devoting whole feature articles: Jamie Lowe’s “The Super Bowl of Beekeeping” (The New York Times Magazine, August 15, 2018) is perhaps the most recent example. The original “fable of the bees” had a very different meaning: Bernard Mandeville’s 1705 poem of that name was an extended argument that public displays of virtue were invariably hypocritical and that the world was made a better place, in fact, the more ruthlessly individuals pursued their own “vices.” That the poem eventually became a touchstone of free-market thinking, and a major influence on Adam Smith, is all the more remarkable given that it first gained popularity in the aftermath of the South Sea Bubble.
“designer climates”: “If geoengineering worked, whose hand would be on the thermostat?” asked Alan Robock in Science, in 2008. “How could the world agree on an optimal climate?” Ten years later, his student Ben Kravitz wrote, on the Harvard geoengineering program’s blog—yes, Harvard has a geoengineering program, and yes, they have a blog—“it may be possible to meet multiple, simultaneous objectives in the climate system.”
Twenty-two percent: Jakub Nowosad et al., “Global Assessment and Mapping of Changes in Mesoscale Landscapes: 1992–2015,” International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation (October 2018).
Ninety-six percent: Yinon M. Bar-On et al., “The Biomass Distribution on Earth,” Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences (June 2018).
the age of loneliness: Brooke Jarvis, “The Insect Apocalypse Is Here,” The New York Times Magazine, November 27, 2018.
“scientific reticence”: J. E. Hansen, “Scientific Reticence and Sea Level Rise,” Environmental Research Letters 2 (May 2007).
a 2017 Nature paper: Daniel A. Chapman et al., “Reassessing Emotion in Climate Change Communication,” Nature Climate Change (November 2017): pp. 850–52.
IPCC released a dramatic, alarmist report: IPCC, Global Warming of 1.5°C: An IPCC Special Report on the Impacts of Global Warming of 1.5°C Above Pre-Industrial Levels and Related Global Greenhouse Gas Emission Pathways, in the Context of Strengthening the Global Response to the Threat of Climate Change, Sustainable Development, and Efforts to Eradicate Poverty (Incheon, Korea, 2018), www.ipcc.ch/report/sr15.
Crisis Capitalism
The scroll of cognitive biases: The single best primer on what behavioral economics has to teach us about these biases is by the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013).
the scope of the climate threat: This is why the theorist Timothy Morton refers to climate change as a “hyperobject.” But while the term is useful in suggesting just how large climate change is, and just how poorly we’ve been able to perceive that scale to date, the deeper you get into Morton’s analysis, the less illuminating it becomes. In Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), he names five characteristics: hyperobjects are 1) viscous, by which he means that they stick to any object or idea they come into contact with, like oil; 2) molten, by which he means so big, they seem to defy our sense of space-time; 3) nonlocal, by which he means distributed in ways that frustrate any attempt to perceive them entirely from a single perspective; 4) phased, by which he means that they have dimensional qualities we cannot understand, as we wouldn’t understand a five-dimensional object passing through our three-dimensional space; and 5) interobjective, by which he means that they connect divergent items and systems. Viscous, nonlocal, and interobjective—okay. But these do not make global warming a different kind of phenomenon than we have seen before, or than those—like capitalism, say—that we actually understand quite well. As for the other qualities…If climate change defies our sense of space-time, it is only because we have an impoverished, narrow idea of space-time, since in fact warming is taking place very much within our planet’s atmosphere, not inexplicably but in ways scientists have predicted quite precisely over decades. That we have failed to deal with it, over those same decades, does not mean it is literally beyond our comprehension. Saying so sounds almost like a cop-out, in fact.
“It is easier to imagine”: Jameson wrote this in “Future City,” published in New Left Review in May–June 2003.
pet theory of the socialist Left: Degrees of emphasis vary, of course, but you can find forms of the “fossil capitalism” argument in Vaclav Smil’s Energy and Civilization, along with Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital and Jason Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life.
Can capitalism survive climate change?: Moore raises this question in Capitalism in the Web of Life, and it is discussed at some length in Benjamin Kunkel, “The Capitalocene,” London Review of Books, March 2, 2017.
Klein memorably sketched out: Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2007).
the island of Puerto Rico: Naomi Klein, The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes On the Disaster Capitalists (Chicago: Haymarket, 2018).
