Senior Producer Alan Weisman’s piece in
the August 15, 2019
issue of the New York Review of Books looks at two recent works on the
future of humanity, a topic Alan has explored in depth in several of his own
books. New
York Review of Books subscribers can read the article here.
By Alan Weisman
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by
David Wallace-Wells. Tim Duggan, 310 pp., $27.00
Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
by Bill McKibben. Henry Holt, 291 pp., $28.00
by Bill McKibben. Henry Holt, 291 pp., $28.00
Climate scientists’ worst-case scenarios back in 2007, the
first year the Northwest Passage became navigable without an icebreaker (today,
you can book a cruise through it), have all been overtaken by the unforeseen
acceleration of events. No one imagined that twelve years later the United
Nations would report that we have just twelve years left to avert global
catastrophe, which would involve cutting fossil-fuel use nearly by half. Since
2007, the UN now says, we’ve done everything wrong. New coal plants built since
the 2015 Paris climate agreement have already doubled the equivalent
coal-energy output of Russia and Japan, and 260 more are underway.
Environmental writers today have a twofold problem. First,
how to overcome readers’ resistance to ever-worsening truths, especially when
climate-change denial has turned into a political credo and a highly profitable
industry with its own television network (in this country, at least; state
controlled networks in autocracies elsewhere, such as Cuba, Singapore, Iran, or
Russia, amount to the same thing). Second, in view of the breathless pace of
new discoveries, publishing can barely keep up. Refined models continually
revise earlier predictions of how quickly ice will melt, how fast and high CO2
levels and seas will rise, how much methane will be belched from thawing
permafrost, how fiercely storms will blow and fires will burn, how long
imperiled species can hang on, and how soon fresh water will run out (even as
they try to forecast flooding from excessive rainfall). There’s a real chance
that an environmental book will be obsolete by its publication date.
I’m not the only writer to wonder whether books are still an
appropriate medium to convey the frightening speed of environmental upheaval.
But the environment is infinitely intricate, and mere articles—much less daily
newsfeeds or Twitter—can barely scratch the surface of environmental issues,
let alone explore the extent of their consequences. Ecology, after all, is
about how everything connects to everything else. Something so complex and
crucial still requires books to attempt to explain it.
David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth expands
on his 2017 article of the same name in the New York magazine, where he’s deputy
editor. It quickly became that magazine’s most viewed article ever. Some
accused Wallace-Wells of sensationalism for focusing on the most extreme
possibilities of what may come if we keep spewing carbon compounds skyward (as
suggested by his title and his ominous opening line, the answer “is, I promise,
worse than you think”). Whatever the article’s lurid appeal, I felt at the time
of its publication that its detractors were mainly evading the message by
maligning the messenger.
Two years later, those critics have largely been subdued by
infernos that have laid waste to huge swaths of California; successive,
monstrous hurricanes—Harvey, Irma, and Maria— that devastated Texas, Florida,
and Puerto Rico in 2017; serial cyclone bombs exploding in America’s heartland;
so-called thousand-year floods that recur every two years; polar ice shelves
fracturing; and refugees pouring from desiccated East and North Africa and the
Middle East, where temperatures have approached 130 degrees Fahrenheit, and
from Central America, where alternating periods of drought and floods have now
largely replaced normal rainfall.
The Uninhabitable Earth, which has become a best seller,
taps into the underlying emotion of the day: fear. This book is meant to scare
the hell out of us, because the alarm sounded by NASA’s Jim Hansen in his
electrifying 1988 congressional testimony on how we’ve trashed the atmosphere
still hasn’t sufficiently registered. “More than half of the carbon exhaled
into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in just the
past three decades,” writes Wallace-Wells, “since Al Gore published his first
book on climate.”
Although Wallace-Wells protests that he’s not an
environmentalist, or even drawn to nature (“I’ve never gone camping, not
willingly anyway”), the environment definitely has his attention now. With
mournful hindsight, he explains how we were convinced that we could survive
with a 2 degrees Celsius increase in average global temperatures over
preindustrial levels, a figure first introduced in 1975 by William Nordhaus, a
Nobel prize–winning economist at Yale, as a safe upper limit. As 2 degrees was
a conveniently easy number to grasp, it became repeated so often that policy
negotiators affirmed it as a target at the UN’s 2009 Copenhagen climate summit.
