The Uninhabitable Earth

by David Wallace-Wells;

  As it turns out, there was no mystery, either, about the bee deaths themselves, which could be explained quite fully by the bees’ working conditions: mostly that they were rubbing up against a new breed of insecticide, neonicotinoids, which, as the name suggests, effectively turned all the bees into cigarette fiends. Flying insects might be disappearing because of warming, in other words—that recent study suggested that, already, 75 percent of them may have died, drawing us closer to a world without pollinators, which the researchers called an “ecological Armageddon”—but colony collapse disorder has basically nothing to do with that. And yet still, as recently as 2018, magazines were devoting whole feature articles to the bee fable. Presumably, this is not because people enjoyed being wrong about bees, but because treating any apparent crisis as an allegory was somehow comforting—as though it sequestered the problem in a story whose meaning we controlled.

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  When Bill McKibben declared “The End of Nature,” in 1989, he was posing a hyperbolic kind of epistemological riddle: What do you call it, whatever it is, when forces of wilderness and weather, of animal kingdoms and plant life, have been so transformed by human activity they are no longer truly “natural”?

  The answer came a few decades later with the term “the Anthropocene,” which was coined in the spirit of environmental alarm and suggested a much messier and more unstable state than “end.” Environmentalists, outdoorspeople, nature lovers, and romantics of various stripes—there are many who would mourn the end of nature. But there are literally billions who will shortly be terrified by the forces unleashed by the Anthropocene. In much of the world, they already are, in the form of lethal close-to-annual heat waves in the Middle East and South Asia, and in the ever-present threat of flood, like those that hit Kerala in 2018 and killed hundreds. The floods hardly made a mark in the United States and Europe, where consumers of news have been trained over decades to see disasters like these as tragic, yes, but also as an inevitable feature of underdevelopment—and therefore both “natural” and distant.

  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. There, at least, we’ve long thought that modernity had paved over nature, completely, factory by factory and strip mall by strip mall. Proponents of solar geoengineering want to take on the sky next, not just to stabilize the planet’s temperature but possibly to create “designer climates,” localized to very particular needs—saving this reef ecosystem, preserving that breadbasket. Conceivably those climates could get considerably more micro, down to particular farms or soccer stadiums or beach resorts.

  These interventions, should they ever become feasible, are decades away, at least. But even rapid and quotidian-seeming projects will leave a profoundly different imprint on the shape of the world. In the nineteenth century, the built environment of the most advanced countries reflected the prerogatives of industry—think of railroad tracks laid across whole continents to move coal. In the twentieth century, those same environments were made to reflect the needs of capital—think of global urbanization agglomerating labor supply for a new service economy. In the twenty-first century, they will reflect the demands of the climate crisis: seawalls, carbon-capture plantations, state-sized solar arrays. The claims of eminent domain made on behalf of climate change will no longer play like government overreach, though they will still surely inspire NIMBY backlash—even in a time of climate crisis, progressives will find ways to look out for number one.

  We are already living within a deformed environment—indeed, quite deformed. In its swaggering twentieth century, the United States built two states of paradise: Florida, out of dismal swamp, and Southern California, out of desert. By 2100, neither will endure as Edenic postcards.

  That we reengineered the natural world so sufficiently to close the book on an entire geological era—that is the major lesson of the Anthropocene. The scale of that transformation remains astonishing, even to those of us who were raised amidst it and took all of its imperious values for granted. Twenty-two percent of the earth’s landmass was altered by humans just between 1992 and 2015. Ninety-six percent of the world’s mammals, by weight, are now humans and their livestock; just four percent are wild. We have simply crowded—or bullied, or brutalized—every other species into retreat, near-extinction, or worse. E. O. Wilson thinks the era might be better called the Eremocine—the age of loneliness.

  But global warming carries a message more concerning still: that we didn’t defeat the environment at all. There was no final conquest, no dominion established. In fact, the opposite: Whatever it means for the other animals on the planet, with global warming we have unwittingly claimed ownership of a system beyond our ability to control or tame in any day-to-day way. But more than that: with our continued activity, we have rendered that system only more out of control. Nature is both over, as in “past,” and all around us, indeed overwhelming us and punishing us—this is the major lesson of climate change, which it teaches us almost daily. And if global warming continues on anything like its present track, it will come to shape everything we do on the planet, from agriculture to human migration to business and mental health, transforming not just our relationship to nature but to politics and to history, and proving a knowledge system as total as “modernity.”

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  Scientists have known this for a while. But they have not often talked like it.

