DAVID
WALLACE –WELLS, THE UNINHABITABLE EARTH, a
Review by Dick Bennett
Contents
Publisher’s
precis
Battistoni’s
review
Robert
Weissman’s praise (president of Public Citizen)
David
Sixbey’s praise (citizen living in Flippin, AR)
Dick’s Analysis of The Uninhabitable Earth
Google Search of
the book
And Interviews
The Uninhabitable
Earth by David Wallace-Wells
'A profound book, which
simultaneously makes me terrified and hopeful about the future' Jonathan Safran
Foer. A Times and FT Most
Anticipated Book 2019.
It is worse, much worse, than you think.
It is worse, much worse, than you think.
The slowness of climate
change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn't
happening at all, and if your anxiety about it is dominated by fears of
sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are
possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today.
Over the past decades,
the term "Anthropocene" has climbed into the popular imagination - a
name given to the geologic era we live in now, one defined by human
intervention in the life of the planet. But however sanguine you might be about
the proposition that we have ravaged the natural world, which we surely have,
it is another thing entirely to consider the possibility that we have only
provoked it, engineering first in ignorance and then in denial a climate system
that will now go to war with us for many centuries, perhaps until it destroys
us. In the meantime, it will remake us, transforming every aspect of the way we
live--the planet no longer nurturing a dream of abundance, but a living
nightmare.
Opener of Battistoni’s
review
Alyssa Battistoni. “Everything to Lose: The
struggle to save the planet.” The Nation (MAY 20,
2019), JUNE 3-10, 2019,
ISSUE).
(Illustration by Tim Robinson)At this point, we all know that
climate change is happening (or at least most of us do). But do we really know
what it will mean to live on a planet transformed by it? We know the seas will
rise, but have we truly reckoned with the fact that they are on track to be
four to eight feet higher by the end of the century, at which point they will
drown the Maldives, the White House, St. Mark’s Basilica, and the Bengal
tiger’s habitat? We know that Earth is getting hotter, but have we actually
come to terms with what it would mean if half the world were so hot that it
would essentially cook the human body to death, as would be the case with a
temperature rise of 5 or 6 degrees Celsius?
That we do not really grasp what climate change will bring is the
central premise of David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth. An
editor at New York magazine,
Wallace-Wells describes in chilling detail the possibility of year-round fires
scorching the planet; latent plagues revived as the ice that harbors these
frozen pathogens melts; growing numbers of people left homeless by
climate-fueled disasters, rising sea levels, increasingly scarce resources, and
the toxic effects of pollution. Very little of what he reports here is new, as
Wallace-Wells notes; most of it has been predicted in scientific studies for
years. This is part of his point: For decades, we have avoided thinking about
the catastrophe on the horizon. His gambit is that, by offering this
information in the form of a taut, evocative, and frequently terrifying view of
the future that awaits, he might make the reality hit home in a way that
scattered headlines do not. . . . The daunting challenge of saying something
about climate change that will break through where other warnings have not is
at the heart of both The Uninhabitable Earth and Losing Earth, the new book by Nathaniel Rich. Both
writers try to understand why it is that we have known about climate change for
nearly four decades and yet seem to go through the same cycle of discovery time
after time. Both try their best to force us out of this pattern.
(The review is brilliant,
identifying precisely not only the uninhabitable and the loss surveyed by the
authors, but where and how they fell short in their quite different analyses. –Dick)
THE UNINHABITABLE EARTH; LIFE AFTER
WARMING
By David
Wallace-Wells Buy this book
LOSING EARTH; A RECENT HISTORY
By Nathaniel Rich Buy this book
National and Local
Praise for The Uninhabitable Earth
Robert
Weissman’s praise (Weisman is president of Public Citizen, founded by Nader)
Sixbey’s
praise in NADG LTE
Time’s running short
American culture evolved with the expansion of the market economy, and today’s market is destroying the planet—producing global warming, ecological implosion and species extinction that makes the current culture unsustainable. As a result, national politics divides between so-called “leftists” who advocate new patterns of culture to address climate change, and traditionalists determined to preserve “the American way of life”—positions that offer little room for compromise.
Donald Trump serves the corporate marketeers who profit from the destructive economy they created and champions the cultural traditionalists who embrace the past. By discrediting science and nullifying regulations designed to address global warming, Trump benefits from a political bump produced by the resulting full employment and rising stock market. He poses as the national paladin defending tradition, while using patriotic clichés and national prejudices to disparage as un-American those who oppose his folly.
There’s a wealth of information on the Internet and in the library on the science and impact of global warming. The national government blocks effective response, but for the time being one can still focus on state, county and municipal reform, encourage discourse in local and state media, critique educational curricula at all levels, and work to enlighten or remove from public office those who block essential reforms.
Those who have doubts about the looming planetary crisis would do well to read recent reports from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (www.ipcc.ch) or David Wallace- Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. Tempus fugit!
DAVID SIXBEY, Flippin
If you read the LTE to the ADG you will have seen many letters from Sixbey, a well-informed, brave voice from small town Arkansas. (All letters about climate are forwarded to CCL members by Charles Sisco.) https://www.nwaonline.com/news/2019/aug/19/letters-20190819/ Pg 7B 8/19/2019 NWADG
Time’s running short
American culture evolved with the expansion of the market economy, and today’s market is destroying the planet—producing global warming, ecological implosion and species extinction that makes the current culture unsustainable. As a result, national politics divides between so-called “leftists” who advocate new patterns of culture to address climate change, and traditionalists determined to preserve “the American way of life”—positions that offer little room for compromise.
Donald Trump serves the corporate marketeers who profit from the destructive economy they created and champions the cultural traditionalists who embrace the past. By discrediting science and nullifying regulations designed to address global warming, Trump benefits from a political bump produced by the resulting full employment and rising stock market. He poses as the national paladin defending tradition, while using patriotic clichés and national prejudices to disparage as un-American those who oppose his folly.