We now know that 2 degrees would be calamitous: “Major cities in the equatorial
band of the planet will become unlivable.” In the Paris Agreement of 2015, 1.5
degrees was deemed a safer limit. At 2 degrees of warming, one study estimates,
150 million more people would die from air pollution alone than they would
after 1.5 degrees. (If we include other climate-driven causes, according to the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that extra half-degree would lead to
hundreds of millions more deaths.) But after watching Houston drown, California
burn, and chunks of Antarctica and Louisiana dissolve, it appears that “safe”
is a relative statement—currently we are only at 1 degree above preindustrial
temperatures.
The preindustrial level of atmospheric carbon dioxide was
280 parts per million. We are now at 410 ppm. The last time that was the case,
three million years ago, seas were about 80 feet higher. A rise of 2 degrees
Celsius would be around 450 ppm, but, says Wallace-Wells, we’re currently
headed beyond 500 ppm. The last time that happened on Earth, seas
were 130 feet higher, he writes, envisioning an eastern seaboard moved miles
inland, to Interstate 95. Forget Long Island, New York City, and nearly half of
New Jersey. It’s unclear how long it takes for oceans to rise in accordance
with CO2 concentrations, but you wouldn’t want to find out the hard way.
Unfortunately, we’re set to sail through 1.5 and 2 degree
increases in the next few decades and keep going. We’re presently on course for
a rise of somewhere between 3 and 4 degrees Celsius, possibly more—our current
trajectory, the UN warns, could even reach an 8 degree increase by this
century’s end. At that level, anyone still in the tropics “would not be able to
move around outside without dying,” Wallace-Wells writes.
The Uninhabitable Earth might be best taken a chapter
at a time; it’s almost too painful to absorb otherwise. But pain is
Wallace-Wells’s strategy, as is his agonizing repetition of how unprecedented
these changes are, and how deadly. “The facts are hysterical,” he says, as he
piles on more examples. Just before the 2016 elections, a respected biologist at an
environmental NGO told me she actually considered voting for Trump. “The way I
see it,” she said, “it’s either four more years on life support with Hillary,
or letting this maniac tear the house down. Maybe then we can pick up the
pieces and finally start rebuilding.” Like many other scientists Wallace-Wells
cites, she has known for decades how bad things are, and seen how little the
Clinton-Gore and Obama-Biden administrations did about it—even in consultation
with Obama’s prescient science adviser, physicist John Holdren, who first wrote
about rising atmospheric CO2 in 1969. For the politicians, it was always,
foremost, about the economy.
Unfortunately, as Wallace-Wells notes: “The entire history
of swift economic growth, which began somewhat suddenly in the eighteenth
century, is not the result of innovation or trade or the dynamics of free
trade, but simply our discovery of fossil fuels and all their raw power.” This
is our daily denial, which now flies in our faces on hurricane winds, or drops
as hot ashes from our immolated forests and homes: growth is how we measure
economic health, and growth must be literally fueled. Other than nuclear energy,
which has its own problems, no form of energy is so concentrated, and none so
cheap or portable, as carbon. By exhuming hundreds of millions of years’ worth
of buried organic matter and burning it in a couple of centuries, we built our
dazzling modern civilization, not noticing that its wastes were amassing
overhead. Now we’re finally paying attention, because hell is starting to rain
down.
I encourage people to read this book. Wallace-Wells has
maniacally absorbed masses of detail and scoured all the articles most readers
couldn’t finish or tried to forget, or skipped because they just couldn’t take
yet another bummer. Wallace-Wells has been faulted for not offering
solutions—but really, what could he say? We now burn 80 percent more coal than
we did in 2000, even though solar energy costs have fallen 80 percent in that
period. His dismaying conclusion is that “solar isn’t eating away at fossil
fuel use . . . it’s just buttressing it. To the market, this is growth; to
human civilization, it is almost suicide.”
He allows that through carbon capture or geoengineering “or
other now-unfathomable innovations, we may conjure new solutions,” but at best,
he says, these will “bring the planet closer to a state we would today regard
as merely grim, rather than apocalyptic.” Having read for years about
geoengineering plans to reflect sunlight back into space by sending up planes
to seed the stratosphere with sulfates, and to enhance the reflectivity of
clouds by spraying salt to brighten them, and about machines that can suck
carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, I know of some who might challenge that—but
so far, none of these ideas has reached even a pilot level, let alone
commercialization scale.
