53 pages • 1 hour read
David Wallace-WellsThe Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 3, Chapters 14-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “The Climate Kaleidoscope”
Part 3, Chapter 14 Summary: “Storytelling”
Wallace-Wells ponders the types of stories humans will tell through art in a world transformed by climate change. Already, images of apocalyptic despair seem to be everywhere in film and on television, he writes. Climate change is at the heart of television’s Game of Thrones, though the impending doom its characters fear is that of an everlasting winter rather than an everlasting heat wave. Mad Max: Fury Road heavily implies that its world is one ravaged by climate change without mentioning the phenomenon by name. From these examples, the author concludes that climate change is “everywhere you look, and yet nowhere in focus” (143).
These works, along with many others, offer different ways of coping with climate devastation. Some provide a persuasive fantasy of survival. Others provide catharsis by assigning guilt, thereby succeeding where law and policy have failed, the author writes.
Wallace-Wells is unsure if these apocalyptic trends in cinema and television will persist as global temperatures continue to rise. While he suspects climate to remain at the center of much of the world’s nonfiction—adding that the topic “may come to be regarded, at least by some, as the only truly serious subject” (145)—he questions whether there will be much appetite for movies like Fury Road when the planet is three or four degrees hotter than at present. At that point, climate change will be seen less as a topic and more as a setting, the metanarrative texture of all of humanity’s stories, from romantic comedies to sports movies.
Wallace-Wells goes on to ask: How does one narrativize climate change when there is no clear villain, or when humanity itself is the villain? In the United States, an arguably disproportionate amount of villainy has been assigned to oil executives, primarily because they are responsible for the lion’s share of disinformation espousing climate denial. However, the oil industry is hardly alone as a perpetrator of climate change, contributing to less than half of the world’s total emissions. Moreover, the author writes, climate denial hasn’t had a huge impact outside the United States nor even outside the Republican Party, and US emissions amount to less than 15% of the whole.
Finally, the author examines a major shift in how climate scientists themselves tell stories. For years, they practiced “scientific reticence” out of fear from alarming people. This approach, the author argues, could often be indistinguishable from complacency. In 2018, with the publication of a new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), climate scientists finally embraced fear as a motivating tactic.
Part 3, Chapter 15 Summary: “Crisis Capitalism”
Wallace-Wells considers a few possible outcomes pertaining to how economic and political systems will react to climate change. On one end of the spectrum is an approach he terms “eco-socialism,” in which governments plays active roles in markets to reduce emissions and manage the economic stresses involved with climate change. On the other end of the spectrum is a doubling-down on blind faith in markets, which will result in widespread rent-seeking as fewer resources are at the world’s disposal. This may be the more likely outcome, he fears, arguing that capital generally responds to a crisis by demanding more power and autonomy for itself. The likelihood of said outcome is best illustrated, the author argues, by the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, when the United States effectively turned over the government of Puerto Rico to a group of bondholders to whom the territory owes a great deal of debt.
That said, Wallace-Wells argues that this unflappable faith in markets that has sustained capitalism for the past century may finally crack, as climate change reveals that the promise of perpetual growth—the supposed reward for tolerating so much inequality and injustice—is a fantasy, propped up by the era of fossil fuels. As temperatures continue to rise, income inequality will grow even more severe, and there will be no light at the end of the tunnel because the recession will feel permanent.
If capitalism endures, the calls for “climate justice” will grow even louder. Already there are lawsuits ongoing that run along three vectors of liability. The first is to sue the companies directly responsible for emissions. The second is generational, as the young sue members of their parents’ generation for voting for officials and policies that allowed climate change to persist. The third is to sue the nation-states most responsible for climate change. The author is skeptical that poorer nations will ever see significant compensation—let alone just compensation—from richer countries over climate change. A more likely scenario, he writes, would take the form of a truth and reconciliation committee in the same vein as the one established in South Africa after apartheid.
In the end, the biggest liability involves how humanity adapts to climate change. The author hopes to see a fully decarbonized global economy and perhaps a meatless society. The ideal outcome would involve a technological breakthrough in carbon capture that results in negative emissions. Using the technology that exists today, this would cost around $300 trillion dollars. The author cites experts who argue that, at present, it would be far cheaper to simply cut emissions. Recent research shows a theoretical technique by which annual emissions could be neutralized at a price tag of $3 trillion per year. To put this number in perspective, the author points out that global fossil fuel subsidies have reached as high as $5 trillion in a single year, while also highlighting the $2.3 trillion tax cut signed by US President Donald Trump in 2017.
Part 3, Chapter 16 Summary: “The Church of Technology”
Aside from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, the author sees little in the way of a real commitment from Silicon Valley’s top innovators to address climate change. He attributes this lack of commitment in part to a philosophy espoused by individuals like former Google CEO Eric Schmidt: “that climate change,” the author writes, “has already been solved, in the sense that a solution has been made inevitable by the speed of technological change” (171). Not unlike capitalists whose faith in markets is absolute, futurists perceive technology as a “superstructure” that contains all the world’s problems and solutions. This view, Wallace-Wells suggests, is perhaps why technology gurus tend to fear artificial intelligence more than any other threat—because they created it.
Rather than think of ways to halt or reverse climate change, technologists seem more interested in transcending it, the author argues. Across Silicon Valley, he sees an obsession with transhumanism or posthumanism, as technologists dream up ways of uploading their consciousness to computers, for example. If they cannot escape their bodies, many seem content to escape the planet by living on spaceships or building artificial environments on Mars, never mind that it would be far cheaper to build those environments on Earth. Moreover, even if one of these gambits were possible, it would likely only be available to the very wealthiest individuals.
