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NY Times Sunday Book Review, April 28, 2019
Two New Books Dramatically Capture the Climate Change Crisis
By John Lanchester
THE UNINHABITABLE EARTH
Life After Warming
By David Wallace-Wells
LOSING EARTH
A Climate History
By Nathaniel Rich
Climate change is the greatest challenge humanity has collectively
faced. That challenge is, to put it mildly, practical; but it also poses
a problem to the imagination. Our politics, our societies, are arranged
around individual and group interests. These interests have to do with
class, or ethnicity, or gender, or economics — make your own list. By
asserting these interests, we call out to each other so that as a
collective we see and hear one another. From that beginning, we
construct the three overlapping, interacting R’s of recognition,
representation and rights.
The problem with climate change, as an existential challenge to
humanity, is that the interest-based model of society and politics
doesn’t work. Most of the people in whose interest we are demanding
action aren’t here. They haven’t been born yet. And because the areas
first and most affected by climate change are the poorest regions of
earth, we are talking about the least seen, least represented group on
our planet. We have to imagine these people into being, and then grant
them rights, and then take unprecedented, society-wide action on that basis.
The demand climate change makes on us is to feel empathy for the unborn
poor of the global south, and change our economies to act on the basis
of their needs. That’s something humanity has never done before.
Pessimism would be an ethical catastrophe. It leads only to despair,
despair to inaction, and inaction to a future world David Attenborough
has described as “the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction
of much of the natural world.” To avoid the most terrible possible
versions of our future, we have to stay positive; it’s the only moral
response to this crisis. And there are grounds to do so, as David
Wallace-Wells argues in his brilliant new book, “The Uninhabitable
Earth: Life After Warming”: “We have all the tools we need, today, to
stop it all: a carbon tax and the political apparatus to aggressively
phase out dirty energy, a new approach to agricultural practices and a
shift away from beef and dairy in the global diet; and public investment
in green energy and carbon capture.”
Global emissions could be cut by a third if the richest 10 percent of
humanity cut their use of energy to the same level as affluent,
comfortable Europe. One prospective technique to scrub carbon from the
atmosphere would cost $3 trillion a year, a colossal amount — but
significantly less than the current level of subsidies paid out globally
for fossil fuel, estimated at $5 trillion. Taken all in all, solutions
are “obvious” and “available.” The only obstacle to implementing them is
political will.
This litany of ideas might make “The Uninhabitable Earth” sound upbeat.
That would be misleading. At the heart of Wallace-Wells’s book is a
remorseless, near-unbearable account of what we are doing to our planet.
Climate change is “not just the biggest threat human life on the planet
has ever faced but a threat of an entirely different category and
scale,” he writes. Even if collective action manages to keep us to 2
degrees Celsius of warming — a target it looks like we are currently on
course to miss — we would be facing a world in which “the ice sheets
will begin their collapse, global G.D.P. per capita will be cut by 13
percent, 400 million more people will suffer from water scarcity, major
cities in the equatorial band of the planet will become unlivable, and
even in the northern latitudes heat waves will kill thousands each summer.”
But remember, he writes, “this is our best case scenario.” Wallace-Wells
takes us through a compendium of the ways in which things could get so
much worse, from simple “heat death” through catastrophic storms,
droughts, flooding, wildfires, pollution, plague, economic collapse and
war. We will see migration on a scale the world has never experienced:
United Nations and World Bank estimates of how many people will be
forcibly displaced by the middle of this century range from the tens to
the hundreds of millions. All of this will affect the world’s poor far
more than the world’s rich. The innocent, who have done the least to
damage the environment through the consumption of fossil fuels, will
suffer more than the guilty.
“The Uninhabitable Earth” gives readers’ emotions a thorough workout
along that pessimism-to-despair spectrum, before we are brought