Published in 2019, The Uninhabitable Earth serves two primary, related purposes.
The first is educational as it describes the possible consequences of something approaching worst-case scenario climate changes when they are combined with something approaching human inaction—or, indeed, our active exacerbation of the problem.
The second is political, as author David Wallace-Wells’ overall thesis—that climate change may well have a far more disastrous impact sooner than many people think—is ammunition for those who believe that more urgent, more radical action is needed to combat the threat.
While it is important to highlight terrible-but-possible outcomes as Wallace-Wells does, not least to buttress the case for catastrophe-averting contingency planning, his polemic is considerably more political than educational, as it chooses to focus on one particular category of eventualities (i.e., bad ones), and so spends little time exploring more hopeful alternatives.
Given the advanced state of today’s climate change debate, that is a missed opportunity.
Reading The Uninhabitable Earth is unsettling and eye-opening. The disturbance is due to the author bombarding readers with an apparently never-ending supply of extreme prose events. Although on a couple of occasions he professes to in actuality possess a positive outlook on our world, that is rarely on display. Rather his book is an immersive experience in the apocalypse around the corner.
Eye-opening titbits are also plentiful. Examples include that Louisiana is losing a football field worth of land to the sea every hour. That the soot from increasing forest fires in the far north absorbs more heat when it settles on ice, so accelerating melting. And that the annual carbon emissions from computers ‘mining’ bitcoins are equivalent to one million transatlantic flights.
Fact check
These days, it is easy enough to do a cursory fact-check of such claims, and Wallace-Wells includes a fairly thorough notes section. The statistic about Louisiana seems true enough, though the losses are not constant. There is indeed concern about soot and arctic ice sheets.
Wallace-Wells’ bitcoin claim may be a bit wobbly, as it is based on this 2018 The Guardian piece, which says, vaguely, that the cryptocurrency’s emissions are only “on pace” to match those of one million transatlantic flights (The Guardian drew on Digiconomist data for its comparison).
Such cautious treatment of the book is warranted given the damning review by scientists on the Climate Feedback website of Wallace-Wells’ 2017 New York Magazine smash hit that led to the book. Their assessment was that the scientific credibility of the viral article was “low”:
“The reviewers found that some statements in this complex article do misrepresent research on the topic, and some others lack the necessary context to be clearly understood by the reader. Many other explanations in the article are correct, but readers are likely left with an overall conclusion that is exaggerated compared to our best scientific understanding.”
While the author doubtless learned from that panel of expert reviewers—the magazine published an amended and fully annotated version in response—there is little doubt that Wallace-Wells adopted a somewhat similar approach to his book that took the same name.
Indeed, in his review of the article, Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, commented: “The title itself is hyperbolic—there’s not really a plausible climate change scenario in which the Earth becomes truly uninhabitable.”
Sea change
Such charges seem especially relevant when it comes to the treatment of adaptation. For example, Wallace-Wells writes that, as sea levels rise, much of the US internet infrastructure may be “drowned in less than two decades”.
The 2018 research paper that this claim is based upon includes at the end of its abstract: “While it is difficult to project the impact of countermeasures such as sea walls, our results suggest the urgency of developing mitigation strategies and alternative infrastructure deployments.” Quite.
A lot of the focus in the climate change debate has been on the burning of fossil fuels. And there are of course very good reasons for the hydrocarbon fixation that both all of us and climate change activists have. Electricity generation and transport contributed, for example, more than half of the US’s carbon emissions in 2019, meanwhile our unprecedented socio-economic development over the past two centuries relied heavily on coal and oil.
Wallace-Wells, in fact, characterises learning how to extract energy from fossil fuels as a technological development that was single-handedly responsible for industrial capitalism and affluent society as we know it.
The centrality of energy to the overall issue means it is a good place for the non-expert to focus on rather than drown in the all-encompassing whirlpool that is the climate change debate.
Energy puzzle
If we return to the bitcoin statistic, it actually references two importantly distinct pieces of the energy puzzle. As of now, and maybe for many years into the future, the only way of significantly reducing carbon emissions from flying will be by significantly reducing flying.
But with bitcoin, the entirely possible replacement of fossil fuels by renewable or nuclear energy to power the processors doing the ‘mining’ would massively reduce emissions from the crypto pioneer without having to reduce the activity.
This sort of sleight of hand evidences the way that Wallace-Wells uses decontextualised eye-popping stats to ram home his main thesis—but the manner in which he treats the energy theme also has wider significance.
Perhaps three-quarters of bitcoin’s ‘mining’ has been done in China. Many Chinese ‘miners’ used surplus hydropower when they could, and then relied on fossil fuels during the dry season. A recent ban is presumably predominantly a Chinese government response to something it is struggling to regulate and that threatens the financial system it governs. But it also likely stems from China’s sporadic global charm offensive, especially on climate issues, as demonstrated by its pre-COP26 pledge to not fund any coal-fired power stations outside of China.