Current carbon-capture prototypes filter CO2 from a
polluter’s exhaust so that it can be converted back into more carbon-based
fuel. But this would require building enough machines to cleanse the entire
atmosphere of emissions from every company and cookfire, and then burying all
that captured CO2 so it can never escape—a huge and dubious undertaking.
Likewise, a program to deflect solar radiation by spraying particles—as Mt.
Pinatubo’s eruption did in 1991, slightly cooling the climate for two years
before its dust settled back to Earth—would have to continue in perpetuity to
work. Such a program would alter planetary rainfall patterns in unpredictable
ways and do nothing to curb ocean acidification. Imagine getting all the
world’s nations to agree to tinker with the atmosphere if it meant some of them
might end up even drier than before. Several major environmental organizations
that once opposed such schemes are now willing to discuss them (the goals of
the Paris Agreement depend on yet-uninvented mass-scale technologies to remove
atmospheric carbon), underscoring Wallace-Wells’s argument that the situation
is dire indeed.
His book gives other examples of why technology probably
can’t get us out of the mess that technology caused in the first place. That includes
one of the biggest innovations of the twentieth century: the Green Revolution,
which more than doubled grain harvests in the 1960s by selective crossbreeding
of wheat, corn, and rice to get extra kernels per stalk. Wallace-Wells notes
that Norman Borlaug, the agronomist behind these advances, is credited with
saving a billion lives by staving off the famines that eighteenth-century
demographic economist Thomas Malthus and Paul Ehrlich, author of The
Population Bomb, had both predicted would inevitably result from population
growth. But Borlaug never claimed to have eliminated the possibility of more
famine. Upon accepting his Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, he warned that without
population controls, enhanced food production would paradoxically lead to even
more hunger, because people spared by famine would give birth to more people
who would continually need more food.
For the rest of his life Borlaug campaigned, in vain, for
universal family planning. His efforts were especially undermined when in 1984,
at the International Conference on Population in Mexico City, Ronald Reagan
instituted the “Global Gag Rule,” prohibiting US funding assistance for any aid
program, American or foreign, that mentioned abortion as a family planning
option—a rule that every Republican president since has supported. As Borlaug
feared, his high-yield cereals, along with the invention of artificial nitrogen
fertilizer a few decades earlier, combined to quadruple the global population
during the twentieth century—a growth unprecedented in biological history for
any large species. As a result, nearly half the unfrozen Earth is now devoted
to growing or grazing food for humans, while other species dwindle or just
disappear. Food production, reports Wallace-Wells, is also responsible for at
least one third of all greenhouse gas emissions (some estimates are as high as
one half when all aspects of food consumption—including shipping,
refrigeration, and agrochemical costs—are considered).
“One hopes these population booms,” writes Wallace-Wells,
referring to Africa, where numbers are expected to quadruple in this century,
“will bring their own Borlaugs, ideally many of them.” By suggesting that
overpopulation might statistically enhance the chances of producing a savior to
cure us of the woes that overpopulation causes, I assume that Wallace-Wells is
either being wry or simply despairing over another enormous blow that humanity
is about to deliver to the planet.
The Uninhabitable Earth makes only scant reference to
the holocaust that climate change is wreaking on biodiversity. (One million
species are now at risk of extinction, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy
Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services reported recently.) But
Wallace Wells’s impulse to focus on our own selfish stake in unfolding events
probably makes sense—this future is real, and it’s ours. As desperate as we are
to know what to do next, enlightening us about that isn’t his objective:
getting our attention is.
If his book doesn’t offer a solution, Wallace-Wells does
give a reason to try to find one. While he was writing the book, he and his
wife had a baby daughter. The question of whether to have children in this
overheating world has been tormenting many couples lately—until, on learning
they’re expecting, they know the answer. A baby is not just their adored
offspring: it embodies hope for the future, and parents will do anything to
ensure their child has one.
