligent life, and the fraction of those planets that would emit detectable signs of that intelligence into space.6

Climate change suggests another kind of sphere, manufactured not out of technological mastery but first through ignorance, then indolence, then indifference—a civilization enclosing itself in a gaseous suicide, a running car in a sealed garage.