The point here is that while many may well be tempted to join Wallace-Wells and throw their hands up in the increasingly toxic air at bitcoin’s electricity consumption (they do not understand its utility—most people without STEM degrees do not understand it at all—and its carbon footprint is, apparently, equivalent to Romania’s) the key issue for the climate is not consumption of power but its manner of generation.
As Wallace-Wells seeks to shock readers into action, or perhaps just massage their concerns, he zooms over these glaring details. That is a systemic weakness of the book.
Mitigation matters
These days, there is little debate about the reality of anthropogenic climate change, and, increasingly, there is little debate that it is, for example, causing an increased frequency of extreme weather events. Instead, the most animated, most meaty discussions are over what to do about it.
On this critical—and vastly complicated—issue, Wallace-Wells has little to say; or at least little positive to say, as he runs us through not just something approaching worse-case outcomes (II. Elements of Chaos), but also the reasons why we are too feckless and selfish to effectively respond (III. The Climate Kaleidoscope).
Perched high and dry on a lofty vantage point, Wallace-Wells ruminates on whether capitalism can survive climate change, but he does not ever get around to substantively addressing any of the real-world trade-offs that are the nuts and bolts of addressing the challenges it presents.
Given this lack of constructiveness, the praise heaped on the book in the listed 27 capsule reviews—eight of which use the words terrified, terrifying, or petrifying—is concerning, and would be even more so if Wallace-Wells took as many shortcuts to sensationalism as he did in his magazine piece.
Nuclear option
Other sections of the book relating to energy production provide further critical insights his approach.
Wallace-Wells seems to understand that humanity missed a trick over the past few decades by failing to develop nuclear fission into an abundant cheap source of electricity, as envisaged by President Dwight D. Eisenhower back in 1953.
In a two-page digression, Wallace-Wells highlights that over the last decade Germany prematurely decided to phase out nuclear power as part of its renewable pivot, taking a dig at Angela Merkel, the so-called “Climate Chancellor”, along the way.
He notes, correctly, that while the investment case for expensive new nuclear power stations is hard to make in many locations due to plummeting renewable costs, it is a lot harder to justify the shutting down of existing plants—as Germans should know by now, and residents of California and New York are set to discover.
Flying in the face of the anti-nuclear environmental campaigning that accompanied the industry’s decline, it is now acknowledged by—among many other establishment pillars—the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change and the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, that nuclear power is needed as fossils fuels are retired and, in the foreseeable future, for when the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow, especially as our transport systems undergo electrification, so boosting demand.
Rather than solely blaming fossil fuel-powered capitalism for our predicament, a braver author would have acknowledged, prominently, that anti-nuclear activism, a preceding brand of apocalyptic environmentalism to his own, also played its part in rising emissions in critical recent decades through scare-mongering over the dangers of nuclear plants. You could call that an inconvenient truth.
Suspicious progress
One likely reason that Wallace-Wells chooses to not overly muddy his message is that he is trying to terrify his readers into taking climate change seriously; and in that he succeeds, magnificently.
But those readers are left no clearer about what needs to be done after they have been terrified into action, may well feel more hopeless than before reading a book focusing on something approaching worst-case scenarios, and most were doubtless already convinced that urgent action was needed anyway.
Ultimately, The Uninhabitable Earth was perhaps so lavishly praised not because it provides a blueprint, or even a stimulus, for action, but because it tapped so effectively into a segment of mainstream rich world liberal-left worries.
Somewhere near the earthy root of the issue is that under that broad ‘progressive’ socio-political tent there is actually plenty of either suspicion or outright opposition to the concept of progress, which stems from understandable guilt for, among other things, the crimes of European colonialism, carbon emissions fuelling Western development, and chronic inequality between and within societies.
Theories of social justice and redistributionist systems are rightly built upon these concerns, but the unease with growth that accompanies them does not serve our current climatic predicament so well—unless someone from XR is able to convince those playing catch-up that one of the consequence of our past recklessness is their continued deprivation.
Growth history
Wallace-Wells expertly details how climate change could well get out of control while confronting the human frailties that suggests we may well fall short in mitigating and adapting to that threat.
There is nothing in The Uninhabitable Earth that suggests the author sees the core issues raised in this review any differently, as the inherent difficulty of reducing carbon emissions to prevent chaos while also maintaining or improving lifestyles underlies his pessimism.
But, for right or for wrong, it is the proponents of progress, pro-nuclear superpowers, and ‘techno-utopians’— including those pesky crypto bros, and those that point out that technology has recently decoupled post-industrial growth from natural resource consumption—who may well shape the future of the West, and the rest.
Despite Wallace-Wells’ finely stitched tale, they have a far more compelling narrative to spin to the billions of people in less privileged parts of the world who are otherwise on course to remain hungry after missing out on the fruits of the now all-but forbidden fossil fuels.