So how do we go on? That has been Bill McKibben’s abiding
concern ever since the publication in 1989 of The End of Nature, a book so
well known that people who’ve never read it regularly refer to it. Its premise
is that since humans altered the entire atmosphere, which touches everything on
Earth, there is no truly pristine nature left. His latest book, Falter—much
like his 2010 book, Eaarth, but nearly a decade deeper into the maw—begins
with a clear-eyed, detailed assessment of what we’re now up against. McKibben
describes just how much trouble we’re in, yet his voice is so calm, his
examples so fresh and unexpected (the book begins with a meditation on roofing,
of all things), that you easily glide into his lucid, engaging contemplation of
the potential end of human civilization. Later in Falter, when he
describes just as equably what we must do to prevent it, you believe it’s still
worth trying.
I’d long admired the clarity of McKibben’s journalism. At
some point, however, he apparently concluded that when a global existential
crisis is bearing down, journalism can only go so far, and he became an
activist. With his students at Middlebury, he cofounded 350.org, a grassroots
advocacy group that has become a worldwide movement and whose name derives from
the safe concentration of atmospheric CO2 in parts per million. We last saw 350
ppm thirty years ago, when The End of Nature was published.
In Falter, he admits frankly to fearing that our “game, in fact, may be
starting to play itself out.” Until he got too busy traveling for 350.org,
McKibben, a lifelong Christian, taught Sunday school. Given all he knows, his faith
surely helps keep him going. Occasionally, it appears in his writing, such
as The Comforting Whirlwind, his 2005 reflection on the Book of Job’s
enduring relevance. Believer and activist though he may be, McKibben doesn’t
preach, and still uses the tools of journalism to investigate, illustrate, and
verify.
In a chapter that begins “Oh, it could
get very bad,” he discusses a study in the Bulletin of
Mathematical Biology concluding that by 2100 the oceans may be too hot for
phytoplankton to photosynthesize. (Another study I’ve seen, in Nature,
suggests that since 1950 phytoplankton populations worldwide may have decreased
by up to 40 percent, correlating to rising sea-surface temperatures.) Just as
we fail to realize how much extra CO2 is in the air because it’s invisible,
it’s hard to grasp how immense—and immensely bad— this news is. Tiny
phytoplankton float in the ocean practically unnoticed, yet they constitute
half the organic matter on Earth and provide, as McKibben notes, “two-thirds of
the earth’s oxygen.” Their loss, he quotes the study’s author, “would likely
result in the mass mortality of animals and humans.”
And that’s just the effects from heat. Absorption of CO2 has
already made the ocean 30 percent more acidic, with pH expected to decline “well
beyond what fish and other marine organisms can tolerate” by the end of this
century, he writes, citing another paper. According to the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change, current acidification rates of seas and lakes already
may be the highest in 300 million years.
McKibben shares some other harrowing examples of threatened
fauna, from insects to lions, but although it’s been understood since Noah’s
time that we need other species, readers best relate to our own, so like
Wallace-Wells McKibben soon circles back to humans. Major cities like Cape Town
and São Paulo (and several in India and China) have come within mere days of
running out of water; it’s just a matter of time until one does. Outdoor work
and maintenance will be halted more frequently as urban thermometers exceed 120
degrees Fahrenheit. Grain harvests will drop as temperatures rise. Insurance
companies will go bankrupt after successive biblical storms destroy trillions
of dollars of property. Refugees running everywhere. This won’t stop.
Even McKibben struggles for an adequate vocabulary to
describe the duplicity of oil companies: “There should be a word for when you
commit treason against an entire planet.” As early as 1977, one of Exxon’s own
scientists explained to the company’s executives that their products were
causing a greenhouse effect, and that there would be only “five to ten years
before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might
become critical.” By 1982, McKibben writes, “the company’s scientists concluded
that heading off global warming would ‘require major reductions in fossil fuel
combustion’” or risk “potentially catastrophic events.” Exxon used predictions
of ice retreat to lengthen their drilling season in the Arctic, and raised
drilling platforms to accommodate sea-level rise. He recounts the deliberate
strategy of oil executives and their pet politicians to, as one Exxon official
put it, “emphasize the uncertainty” of climate science. “I’ve lived the last
thirty years inside that lie,” McKibben realizes, “engaged in an endless debate
over whether global warming was ‘real’—a debate in which both sides knew the
answer from the beginning.”
He gives the most succinct explanation I’ve ever read of how
the Koch brothers and their ilk triumphed. Another character who emerges in
this section, and haunts the rest of the book, is Ayn Rand. McKibben’s
description of her backstory and the outsized scope of her influence on so many
of today’s politicians will shock some readers into taking their tattered
copies of The Fountainhead to the nearest hazardous waste disposal.