There’s a wealth of information on the Internet and in the library on the science and impact of global warming. The national government blocks effective response, but for the time being one can still focus on state, county and municipal reform, encourage discourse in local and state media, critique educational curricula at all levels, and work to enlighten or remove from public office those who block essential reforms.
Those who have doubts about the looming planetary crisis would do well to read recent reports from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (www.ipcc.ch) or David Wallace- Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. Tempus fugit!
DAVID SIXBEY, Flippin
If you read the LTE to the ADG you will have seen many letters from Sixbey, a well-informed, brave voice from small town Arkansas. (All letters about climate are forwarded to CCL members by Charles Sisco.) https://www.nwaonline.com/news/2019/aug/19/letters-20190819/ Pg 7B 8/19/2019 NWADG
NOTES
TOWARD A STUDY OF THE UNINHABITABLE EARTH by Dick Bennett
David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming.
The term "Anthropocene"-- the geologic era we live in
now, defined by human intervention in the life of the planet-- is gaining popularity. But do people know what it signifies? That out of ignorance and then in denial we
have engineered a climate system that is going to war with us possibly until it
destroys us?
The book was not written for those who already know the possible
worst, toward which we are heading, though they offer abundantly rich
information for all levels of readers.
Rather it seeks to prepare advocates of a new way of thinking to help leaders
and the public more rapidly and effectively engage in creating a new politics
and a new economics.
Wallace-Wells would
make so concrete, so specific, so immediate the anthropocentric warmed world
coming that by the billions the people will clamor for change. His central premise is: When the general public fully understands that the seas will
likely rise to be four to eight feet higher by the end of the century, drowning
the Maldives, the White House, St. Mark’s Basilica, and the Bengal tiger’s
habitat, that half the world is predicted to become so hot that it will cook
the human body, that millions of refugees will press on our borders, then THE PEOPLE will demand and the
politicians will listen. Readers of the
OMNI CBF books already know this argument.
Our job is to help the public get it, and get to work.
ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK SECTION I. CASCADES
Accretive,
Cumulative Organization of themes in Section I, “Cascades”
You will recall
classes in high school on classifying sentences functionally and rhetorically.
Rhetorically sentences tend to be cumulative (the most common) or
periodic. Cumulative sentences begin
with the subject and predicate and then build on this foundation with phrases
and clauses. (Periodic: subject and verb at end.) Not only sentences, but paragraphs,
and even whole essays can be described as cumulative or periodic. Usually they are mixed in various ways to
give variety to the writing.
McKibben in Falter told readers his subject and then
elaborated, advancing and returning, often by connecting the beginning of a
sentence to the end of the preceding sentence, until his major terms and ideas
were established.
Wallace-Wells
follows the same twining style with his themes in Part I, “Cascades,” such as
cascades, delusions, dire warnings, one generation (for catastrophe and one for
rescue), and extreme transformations.
Cascades
P. 21 Here’s one of several
explanations of “cascades”:
“The assaults [on the planet] will not be discrete—this is
another climate delusion. Instead, they
will produce a new kind of cascading violence…with increasing intensity and in
ways that build on each other and undermine our ability to respond, uprooting
much of the landscape we have taken for granted, for centuries…and subverting
the promise that the world we have engineered and built for ourselves, out of
nature, will also protect us against it, rather than conspiring with disaster
against its makers” (complex issues inspire complex but perfectly clear sentences).
Anthropocene (In
only “a single generation” human exhaust, “the poison of emissions” has melted
“a millennia of ice” and destroyed the environmental stability that enable
human history.)
Delusions
(the
opening paragraph lists eight delusions, and others are discussed passim, e.g. 29, “…that the totality of
climate change should make us feel so passive—that is another of its
delusions”)
Dire
warnings
Pp. 4, 7, 11, 12, 13, 14, 18, 19, etc.
Pp. 4, 7, 11, 12, 13, 14, 18, 19, etc.
Extreme transformation (possibly “whole regions” of the
planet…would be rendered uninhabitable by heat, desertification, and flooding”
6, etc.)
One
generation , the speed of climate change (e.g., “the story of the
industrial world’s kamikaze mission is the story of a single lifetime” 4; “the
single lifetime is also the lifetime of my mother” 5, etc.)
Twine: entwine, braid, twist, intertwine, curl,
wreathe, spiral, wind, weave, interweave.
Part II, “Elements
of Chaos,”
Seen
as a whole structure, Part II differs entirely from Part I, “Cascades.” Cascades
produce anything suggesting a series of waterfalls, often connected, but to W-W
signifying chaos. Elements denote the effort to put order in movement, to identify
the essential features of a larger whole.
“The science that makes up the following twelve chapters has been culled from interviews with dozens of
experts, and from hundreds of papers published in the best academic journals
over the previous decade or so. “ [He
also cites many books that were published also during the preceding 10 years.] It is an effort to present “the state of our
collective understanding of the many multiplying threats that a warming planet
poses to all of us….”
The twelve
chapters move in blocks of individual topics: Heat Death, Hunger, Drowning, Wildfire, Disasters No Longer Natural,
Freshwater Drain, Dying Oceans, Unbreathable Air, Plagues of Warming, Economic
Collapse, Climate Conflict, ‘Systems.’
This arrangement is helpful for anyone seeking an explanation of a topic
in one location (especially when the index is incomplete like this one). Yet these are not simple, single-topic
essays, for in each section the author throws out filaments backwards and
forwards, past and present.
Heat. Burning carbon/fossil fuels increases carbon
dioxide which increases water absorption which destabilizes the weather into
extremes. “Since 1980, the planet has
experienced a fiftyfold increase in the number of dangerous heat waves; a
bigger increase is to come” (40).
Another level
of sophistication exists in that the blocks function also as one structure
progressing from the first to the last.
This first, on the rising
temperature, propels all the others.
Throughout he reminds us of the
politics of climate, “principally, how much more carbon we decide to emit,
which is not a question for the natural sciences [Part II], but the human ones”
43). Climatologists can predict
hurricane place, time, and intensity, but not what humans in market economics
will do; we still produce and consume energy without forethought of the human
future (or other species) future. We
talk restraint and reason and political will while growing emissions and heat
for profit (44). The human track record
of shortsightedness since Kyoto tells us to focus not on prediction but on
“what could happen” (but he does
scatters many predictions throughout).