The author returns to the conversation about nuclear power as a potential game-changer in reducing emissions. He acknowledges the metaphysical terror nuclear power engenders in people but also dismisses those fears as unwarranted. He characterizes the impact of the Three Mile Island meltdown as negligible. He cites the official death count from the Chernobyl explosion at 47, while also admitting that the count may be closer to 4,000. He also cites studies showing no increased cancer incidence following the Fukushima disaster. Certainly, there are other costs to these disasters, and any amount of death associated with them is a tragedy, but the author puts those deaths in perspective by reminding readers that 10,000 die every day because of complications related to air pollution, including an estimated 1,400 more Americans a year as a result of relaxed clean air laws under President Trump.
Part 3, Chapters 14-16 Analysis
As Wallace-Wells transitions into the third part of the book, his projections surrounding a climate-ravaged world become much more philosophical in nature, including his ideas about what art will look like after global warming. For example, the author observes that, at present, climate change is “everywhere you look, and yet nowhere in focus” (143), given how many films depict the end of the world without directly addressing global warming. One of the few exceptions is 2004’s The Day After Tomorrow. Despite its success at the box office, the film inspired very few other filmmakers to follow in its footsteps. In a 2020 retrospective, BBC critic Nicholas Barber points to the film’s front-heavy structure to explain why climate change is such a difficult topic to put on film, writing, “Once you’ve shown civilisation being flattened, though, where do you go next?” (Barber, Nicholas. “Why Does Cinema Ignore Climate Change?” The BBC. 17 Apr. 2020).
In his chapter on storytelling, the author addresses the scourge of climate denial. He writes that climate denialism—much of which is the result of propaganda pushed by the fossil fuel industry—has failed to gain much of a foothold outside the United States. A number of surveys back up this observation, including one conducted by the YouGov-Cambridge Globalism Project which found that only Indonesia and Saudi Arabia rank above the United States when it comes to denial of manmade climate change (Harvey, Fiona & Milman, Oliver. “US is a hotbed of climate change denial, major global survey finds.” The Guardian. 8 May 2019. The good news is that across all countries surveyed, no more than 18 percent of respondents said that humans are not at all responsible for climate change.
Wallace-Wells also revisits the debate over whether climatologists and journalists should embrace alarmist rhetoric or what’s been named “scientific reticence.” As one who has been called alarmist himself, the author is sensitive to this question. He also, however, notes that a major shift away from reticence occurred following the publication of the IPCC’s 2018 report. That report found that while a post-Industrial temperature spike of 1.5 degrees was theoretically possible, achieving it would require immediate emission reductions and “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” (“Summary for Policymakers of IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C Approved by Governments.” Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 8 Oct. 2018).
In the chapter on capitalism, meanwhile, the author revisits many of his earlier themes surrounding capitalism’s dependence on fossil fuels for growth. At the same time, he consciously undercuts his argument by pointing out that “it simply isn’t the case that the socialist countries of the world are behaving more responsibly, with carbon, nor that they have in the past” (149). It thus stands to reason that any system of so-called “eco-socialism” that may arise in response to the dangers posed by climate change will diverge even further from capitalism than most existing socialist states. That includes China, which since 1992 has referred to itself as a socialist market state, a definition that reflects the existence of private enterprise and entrepreneurship alongside the more planned aspects of the country’s economy.
Based on the United States’ response to Hurricane Maria, however, the author does not see climate change bringing an end to the era of capitalism anytime soon. Indeed, he views Hurricane Maria as a case study in “what kind of strategy to expect from the world’s money elite in a time of rolling ecological crisis” (163). If capitalism is capable of addressing climate change, it would presumably be because of the technological advances made possible by Western prosperity. However, the author is highly skeptical that most the world’s technological luminaries are currently well-equipped, both scientifically and philosophically, to address climate change. The author notes the blind faith shared by many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs that there is no problem technology cannot solve, including climate change. In many ways, it’s not so different from the blind faith held by some capitalists that markets and economic growth will solve all problems.
That faith is partly why Wallace-Wells refers to technology as a church in his chapter header on the subject. Moreover, so many of the ideas technologists have for addressing climate change involve escaping the body or transcending the world. These notions are in many ways akin to religious ideas pertaining to the afterlife, the author suggests. There’s even a lord and savior at the center of this church of technology: Elon Musk. Wallace-Wells admits that the Tesla CEO is one of the only major Silicon Valley figures doing significant work to help reduce emissions. That said, the author points out that many of Musk’s colleagues in the tech world simply assume that he will find a way to deliver them from climate change. Of this phenomenon, the author writes, “Elon Musk—it’s not the name of a man but a species-scale survival strategy” (176).
The technology most commonly proposed in the fight against climate change is carbon capture. This, too, is reflective of a flawed technocratic ethos counseling blind faith in technology and industry. The author writes, “Threaded through the reverie for carbon capture is a fantasy of industrial absolution—that a technology could be almost dreamed into being that could purify the ecological legacy of modernity” (181). Indeed, while carbon capture technology is responsible for storing 30 million tons of CO2 a year, the Global CCS Institute notes that this amounts to only 1% of the carbon needed to meet 2040 Paris Accords targets. Scaling that up would require both time and policy incentives, according to climate scholars Jan Christoph Minx and Gregory Nemet (Minx, Jan Christoph & Nemet, Gregory. “The Inconvenient Truth About Carbon Capture”. The Washington Post. 31 May 2018). With so little time left, they add, any serious climate change plan also requires emission reductions, mandated at national and international levels. In this, one sees what’s perhaps the author’s most pressing theme: that climate change is a political problem and not a natural nor even a technological problem.