  For decades now, there have been few things with a worse reputation than “alarmism” among those studying climate change. For a concerned class, this was somewhat strange; you don’t typically hear from public health experts about the need for circumspection in describing the risks of carcinogens, for instance. James Hansen, who first testified before Congress about global warming in 1988, has named the phenomenon “scientific reticence,” and in 2007 chastised his colleagues for editing their own observations so conscientiously that they failed to communicate how dire the threat really was. That tendency has metastasized over time, ironically as the news from research grew bleaker, so that for a long time each major publication would be attended by a cloud of commentary debating its precise calibration of perspective and tone—with many of those articles seen to lack an even balance between bad news and optimism, and labeled “fatalistic.” Some were derided as “climate porn.”

  The terms are slippery, like any good insult, but served to circumscribe the scope of “reasonable” perspectives on climate. Which is why scientific reticence is another reason we don’t see the threat so clearly—the experts signaling strongly that it is irresponsible to communicate openly about the more worrisome possibilities for global warming, as though they didn’t trust the world with the information they themselves had, or at least didn’t trust the public to interpret it and respond properly. Whatever that means: it has now been thirty years since Hansen’s first testimony and the establishment of the IPCC, and climate concern has traversed small peaks and small valleys but never meaningfully jumped upward. In terms of public response, the results are even more dismal. Within the United States, climate denial took over one of the two major parties and essentially vetoed major legislative action. Abroad, we have had a series of high-profile conferences, treaties, and accords, but they increasingly look like so many acts of climate kabuki; emissions are still growing, unabated.

  But scientific reticence is also perfectly reasonable, in its way, a river of rhetorical caution with many tributaries. The first is temperamental: climate scientists are scientists first, self-selected and then trained for perspicacity. The second is experiential: many of them have now done battle, in the United States particularly and sometimes for decades, with the forces of climate denial, who capitalize on any overstatement or erroneous prediction as proof of illegitimacy or bad faith; this makes climate scientists more cautious, and understandably so. Unfortunately, worrying so much about erring o
n the side of excessive alarm has meant they have erred, so routinely it became a kind of professional principle, on the side of excessive caution—which is, effectively, the side of complacency.

  There was also a kind of personal wisdom in scientific reticence, as politically backward as it may seem to keep the scariest implications of new research from the public. As part-time advocates, scientists have also watched their colleagues and collaborators pass through many dark nights of the soul, and typically despaired themselves as well, about the coming storm of climate change and just how little the world is doing to combat it. As a result, they were especially worried about burnout, and the possibility that honest storytelling about climate could tip so many people into despondency that the effort to avert a crisis would burn itself out. And in generalizing from that experience, they pointed to a selection of social science suggesting that “hope” can be more motivating than “fear”—without acknowledging that alarm is not the same as fatalism, that hope does not demand silence about scarier challenges, and that fear can motivate, too. That was the finding of a 2017 Nature paper surveying the full breadth of the academic literature: that despite a strong consensus among climate scientists about “hope” and “fear” and what qualifies as responsible storytelling, there is no single way to best tell the story of climate change, no single rhetorical approach likely to work on a given audience, and none too dangerous to try. Any story that sticks is a good one.

  In 2018, scientists began embracing fear, when the IPCC released a dramatic, alarmist report illustrating just how much worse climate change would be at 2 degrees of warming compared with 1.5: tens of millions more exposed to deadly heat waves, water shortages, and flooding. The research summarized in the report was not new, and temperatures beyond 2 degrees were not even covered. But though it did not address any of the scarier possibilities for warming, the report did offer a new form of permission, of sanction, to the world’s scientists. The thing that was new was the message: It is okay, finally, to freak out. It is almost hard to imagine, in its aftermath, anything but a new torrent of panic, issuing forth from scientists finally emboldened to scream as they wish to.

  But that prior caution was understandable. Scientists spent decades presenting the unambiguous data, demonstrating to anyone who would listen just what kind of crisis will come for the planet if nothing is done, and then watched, year after year, as nothing was done. It should not be altogether surprising that they returned again and again to the communications greenroom, scratching their heads about rhetorical strategy and “messaging.” If only they were in charge, they would know exactly what to do, and there would be no need to panic. So why wouldn’t anyone listen to them? It had to be the rhetoric. What other explanation could there be?

  Crisis Capitalism

  The scroll of cognitive biases identified by behavioral psychologists and fellow travelers over the last half century is, like a social media feed, apparently infinite, and every single one distorts and distends our perception of a changing climate—a threat as imminent and immediate as the approach of a predator, but viewed always through a bell jar.

  There is, to start with, anchoring, which explains how we build mental models around as few as one or two initial examples, no matter how unrepresentative—in the case of global warming, the world we know today, which is reassuringly temperate. There is also the ambiguity effect, which suggests that most people are so uncomfortable contemplating uncertainty, they will accept lesser outcomes in a bargain to avoid dealing with it. In theory, with climate, uncertainty should be an argument for action—much of the ambiguity arises from the range of possible human inputs, a quite concrete prompt we choose to process instead as a riddle, which discourages us.