Hunger.
Our future of rising temperature, 50 percent more people,
50 percent less grain, proteins worse (see his details just in the opening
par.). Insects, disease, soil erosion.
The Green Revolution reduced extreme poverty, but we’re responding today too
slowly and inufficiently. Since 1980 the arid West has moved 140 miles
eastward. The earth’s carrying capacity
is decreasing. Climate change Is the
totality of the “planet already struggling with civil strife and war and
horrifying inequality and far too many other insoluble hardships to iterate”
(53). With cruel irony, all the
progress, the humanitarian growth, “has been paid for by fossil-fuel-driven
industrialization” (53-5). “Climate change promises. . .an empire of
hunger erected among the world’s poor” (58).
The
middle chapters: Drowning, Wildfire,
Disasters No Longer Natural, Freshwater Drain, Dying Oceans, Unbreathable Air,
Plagues of Warming, Economic Collapse.
The penultimate
chapter, “Climate Conflict,” relates, the two chief existential
threats, warming and (nuclear) war. “Most wars throughout history…have been
conflicts over resources...which is what an earth densely populated and denuded
by climate change will yield” (129). And
“heat frays everything,” and then “can cascade into violence.” Droughts and heat waves hit, agricultural
yields drop, political fault lines
electrify, societies falter.
The last chapter
of Part II, “Systems,” traces
the resultant climate refugees. The poor will suffer the most. By 2050 from 140 to 200 million climate
refugees in just three global regions.
Humans suffering from mental problems will escalate. And it is today; all the research W-W
summarizes is from the “world we know today”—“a world just one degree warmer…now
barreling headlong into an age of …climate chaos, a world we are only beginning
to perceive” (138).
For clarity, he
has identified twelve threats from cc, but they are not discrete. “…together they form a latticework of
climate crisis, beneath which at least some humans, and probably many billions,
will live.” The question is, How? (140).
Part III, “The Climate Kaleidoscope”
In six chapters
W-W gives us an “accounting of the human
costs of human life” in one generation, filling up the planet “with only
more humans” producing massive heat intensities , conflicts, wars, and
disruptions of public health and food production, overheated, overcrowded, drowning cities, epidemic of PTSD, and an
“acceleration of history and the diminishing of possibility that acceleration
likely brings” (36).
Storytelling
(6
parts)
Effects of proliferation of Armageddon fictions in print
and film, when humans are experiencing a real world climate and nuclear
catastrophe. Heroes and villains in the
fictions and real life. Climate
parables-- significant and not. The end
of nature/the ascendancy of the
Anthropocene. “The arrival of this
scale of climate suffering in the modern West will be one of the great and
terrible stories of the coming decades.”(153). [Transforming all departments in
universities worldwide, but especially those studying stories. I was a professor
English and US literature –D] Striking
data, as throughout the book; e.g., “”Ninety-six percent of the world’s
mammals, by weight, are now humans and their livestock.”(154). And global warming [gw] “will come to shape
everything we do on the planet….” (155).
Scientists’ reticence and caution, industry disinformation, and other
reasons caused us to be so late (too late?) in engaging cc (it’s been 30 years
since Hansen’s first testimony and the establishment of the IPCC).
Crisis
Capitalism (6 parts)
Humans (Dr. Frankenstein) created the
Anthropocene via capitalism (the Dr.’s creation) in a few recent years, and it
is now so monstrously pervasive and powerful (e.g., trillions of dollars in ff
subsidies) that renovating it seems impossible. The end of the Cold War and explosion of
carbon emissions. Klein’s The Shock Doctrine and The Battle for Paradise. Growth!
Warming! The growing power of the
1%. The costs will make the Great
Depression minor. Increasing inequality. (166).
Violence, wars. Adaptation and
mitigation (decarbonization) costs, a WWII mobilization now global and rapid
(169). To pull us back from total
destruction will cost $300 trillion—“or nearly four times total global GDP”
(170).
The
Church of Technology (7 parts)
Assesses technological magical thinking. Silicon
Valley dreams of rescue through technology.
The dreams of the new billionaire caste of escape and tech immortality. Cost of renewables dropped 80%, but “Solar
isn’t eating away at fossil fuel use…it’s just buttressing it.” While human civilization commits suicide, the
market and profits grow for the few (178).
And “we have just twelve years to cut
[emissions] in half”(179). “If we start [cutting
emissions] today, when global emissions are still growing, the necessary rate
is 10 percent. If we delay another
decade….” (180). “…the world is on track
to complete the necessary energy revolution in four hundred years.” Both nuclear power and renewables power are
at present reveries revolution.
Politics
of Consumption (6)
“…the
climate crisis demands political commitment” not only against
entrenched corporations but against the easy, comfortable, lukewarm
semi-engagement of “liberal environmentalists” (186). “Eating organic is nice…but if your goal is
to save the climate your vote is much more important. Politics is a moral multiplier.” (187). What kind of politics will evolve to replace
neoliberalism (US capitalism)? Mann and
Wainwright, Climate Leviathan: A
Political Theory of Our Planetary Future (191): a
planetary threat requires a planetary sovereignty such as China seems most
likely to provide (194-5). Harold
Welzer, Climate Wars: What People Will Be
Killed for in the 21st Century.
Mad Max.
History
After Progress (3)
Loss
of belief in Progress in industrialization and economic growth. Books by Noah Harari, James
Scott, Jared Diamond, et al. Rising
temperature. The Industrial Revolution
as organized by capitalism has induced cc, which has made “us all prisoners” of
“a time of cascading, disorienting
change” (kaleidoscope)(202). The catastrophic future summarized
(203). But this future calls forth massive
resistance—counter engineering-- if we are to prevent the worst. But also keep in mind, “The entire lifespan
of human civilization is rendered, effectively, an afterthought; and the much
longer span of climate change becomes eternity” (203). [This is the perspective all geologists, I
suppose, convey.)
