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March 16 2019
Book review: The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
by David Wallace-Wells, (c) 2019.
Finally finished this very engaging not-too-long book (300 pages,
including notes and index). As previously mentioned, the book is an
expansion on the author's 2017 New York Magazine article [1] by the
same title. Alex Smith of Radio EcoShock interviewed Wallace-Wells
recently [2]; worth listening to whether or not you read the book.
Being someone who is naturally attracted to the more depressing end
of the spectrum of writings concerning climate change, resource depletion,
environmental destruction and the likelihood of civilizational collapse,
this was a book I was destined to read. The very first sentence sets
the tone: "It is worse, much worse, than you think.". And indeed, it
really is. Likely the vast majority of people, at least in the US,
base their understanding of climate change off of skimmed headlines
referencing the ebb and flow of mere degrees and/or rates of warming,
perhaps making a mental note not to buy Florida beachfront property. The
actual ramifications of those few extra degrees of warming is much more
extensive, much more severe, due to the cascading of interlinked systems
that constitute our imperiled still-blue planet.
The first section, Cascades, lays out the evidence to date for global
warming (GW) and the central role it played in 4 of the 5 past mass
extinction events. Basically massive volcanic activity got things going,
triggering arctic methane releases (hydrates and/or thawed permafrost)
which delivered the doom. The fact that our current anthropogenic GW is
occurring at least 10x the rate of those past extinction events should
be enough to give us big brained primates pause if we were truly rational
beings. Sadly, we are anything but.
The next section, Elements of Chaos, methodically goes through all the
ways things can go sideways as GW progresses unchecked. Twelve short
chapters with titles like Heat Death, Hunger, Dying Oceans, and Economic
Collapse explore the multiplicative pile up of stressors. The author's
goal seems to be to spell out the range of possibilities, an eye wide open
view of possible futures. I took a lot of notes through this section
which contains many factoids like "at 7 degrees C warming humans and
other mammals lose the ability to cool their bodies via panting and/or
sweating", a real possibility for countries straddling the equatorial band
such as southeast Asia, a truly uninhabitable scenario.
A few of the more notable notes:
- Saudi Arabia burns roughly 700,000 barrels of oil per day to air condition
buildings in the Summer months when temperatures can reach 120F.
- general rule of thumb for crop yields: 10% loss per degree C warming for
cereal crops; cereals plus soy and corn provide roughly 67% of human diet.
- after India, US is the most vulnerable to GW due to coastal development.
- by 2030 global fresh water demand will outstrip supply by 40%.
- each degree C warming means 20-40% increased likelihood of war/conflict.
Section III, Climate Kaleidoscope, focuses on cultural, political,
ethical aspects of what has come to be called the Anthropocene. It is
also the weakest section, though to be fair this kind of stuff is hard
to get a bead on; we are the fish in the fish bowl after all. The bits
that resonated most for me had to do with our economics and technology.
I noted the following:
Crisis Capitalism chapter:
- most can easier imagine the end of civilization than the end of capitalism,
or even the possibility or _not_ incentivizing burning fossil fuels.
- climate change will likely end capitalism as we know it as the cost of
adaptation and mitigation escalate, flat-lining any economic growth.
The Church of Technology chapter:
- the transition of electricity generation from "dirty" to "green" sources
is the lowest of the low-hanging fruit; electrifying everything will be
orders of magnitude harder and in many cases not possible at all.
- despite the technological advances over the last several decades, our
standards of living has been largely static; advances tend to simply add
to energy and resource use.
My biggest contention with the author is with some of his positions
taken under Politics of Consumption where he suggests that the
adoption of seemingly more ethical behaviors such as eating less meat
and biking/walking instead of driving are little more than lifestyle
choices stemming from neoliberal values that equate "right living" with
substantive political engagement and are therefor a cop-out. To some
extent I agree with that, however one doesn't have to engage in the US
political system much before concluding that political engagement shares
much in common with banging ones head against a wall. Most people have
neither the time nor the fiscal luxury of direct political involvement in
the current system. That leaves engagement through donations to various
proxy groups, many of which to my eye look completely ineffective. Which
leads back to where I suspect many people are, disengagement from the
larger system to whatever extent possible, and personal ethical choices.
By the way, Wallace-Wells thinks disengagement is also a cop-out. He
is a parent which I suspect taints his point of view; all parents want
a better world for their children, whatever it takes.
The book wraps things up with History After Progress, which makes the case
for recessing our relatively recent experience with Growth, Progress,
and perhaps civilization in general as little more than a temporary
reprieve from humanity's norm which as been largely as hunter-gathers (95%
of modern humans lived this way), later as agriculturalists (last 12,000
years) for which gains in food security were offset but poorer health,
long stretches decidedly lacking in anything that looked like economic
growth and progress. Several civilizations did arise but depleted their
resources and collapsed, a reversion to a subsistence mean.
That our current civilization has, at least for some, seemed so full
of wonder and possibilities, we can largely thank fossil fuels. But we
have been so enamored with the view out the windscreen that we didn't
contemplate the cloud of exhaust trailing behind. Now the winds have
shifted, the tank is edging south of '1/2', and that open road turned
out to be a round-about in need of repair.
Closing thoughts:
In general I found this to be a well-considered, engaging book.
Wallace-Wells is a gifted writer and his style is a nice balance of
word-play, enough factoids to make a point but not overwhelm, responsible
use of references (no excessive name-dropping, no out-in-left-field
sources). Several reviewers have accused the book of alarmism, however the
author is simply presenting the range of possibilities and predictions
based on science that always contains a degree of uncertainty. I spent
some time in the Notes section and didn't find any references that
seemed unsubstantiated -- most are books, papers and articles published
by respected institutions. The fact of the matter is this information
IS unsettling, and alarm is a normal response.
That so many instinctively move to dismiss the message of Wallace-Well's
book reminds me of that old John Steinbeck quote: "It is difficult to
get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not
understanding it". So many of us have so much to lose by killing fossil
capitalism even as it not-so-slowly kills us. And so we have school kids
cutting class to protest the theft of their futures while their parents
feed the beast -- it's koyaanisqatsi.
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[1] gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/The%20Uninhabitable%20Earth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Uninhabitable_Earth
[2] https://www.ecoshock.org/2019/02/uninhabitable-earth-david-wallace-wells.html