[D66] Burning Down the House | nybooks.com

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Burning Down the House
By
Alan Weisman
nybooks.com
18 min
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Burning Down the House
August 15, 2019 Issue
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

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 New York, 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.
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