Ethics
at the End of the World (6)
Preparation for the death of our species should emulate the
Dalai Lama’s recommendation for preparing for our individual death—with
“compassion, wonderment, and, above all, love” (205). Rejection
of fearmongering, paranoid, conspiratorial doomsayers –Guy McPherson, et
al. (204-). Rejection too of “nihilists”
of “detachment” from the endangered planet—Kingsnorth, Robinson Jeffers,
Charles Taylor and other “anti-humanists.’
Paul Kingsnorth’s “Dark Ecology” (210): withdraw, preserve all species,
get your hands dirty, affirm nature’s value beyond utility, build refuges
(211). Following the IPCC, W-W supports
mass mobilization of WWII proportions; he labels himself a “climate alarmist”
(213); he declares flatly: “the world has, at most, about three decades to
completely decarbonize before truly devastating climate horrors begin. You can’t halfway your way to a solution to a
crisis this large” (214). Against panic
and depression, growing in a world menaced by “a raging environment fueled by
indifferent politics,” we must reject “human exceptionalism” and promote forest
health as “our health” and “make people ‘plant-conscious.’” (215). He cites books by Roy Scranton. As we “gaze out at the future” from our
planet warming to a “nightmarish” two degrees and heading to a “grotesque”
three, we might “normalize climate suffering at the same pace we accelerate it”
(216).
Part
IV. The Anthropic Principle
“How much will we do to stall disaster, and how
quickly? Those are the only questions
that matter.” (219) The Fermi paradox—the Great Silence. The Drake equation. Why haven’t we heard from anybody? (This chapter is for astronomers!) Adam Frank, Light of the Stars: thinking
like a planet, “we are not the
first.” (223) We are humans, however,
whose ancestors chose to live “in a gaseous suicide, a running car in a sealed
garage” (223). But we can think like one
people, and we can choose the fate of the earth. The transformation under way is “ubiquitous
and dramatic,” “exceeding in just two
centuries” the worst in tens of thousands of years. Yet “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” (226-7). “I think that climate change…calls the world,
as one, to action.” (228).
IF THE BOOK WERE LONGER: What Is Omitted or Under-Discussed?
Index
Indexes are usually inadequate and misleading. The author doesn’t want to prepare them, just
having spent so long writing the book.
The publisher doesn’t want to spend more money on the book. Research scholars will compile their own
index. But for critical readers a good
index is important for more rapid, accurate, and comprehensive assessment of
the book. This Index is mediocre.
WHAT IS OMITTED?
Animals
(p. 35
W-W explains their absence from his book: “the tragic fate of the planet’s
animals” has been “written about” so amply and well as almost to “occlude”
attention to the “human animal”). Maybe
“written about” amply, but this is the 6th Great Extinction.
Arkansas
He generalizes often about the USA, but in fact areas and states of the nation vary in educational levels and awareness; e.g., AR’s statewide newspaper, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette apparently knows almost nothing about the subject Anthropocene (W-W 20).
He generalizes often about the USA, but in fact areas and states of the nation vary in educational levels and awareness; e.g., AR’s statewide newspaper, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette apparently knows almost nothing about the subject Anthropocene (W-W 20).
Marx, Marxist Ecology (the people best informed about changing the economic system in
the US are not mentioned in the Index)
Mass Media
W-W provides only one paragraph (p. 8) on media complicity in causing global warming (failure to investigate and report, denial). But like the preceding subject, that’s a book or books! In itself. Here’s an example for the chief newspaper of the state of Arkansas.
W-W provides only one paragraph (p. 8) on media complicity in causing global warming (failure to investigate and report, denial). But like the preceding subject, that’s a book or books! In itself. Here’s an example for the chief newspaper of the state of Arkansas.
ARKANSAS
DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE’s extreme underreporting of global warming: Is it from
Ignorance? Economic gain?
Wallace-Wells quotes an oceanographer as calling the planet an “angry beast” in its extreme weather responses to centuries of human (especially US) abuses; or even better, “a war machine” which “each day we arm…more” (21). Thus he observes that “Over the past few decades, the term ‘Anthropocene’ has climbed out of academic discourse and into the popular imagination” (20). Maybe in a few academies and cities in the US, maybe in Europe, but not in Arkansas as indicated by the state’s chief newspaper, the ADG. Day after day, month after month, year after year it’s business as usual for our newspaper, as though we were stuck in the 1950s. What can we say about the newspaper’s President Brent Powers, the Editor Rusty Turner, the Editorial Page Editor Greg Harton? Which explanation is kinder—that they are ignorant of or they are covering up the rising temperature and its consequences? They heard me coming? On August 23, 2019, the ADG printed an editorial from The Washington Post: “Global Warming Happening” that denounces President Trump’s denial of global warming. “It is beyond unforgivable.” Do the ADG editors read their extremely rare guest editorials?
Ignorance? Economic gain?
Wallace-Wells quotes an oceanographer as calling the planet an “angry beast” in its extreme weather responses to centuries of human (especially US) abuses; or even better, “a war machine” which “each day we arm…more” (21). Thus he observes that “Over the past few decades, the term ‘Anthropocene’ has climbed out of academic discourse and into the popular imagination” (20). Maybe in a few academies and cities in the US, maybe in Europe, but not in Arkansas as indicated by the state’s chief newspaper, the ADG. Day after day, month after month, year after year it’s business as usual for our newspaper, as though we were stuck in the 1950s. What can we say about the newspaper’s President Brent Powers, the Editor Rusty Turner, the Editorial Page Editor Greg Harton? Which explanation is kinder—that they are ignorant of or they are covering up the rising temperature and its consequences? They heard me coming? On August 23, 2019, the ADG printed an editorial from The Washington Post: “Global Warming Happening” that denounces President Trump’s denial of global warming. “It is beyond unforgivable.” Do the ADG editors read their extremely rare guest editorials?