  There is anthropocentric thinking, by which we build our view of the universe outward from our own experience, a reflexive tendency that some especially ruthless environmentalists have derided as “human supremacy” and that surely shapes our ability to apprehend genuinely existential threats to the species—a shortcoming many climate scientists have mocked: “The planet will survive,” they say; “it’s the humans that may not.”

  There is automation bias, which describes a preference for algorithmic and other kinds of nonhuman decision making, and also applies to our generations-long deference to market forces as something like an infallible, or at least an unbeatable, overseer. In the case of climate, this has meant trusting that economic systems unencumbered by regulation or restriction would solve the problem of global warming as naturally, as surely as they had solved the problems of pollution, inequality, justice, and conflict.

  These biases are drawn only from the A volume of the literature—and are just a sampling of that volume. Among the most destructive effects that appear later in the behavioral economics library are these: the bystander effect, or our tendency to wait for others to act rather than acting ourselves; confirmation bias, by which we seek evidence for what we already understand to be true, such as the promise that human life will endure, rather than endure the cognitive pain of reconceptualizing our world; the default effect, or tendency to choose the present option over alternatives, which is related to the status quo bias, or preference for things as they are, however bad that is, and to the endowment effect, or instinct to demand more to give up something we have than we actually value it (or had paid to acquire or establish it). We have an illusion of control, the behavioral economists tell us, and also suffer from overconfidence and an optimism bias. We also have a pessimism bias, not that it compensates—instead it pushes us to see challenges as predetermined defeats and to hear alarm, perhaps especially on climate, as cries of fatalism. The opposite of a cognitive bias, in other words, is not clear thinking but another cognitive bias. We can’t see anything but through cataracts of self-deception.

  Many of these insights may feel as intuitive and familiar as folk wisdom, which in some cases they are, dressed up in academic language. Behavioral economics is unusual as a contrarian intellectual movement in that it overturns beliefs—namely, in the perfectly rational human actor—that perhaps only its proponents ever truly believed, and maybe even only as economics undergraduates. But altogether the field is not merely a revision to existing economics. It is a thoroughgoing contradiction of the central proposition of its parent discipline, indeed to the whole rationalist self-image of the modern West as it emerged out of the universities of—in what can only be coincidence—the early industrial period. That is, a map of human reason as an awkward kluge, blindly self-regarding and self-defeating, curiously effective at some things and maddeningly incompetent when it comes to others; compromised and misguided and tattered. How did we ever put a man on the moon?

  That climate change demands expertise, and faith in it, at precisely the moment when public confidence in expertise is collapsing, is another of its historical ironies. That climate change touches each of these biases is not a curiosity, or a coincidence, or an anomaly. It is a mark of just how big it is, and how much about human life it touches—which is to say, nearly everything.

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  You might begin the B volume with bigness—that the scope of the climate threat is so large, and its menace so intense, we reflexively avert our eyes, as we would with the sun.

  Bigness as an excuse for complacency will be familiar to anyone who has listened in on an undergraduate debate about capitalism. The size of the problem, its all-encompassing quality, the apparent lack of readymade alternatives, and the enticement of fugitive benefits—these were the building blocks of a decades-long subliminal argument, directed at the increasingly disgruntled professional middle classes of the wealthy West, who on another planet might have formed the intellectual vanguard of a movement against endless financialization and unencumbered markets. “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism,” the literary critic Fredric Jameson has written, attributing the phrase, coyly, to “someone” wh
o “once said it.” That someone might say, today, “Why choose?”

  When it comes to authority and responsibility, scale and perspective often befuddle us—we may be unable to recognize which matryoshka doll nests inside the other, or on whose display shelf the whole set sits. Big things make us feel small, and rather powerless, even if we are nominally “in charge.” In the modern age, at least, there is also the related tendency to view large human systems, like the internet or industrial economy, as more unassailable, even more un-intervenable, than natural systems, like climate, that literally enclose us. This is how renovating capitalism so that it doesn’t reward fossil fuel extraction can seem unlikelier than suspending sulfur in the air to dye the sky red and cool the planet off by a degree or two. To some, even ending trillions in fossil fuel subsidies sounds harder to pull off than deploying technologies to suck carbon out of the air everywhere on Earth.

  This is a kind of Frankenstein problem, and relates to widespread fears of artificial intelligence: we are more intimidated by the monsters we create than those we inherit. Sitting at computers in air-conditioned rooms reading dispatches in the science section of the newspaper, we feel illogically in control of natural ecosystems; we expect we should be able to protect the dwindling population of an endangered species, and preserve their habitat, should we choose to, and that we should be able to manage an abundant water supply, rather than see it wasted on the way to human mouths—again, should we choose to. We feel less that way about the internet, which seems beyond our control though we designed and built it, and quite recently; still less about global warming, which we extend each day, each minute, by our actions. And the perceptual size of market capitalism has been a kind of obstacle to its critics for at least a generation, when it came to seem even to those attuned to its failings to be perhaps too big to fail.