Equally cogent, and creepy, is his survey of the race for
technological mastery over our natural limitations (including death) by
engineering human babies using the gene-editing technology CRISPR, melding our
minds with artificial intelligence and with hardware more resilient than our
shambling bodies, or simply letting robots handle the hard stuff. Every day
some trending new gizmo or beguiling advance distracts us from the climate disaster
by promising to make our lives easier, even as our future grows shorter.
The last part of McKibben’s book is titled “An Outside
Chance.” He admits that he’s not sure we have one. He argues that neither
artificial intelligence nor genetic engineering will improve our odds for
survival, and then he gets to Falter’s final, main point: “Let’s assume
we’re capable of acting together to do remarkable things.”
This is where McKibben’s spirituality infuses his clear
intellect to show how we can, and why we must. Despite his detailed and
documented outrage over the wreckage caused by an “unbelievably small
percentage of people at the top of the energy heap,” he—along with most humans,
he maintains—still believes in humanity. He then describes two “technologies”
that could be deployed to begin to reverse the damage.
The first is the simple photovoltaic solar panel.
Wallace-Wells contends that, while hanging solar panels on our homes might make
us feel better, we’re kidding ourselves that it makes any meaningful dent in
the continued growth of the fossil fuel industry. But McKibben argues that
solar energy is already undermining that industry’s expansion plans in Africa
and elsewhere in the developing world. Coal and natural gas plants require
complex, costly grids to deliver their energy, and customers who can afford to
pay for them. McKibben visits colorful, unlikely places from rural Ghana to
Ivory Coast where people with inexpensive solar cells are lighting villages,
running hospitals, starting businesses, and marketing and manufacturing
products—all without drilling or building networks involving power poles and
miles of copper wiring. Likewise, the ubiquity of cell phones has eliminated
the need to string expensive telephone lines. The next time you step outside,
McKibben is urging, look at all the wires tethering us to an energy sector
that’s killing us. If Africa can dispense with them, why can’t we? By 2050,
according to data he cites, solar alone could provide two-thirds of the US’s
energy—with the rest coming from wind turbines and hydroelectric dams— and
create thirty-six million jobs.
McKibben’s second technology is what he calls “one of the
signal inventions of our time”: nonviolent protest and resistance. He tells
how, on its very first try, 350.org’s utterly quixotic strategy to “organize
the world” ignited rallies in 181 countries in 2009. Inspired by
Gandhi—McKibben is a Gandhi Peace Award laureate—and the Sermon on the Mount,
he makes a surprisingly persuasive case for why the movement to stop using
carbon-based fuels will ultimately win.
But whether it wins in time, he acknowledges, is another
matter. As America’s ongoing racial strife shows, a half-century after Martin
Luther King Jr., nonviolence doesn’t bring change overnight. Could anything reverse
civilization’s suicidal course faster? Once, a well-known journalist whom I
won’t name remarked, as we commiserated over the infuriating, deteriorating
state of affairs we were covering, “You know that someday we’ll ditch this
journalism crap and become terrorists.” I knew the feeling, but given the
choice, I’ll opt for McKibben’s nonviolent activism.
It’s not only our planet that’s strained and needs saving,
he concludes, but ourselves. From our plateauing height and lifespans to
athletic records that haven’t been broken for years, human capacity may have
finally peaked, and actually be declining. Recent data he cites show that IQs,
after rising for more than a century, are now dropping. “Our task now,” as
McKibben paraphrases the authors of that study, “should be to
somehow maintain the gains of the past.”
In our lives and in our world, says McKibben, “There’s a
time and a place for growth, and a time and a place for maturity, for balance,
for scale. And the risks we’re currently running… suggest that that time is
now…. Our goals need to fundamentally shift: toward repair, toward security,
toward protection.” The overarching goal, he adds, is to ensure the survival of
our species. “Perhaps our job, at this particular point in time, is to slow
things down, just as basketball teams do when they’re ahead. If we don’t screw
up the game of being human, it could last for a very long time; compared to
other species, we’re still early in our career.”
Put that way, it would be a damn shame if we went extinct
prematurely. With Falter, he’s offering us a game plan.