Mass Movements (to gain control of the establishment)
Like during the crisis activists faced in the first years of the Great Depression, if we hope to harness state power and the neoliberal economic system if we are ever to slow and stop the dissemination of carbon, the people need to build a powerful, mass-movement for change. W-W does not discuss how we are to accomplish this. Of course, the subject has the magnitude of another book.
Like during the crisis activists faced in the first years of the Great Depression, if we hope to harness state power and the neoliberal economic system if we are ever to slow and stop the dissemination of carbon, the people need to build a powerful, mass-movement for change. W-W does not discuss how we are to accomplish this. Of course, the subject has the magnitude of another book.
US “neoliberal” Capitalism
Not mentioned until p. 27 and then not again until p. 115, despite actually and inevitably discussing its features often. I cannot think W-W was unaware, but only avoiding the severe condemnation sure to come from the worshippers of the US unregulated economic system, “neoliberal” capitalism.
Not mentioned until p. 27 and then not again until p. 115, despite actually and inevitably discussing its features often. I cannot think W-W was unaware, but only avoiding the severe condemnation sure to come from the worshippers of the US unregulated economic system, “neoliberal” capitalism.
Asking
the Right Questions (How much will we do to stall disaster, and how
quickly? We know the answer: the People
have done little and none quickly.
Dozens of conferences and books and hundreds of articles have been
written exhorting our leaders to take action For the Planet. Perhaps a different response would occur if
we concentrated on the future: What should we do to realign power quickly in
the US?
Temperature
Many pages on the fundamental subject temperature yet only one, insignificant Index entry, which does not refer readers to the entry on global warming covering the subject.
Many pages on the fundamental subject temperature yet only one, insignificant Index entry, which does not refer readers to the entry on global warming covering the subject.
Some important subjects he doesn’t index (but see Index
note above):
Climate
justice (injustice!; one entry on environmental justice)
Contraceptives
(for
population/CO2 control)
Corporate
crime (esp. fossil fuel companies: lying, coverup, bribery; this
subject has been extensively reported in books, articles, films; McKibben uses
one book especially: Horsemen of the
Apocalypse by Dick Russell))
Denial (of
warming, cc; he seems not to have read the prolific studies of Exxon et al.)
Nuclear
war
(29 he mentions nuclear winter).
Patriarchy
(well,
destroyed our civilization has been a male’s prerogative)
Politics
(W-W recognizes the need
for mass mobilization of WWII proportions if we are to avoid a new Dark Age,
but readers will look in vain for even a paragraph about how we are to do it)
Over-Population (at
least a half-dozen times W-W incisively emphasizes the major iharms of
population growth; for example: P. 7 Compares dramatic climate refugee statsistics
around the world with population growth ,concluding with 140 million to one
billion climate refugees by 2050 (refugees in 2019 were 65 million, global
population in 1820 was a billion). P. 8
Why have “carbon emissions… accelerated so much”? “this is what results when there are simply
that many more humans around.” “Fifteen
percent of all human experience throughout history…belongs to people alive
right now, each walking the earth with carbon footprints.” P. 129 “…most wars throughout history…have
been conflicts over resources, often ignited by resource scarcity, which what
an earth densely populated and denuded by climate change will yield.”
Yet he does not
devote a chapter to population growth as an element of chaos.
The latest no. of Population Connection arrived today as usual containing vital
information for stabilizing and reversing population growth despite the
interferences by Pres. Trump. You’ll
find a long article on Guatemalan women: victims of violence, racism and
persistent indigenous poverty, machismo at the root of gender inequality, and
more; the president of PC relates overpopulation and social collapse; a
full-page graphic depicting rapid population growth around the world; a cartoon
showing a pregnant woman and a child speaking to the woman’s belly: “You wanna
be protected, wanted, looked after? Stay Where You Are!” And more, and of
course advocacy of the new long-range contraceptives throughout.
United
Nations (on 25 and elsewhere and in his conclusion he makes a
strong but very general case for world government, but fails to develop circumstantially
how the UN is and could be functioning better against warming with adequate
support from its affluent nations).
A
few of the books cited by W-W in his notes
These are a few of the books cited in the “Storytelling” chapter of Part III to sample how impressively climate change is being examined, reported, and resisted by our scientists, scholars, and general citizens, and W-W’s knowledge of them. (And of course many articles were cited also.) W-W’s notation system is nothing new (cited phrase and source placed together) but is especially appropriate for establishing the author’s reliability and credibility.
These are a few of the books cited in the “Storytelling” chapter of Part III to sample how impressively climate change is being examined, reported, and resisted by our scientists, scholars, and general citizens, and W-W’s knowledge of them. (And of course many articles were cited also.) W-W’s notation system is nothing new (cited phrase and source placed together) but is especially appropriate for establishing the author’s reliability and credibility.
Amitav
Ghosh. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the
Unthinkable. 2016.
IPCC, Global Warming of 1.5C: An IPCC Special Report on the Impacts of Global Warming. . . . 2018E. Ann Kaplan. Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction.
2015.Naomi Klein. This Changes Everything and The Battle for Paradise.Andreas Malm. Fossil Capital.
Michael Mann and Tom Toles. The Madhouse Effect. 2016.Oreskes and Conway. Merchants of Doubt. 2010.Jedediah Purdy. After Nature.Roy Scranton. Learning to Die in the Anthropocene and We’re Doomed. Now What?
F. O. Wilson. Half- Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life. 2016.
Speculative fiction driven by climate conditions (p. 281): 7 authors in one note; e.g., J. G. Ballard, The Drowned World trilogy. Other authors: Wells, Verne, Atwood, McEwan, McCarthy, Robinson.
IPCC, Global Warming of 1.5C: An IPCC Special Report on the Impacts of Global Warming. . . . 2018E. Ann Kaplan. Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction.
2015.Naomi Klein. This Changes Everything and The Battle for Paradise.Andreas Malm. Fossil Capital.
Michael Mann and Tom Toles. The Madhouse Effect. 2016.Oreskes and Conway. Merchants of Doubt. 2010.Jedediah Purdy. After Nature.Roy Scranton. Learning to Die in the Anthropocene and We’re Doomed. Now What?
F. O. Wilson. Half- Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life. 2016.
Speculative fiction driven by climate conditions (p. 281): 7 authors in one note; e.g., J. G. Ballard, The Drowned World trilogy. Other authors: Wells, Verne, Atwood, McEwan, McCarthy, Robinson.
David
Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After
Warming. 2019.
Google SearchMcKibben’s Falter and W-W’s The Uninhabitable Earth
No Happy Ending: On Bill McKibben's “Falter” and David Wallace ...https://lareviewofbooks.org/.../no-happy-ending-on-bill-mckibbens-falter-a...
Jun 3, 2019 - Roy Scranton reviews two new books by Bill McKibben and David ... McKibben's “Falter” and David Wallace-Wells's “The Uninhabitable Earth”.
Google SearchMcKibben’s Falter and W-W’s The Uninhabitable Earth
No Happy Ending: On Bill McKibben's “Falter” and David Wallace ...https://lareviewofbooks.org/.../no-happy-ending-on-bill-mckibbens-falter-a...
Jun 3, 2019 - Roy Scranton reviews two new books by Bill McKibben and David ... McKibben's “Falter” and David Wallace-Wells's “The Uninhabitable Earth”.
18 hours ago - David Wallace-Wells doesn't pull any punches about the effects of climate
change. In his new book, “The Uninhabitable Earth,” the author takes ...
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "The Uninhabitable Earth hits you like a comet, with an overflow
of insanely lyrical prose about our pending Armageddon.
Mar 6, 2019 - More than halfway through “The Uninhabitable Earth,” David Wallace-Wells addresses the reader
directly, commending anyone who has ...
Enough to induce a panic attack ... a brutal
portrait of climate change and our future lives on Earth. But we have the tools to avoid it.
6 days ago - Wallace-Wells has since
developed his terrifying essay into an even more terrifying book, titled
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming.
Jul 9, 2017 - The Uninhabitable Earth, Annotated Edition ... But no matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough. Over the
past ...
So begins The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells's new book about how climate change will reshape every
aspect of our lives if the ...
The Uninhabitable Earth is a New York magazine article by American journalist
David Wallace-Wells published on July 9, 2017. The long-form
article depicts a ...
- Talking Climate and Health: “The Uninhabitable Earth” Author David ... David Wallace-Wells is deputy editor and climate columnist at New
York ...
David Wallace-Wells. The
Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming.--David Wallace-Wells. “The
Uninhabitable Earth.” New York Magazine, 2017. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html
INTERVIEWS OF AUTHOR
Wallace-Wells,
David. PBS video interview of
author. Excellent.
Feb 5, 2019 - It is worse, much worse, than you think. Out
now: https://amzn.to/2MOJOQp The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale,
perhaps as ...
May 10, 2019 - David Wallace-Wells, the author of The Uninhabitable Earth, says climate change is no longer a matter of
"if" or "when" but "how bad will it get.
Mar 12, 2019 - Music, Film, TV and Political
News Coverage. ... David Wallace-Wells' "The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming," presents a
terrifying ...
END DICK’S NOTES ON W-W
CLIMATE
POLITICS
Nathaniel
Rich, Losing
Earth
Recently a former student knocked on my
door with a book I had loaned him several years ago (Tropic of Chaos). During a
brief conversation he opined that as soon as we rid ourselves of Trump, we
could return to our devotion to the nation and planet we had enjoyed. (Unfortunately, I thought, Trump was an
atrocious symptom rather than a cause of global warming. I urged him to read a
book on how the CEOs of corporations, members of the 1%, and their government
allies—the fossil fuel industry, the American Petroleum Industry,
associated business interests, the Chamber of Commerce, energy
lobbyists, assorted Reaganites, AND
individuals in high positions blocked the scientific consensus on rising
temperature and business as usual and rising temperature continue today. OMNI has discussed Hoggan’s Climate Cover-up: The Crusade to Deny Global
Warming. And many other books more
or less expose the conspiracy to hide the truth about warming: --David Michaels. Doubt
is Their Product: How Industry Scientists Manufacture Uncertainty and
Threaten Your Health. Bovard,
Attention Deficit Democracy; Grant, Denying
Science; Hertsgaard, Hot; Nancy MacLean, Democracy
in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America; Mann and Toles, The Madhouse Effect; Jane Mayer, Dark
Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical
Right.; Milburn and Conrad, The Politics of Denial; Mooney, The Republican War on Science; Mooney
and Kirshenbaum, Unscientific
America; Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt; Potter, Deadly Spin;
Schneider, Science as a Contact Sport; Siegel,
False Alarm; Specter, Denialism.
I saved for last Dick Russell, ed. by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Horsemen of the Apocalypse: The Men Who Are
Destroying Life on Earth and What It Means for Our Children (2017), because
Bill McKibben drew from it for the villains almost exclusively in his book Falter.
And now
in 2019 the writer-resisters Wallace-Wells, The
Uninhabitable Earth, and Rich, Losing Earth, should
be added to the list of books that defend the planet.
My education in the politics of climate began in earnest via James
Hansen’s Storms of My Grandchildren. It is two books really: the science of
climatology and its politics: scientist James Hansen’s struggle to discover and
reveal the truth about warming and climate change, and to push leaders to take
action. The book might have been titled “The Truth and
the Politics of CC.” (The 2010
paperback includes a Q&A with Bill McKibben in which Hansen, sick of silence and compromise, condenses into blowtorch
intensity what will happen in our children's and grandchildren's lifetimes if
we follow the course we're on.)
Two 2019 righteous alarmists are David
Wallace-Wells and Nathaniel Rich.
David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming.
The term "Anthropocene"-- the
geologic era we live in now, defined by human intervention in the life of the
planet-- is gaining popularity. But do
people know what it signifies? That out
of ignorance and then in denial we have engineered a climate system that is
going to war with us possibly until it destroys us?
The books were not written for those who already
know the possible worst, toward which we are heading, though they offer
abundantly rich information for all levels of readers. Rather they seek to prepare advocates of a
new way of thinking to help leaders and the public more rapidly and effectively
engage in creating a new politics and a new economics.
Wallace-Wells would
make so concrete, so specific, so immediate the anthropocentric warmed world
coming that by the billions the people will clamor for change. His central premise is: When the general public fully understands that the seas will
likely rise to be four to eight feet higher by the end of the century, drowning
the Maldives, the White House, St. Mark’s Basilica, and the Bengal tiger’s
habitat, that half the world is predicted to become so hot that it will cook
the human body, that millions of refugees will press on our borders, then THE
PEOPLE will demand and the politicians will listen. Readers of the OMNI CBF books already know
this argument. Our job is to help the
public get it, and get to work.
I have analyzed The Uninhabitable Earth in https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2019/08/review-of-david-wallace-wells.html
Rich's Losing Earth: A Recent History.
This book reinforces W-W by explaining one small part
of the history of why US scientists failed to win the struggle for truth and
why the public in general remains unengaged. The book is composed of a series
of anecdotes covering the years 1979-1989 when US bipartisan and public support
for stopping CO2 was widespread, and change was possible, yet nothing was done,
the stories explaining very specifically why (for example, two chapters on
silencing Hansen). The stories are profoundly important to us today
because they show us how to cope with business as usual in our everyday lives (much
the coverage presented by W-W).
In his final paragraph, Rich writes: "There is one thing that each of us
can do....We can call the threats to our future what they are. We can
call the villains villains, the heroes heroes, the victims victims [all the
actors in this historical tragedy are identified], and ourselves
complicit." Only then, he believes, will the public and our
officials take action. When this happens, watch out, Arkansas!
CLIMATE CHANGE POLITICS
The publisher and, we can assume, the author,
Nathaniel Rich, wrote the following about
Losing Earth:
“By
1979, we knew nearly everything we understand today about climate
change—including how to stop it. Over the next decade, a handful of scientists,
politicians, and strategists, led by two unlikely heroes, risked their careers
in a desperate, escalating campaign to convince the world to act before it was
too late. Losing Earth is their story, and ours. [They are the climatologist James Hansen
and government official Rafe Pomerance.]
The New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to Nathaniel Rich’s groundbreaking
chronicle of that decade, which became an instant journalistic phenomenon—the
subject of news coverage, editorials, and conversations all over the world. In
its emphasis on the lives of the people who grappled with the great existential
threat of our age, it made vivid the moral dimensions of our shared plight.
Now expanded into book form, Losing Earth tells
the human story of climate change in even richer, more intimate terms. It
reveals, in previously unreported detail, the birth of climate denialism and
the genesis of the fossil fuel industry’s coordinated effort to thwart climate
policy through misinformation propaganda and political influence. The book
carries the story into the present day, wrestling with the long shadow of our
past failures and asking crucial questions about how we make sense of our past,
our future, and ourselves.”
Beginning
in the 1970s and continuing to this day, distinguished climate scientists have announced
that the world was warming at a rate without precedent during at least the last
two millennia, and that warming was caused by the buildup of greenhouse gases
from human activity. The story of how scientists reached that conclusion was
the story Spencer R. Weart told in The Discovery of
Global Warming in 2003. Then in 2008 he brought his award-winning
account up to date, to show how the scientific consensus caught fire among the
general world public, and how an understanding of the human meaning of climate
change spurred individuals and governments to action.
But
that’s only one side of the story.
Nathaniel
Rich gives the complementary narrative of the earlier 1970s and‘80s consensus
and the mainly successful efforts to thwart that consensus and block the disclosure
of and action on the scientific discovery of warming, ending with the US
refusal to agree to a binding agreement at the 1979 Noordwijk and 1992 Rio
Summits.
The book is composed of a series of interesting
anecdotes covering the years 1979-1989 when bipartisan and public support for
stopping CO2 was widespread, and change was possible. Here’s one example:
In 1982, Hansen thought the
only political question that mattered was how long until the worst began?
Testifying before Gore's congressional committee, he was asked,
"are we pushing beyond the range of human adaptability?"
"Yes," he answered. Therefore how soon would the US "need
to change the national model of energy production?" Hansen
hesitated. He thought, false hopes were worse than no hope at all,
since they deluded people away from real solutions. Finally
he replied "very soon." (A member of the audience, Nobel winner
Melvin Calvin--all of Rich's actors are named--, said that time was past
already.)
That's one page from Rich's Losing
Earth, chapters 8 and 9 on silencing Hansen.
Despite hearings in Congress and other seeming breakthroughs,
nothing was done,. Rich’s stories
explain humanly and politically why.
It's a short book with profound
importance to us today. For a decade the two heroes of science and their
supporters, confronted the concentrated power of our economic system. Unfortunately, Rich does not provide an Index
or a list of these protagonists. So to
make clear why I think this book is worth reading I’ll list some of the villains
and heroes discussed in Rich’s final chapter, “Afterword: Glass-Bottomed Boats” (the victims numbering in the billions, are
unnamed) . THE
LIST
The time period is
1989 and 1992, the first international conferences in pursuit of a binding international agreement to prevent
catastrophic global warming: in 1989, the failure of the international
conference in Noordwijk, Netherlands, and in 1992, the failure of the Rio Earth
Summit. Noordwijk sought 3 stipulations: 1) freeze of U.S. CO2 emissions at current levels, 2) specific
targets for reductions, and 3) assistance to developing c0untries to use
renewable sources of energy.
8 Heroes central to
Rich’s story in the final chapter
Ken Caldeira (180)
Jule Charney (187)
President Bill Clinton (185)
Al Gore (186)
Jim Hansen (182
William Nordhaus (181
Rafe Pomerance , lobbyist for the
environment in Friends of the earth, Clinton’s Dep. Assistant Secretary Bureau
of Oceans (10, 182, 186), the chief hero of the story
Timothy Wirth, Clinton’s Undersecretary for Global Affairs
(186
15 Villains(Sununu left
gov. in 1991) 15
Dr.
Allan Bromley (178-9)
Pres. George H. W. Bush (182)
Brian Flannery, Exxon (183
Robert Jastrow, Marshall Institute (188
Duane LeVine , Exxon (180)
Richard Lindzen, MIT (184
Patrick Michaels, UVA (184)
William Nierenberg (185)
William O’Keefe , API, GCC (185
William Reilly, EPA(177)
Charles Sandler , GCC (183
Henry Shaw (183
Fred Singer, UVA (184
Arthur Wiese, GCC (183
Terry Yosie , American Petroleum Institute API
(182)
Some of the front groups in which these
disgraceful or mistaken persons operated are:
Advancement of Sound Science Coalition
Citizens for the Environment
Cooler Heads Coalition
George C. Marshall Institute
Global Climate Coalition (“spent at least $1
million a year to crush public support for climate policy”)
Global Climate Information Project
Information Council on the Environment
The GCC “spent $13 million on a single ad
campaign to induce the Senate to oppose the Kyoto treaty. It passed 95-0.” (186)
“The
corporations that funded these groups together represented the lion’s share of
the gross domestic product.” (185)
I know I’m out of time, but I wanted to show
how circumstantial is the book. In only
10 pages Rich cites some 20 actors during the late 1989 Republican conquest of
climate policy.
The villainy of John
Sununu is recounted rin 4 of Rich’s chapters out of 22. Rich
asked William Reilly, former EPA head, whether Sununu “was the only person”
obstructing the agreement. Reilly replied, “Yes and no.” Preceding chapters 18-21 present the yes of Sununu’s virulent opposition. Earlier chapters 1-17 and the final chapter ,
the Afterword, present the no, for
many other wicked people influenced the decision not to make the resolutions
binding.
Sununu himself
explained the no. Even had he been 100%
in support of the treaty, it would not have mattered, because “the dirty little
secret” was that none of the leaders of the world really wanted hard
commitments but only the appearance of them.
He even said that the IPCC process was never expected to lead to
anything definite. “Even if the US had
signed a strict treaty,” it would not have meant anything. (179).
Sununu’s cynical
interpretation of the Noordwijk conference was seconded by Allan Bromley, G. H.
W. Bush’s chief scientist. Bromley wrote
in his memoir before he died that the delegates from the major European nations
were clueless regarding greenhouse gas emissions stabilization.
Where
are we today, according to Rich?(180)
“More carbon has been
released into the atmosphere since November 7, 1989, the final day of the
Noordwijk conference, than in the entire history of civilization….
“In 1990, humankind
emitted more than 20 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide. In 2018 we were projected to have produced 37
billion metric tons. check
“The earth is now as
warm as it was before the last ice age, 115,000 years ago, when the seas were
more than twenty feet higher.
Despite all the efforts
taken since the Charney Report (date) , “the total quantity of emitted
greenhouse gases has continued its inexorable rise.”
Quick electoral history:
George W. Bush and Dick Cheney beat
Gore.
Although in 2008 McCain lost to
Barack Obama, the cult of denialism controlled the GOP, AND the Democratic-
controlled Senate, when with a 59-seat majority the Dems declined to debate
comprehensive climate legislation. Of
course, “in that year alone , the oil and gas industry spent about half a
billion dollars on lobbying efforts to weaken energy legislation.” (187).
Where are we today?
“Our understanding of
warming hasn’t increased substantially during this time.
“The political story
hasn’t change greatly either. Only 7
countries are close to limiting emissions at the level necessary to keep
warming to 2 degrees. (181).
Now fifty years since the struggle to tell
the truth about climate change by scientists began, we might expect that
sufficient apocalyptic warnings had been published, and nations would be
engaged cooperatively in confronting the emergency. But not so.
Some nations have perceived the truth and are organizing. But the most powerful nation is not, and its
present president is not only preventing new resistance to warming, but is
dismantling as many of its environmental achievements as he can.
The bewildered US public largely remains
as passive or paralyzed and either way complicit as it was when James Hansen
confronted President Bush in 2003. In
response, additional scientist Paul Reveres have joined Hansen in crying
out: Sleepers Awake! An aroused populace could compel the
politicians to change their way of thinking and change the economic
system. (Even children—the Greta
Thunbergs of the world—are demanding: We need new politics!)
For the last quarter century the US
dominant behavior in regard to warming has been 1) the unrestrained efforts of
the fossil fuel industry to expand and make profit, by multimillion-dollar
disinformation campaigns, paying scientists to lie, or trying to brainwash
elementary school children, and 2) the Republican Party’s efforts “to suppress
scientific fact, confuse the public, and bribe politicians.”
SO WHAT SHOULD WE BE
DOING TO STOP AND REVERSE THE RISE IN TEMPERATURE THAT IS CHANGING THE CLIMATE?
Rich’s book is after all
a handbook on political struggle. But
it is a handbook on failure. A handful
of diverse people—scientists…political appointees, members of Congress, economists,
philosophers, and …bureaucrats,” led by “a hyperkinetic lobbyist and a guileless
atmospheric physicist” (Rafe Pomerance and James Hansen), “tried to warn
humanity of what was coming. They risked
their careers in a painful, escalating campaign to solve the problem, first in
scientific reports, later through conventional avenues of political persuasion,
and finally with a strategy of public shaming. Their efforts were shrewd, passionate,
robust. And they failed.” Rich’s book is
“their story, and ours” (9).
The members of OMNI’s Climate Book Forum can
be proud to be members of a genuine adult book forum, where the way to the
better exacts a full look at the worst.
In his final paragraph, Rich writes:
"There is one thing that each of us can do....We can call the threats to
our future what they are. We can call the villains villains, the heroes
heroes, the victims victims, and ourselves complicit." Only then
will the public and our officials take action. Unfortunately, people do this mindlessly all
the time. But his circumstantial narrative gives his solution validity. When we have fully examined a problem, then
we can name the despicable and the estimable.
And then we must take action.