Maria could cut Puerto Rican incomes: This comes from Hsiang and Houser’s “Don’t Let Puerto Rico Fall into an Economic Abyss,” The New York Times, September 29, 2017.
carbon emissions have exploded: According to the International Energy Agency, total global emissions were 32.5 gigatons in 2017, up from 22.4 in 1990. Of course, it is worth remembering that the world’s socialist nations, and even its left-of-center ones, do not have a notably better record when it comes to emissions than its excessively capitalistic ones. This suggests that it may be a bit misleading to describe emissions as having been driven by capitalism per se, or even interests made especially prominent and powerful within capitalistic systems. Instead, it may reflect the universal power of material comforts, benefits that we tend to assess using only a very short-term calculus.
“Neoliberalism: Oversold?”: This paper, by Jonathan D. Ostry, Prakash Loungani, and Davide Furceri, was published in June 2016.
something like a fantasy field: Romer published “The Trouble with Macroeconomics” on his own website on September 14, 2016.
Nordhaus favors a carbon tax: The Nobel laureate has published widely on the subject of the carbon tax, and he gives the most plainspoken account of the tax level he considers optimal in “Integrated Assessment Models of Climate Change,” National Bureau of Economic Research, 2017, https://www.nber.org/reporter/2017number3/nordhaus.html.
$306 billion: Adam B. Smith, “2017 U.S. Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters: A Historic Year in Context,” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, January 8, 2018.
$551 trillion in damages: “Risks Associated with Global Warming of 1.5 Degrees Celsius or 2 Degrees Celsius,” Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, May 2018.
23 percent of potential global income: Marshall Burke et al., “Global Non-Linear Effect of Temperature on Economic Production,” Nature 527 (October 2015): pp. 235–39, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature15725.
Of 400 IPCC emissions models: “Negative Emissions Technologies: What Role in Meeting Paris Agreement Targets?” European Academies’ Science Advisory Council, February 2018.
a third of the world’s farmable land: Jason Hickel, “The Paris Agreement Is Deeply Flawed—It’s Time for a New Deal,” Al Jazeera, March 16, 2018.
a paper by David Keith: David Keith et al., “A Process for Capturing CO2 from the Atmosphere,” Joule, August 15, 2018.
total global fossil fuel subsidies: David Coady et al., “How Large Are Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies?” World Development 91 (March 2017): pp. 11–27.
$2.3 trillion tax cut: David Rogers, “At $2.3 Trillion Cost, Trump Tax Cuts Leave Big Gap,” Politico, February 28, 2018. Other estimates run higher.
The Church of Technology
outlined by Eric Schmidt: He laid out this perspective most clearly at a conference in New York in January 2016.
“Consider: Who pursues”: Ted Chiang, “Silicon Valley Is Turning into Its Own Worst Fear,” Buzz
Feed, December 18, 2017.
an influential 2002 paper: Nick Bostrom, “Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards,” Journal of Evolution and Technology 9 (March 2002).
close to universal: In “Survival of the Richest” (Medium, July 5, 2018), the futurist Douglas Rushkoff described his experience as a keynote speaker at a private conference attended by the superrich—these patrons not themselves technologists but hedge-funders he came to feel were taking all of their cues from them. Quickly, he writes, the conversation attained a clear focus:
Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”
“The event.” In Rushkoff’s telling, this is a kind of catchall phrase for anything that might threaten their status or security as the world’s most privileged—“their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down.
“This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour,” Rushkoff continues.
They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers — if that technology could be developed in time.
In To Be a Machine, Mark O’Connell traced the same impulse through Silicon Valley’s whole Brahman caste. The book opens with an epigraph from Don DeLillo: “This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other.” The quote comes from White Noise, in particular from its narrator’s colleague and sidekick Murray Jay Siskind, who is both the novel’s comic foil and its “explainer.” It was never clear to me just how seriously we are meant to take Murray’s pronouncements, but this one does quite sharply describe the contemporary tech two-step: freaking out about “existential risks” while simultaneously cultivating private exits from mortality.
For Rushkoff, these are all facets of the same impulse, broadly shared by the class of visionaries and power brokers and venture capitalists whose dreams for the future are received as blueprints, especially by the armies of engineers they command like impetuous fiefdoms—investing in new forms of space travel, life extension, and technology-aided life after death. “They were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion,” he writes. “For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.”
“An Account of My Hut”: Christina Nichol, “An Account of My Hut,” n+1, Spring 2018. Nichol explains the title this way:
I once read a story called “An Account of My Hut,” by Kamo no Chōmei, a 12th-century Japanese hermit. Chōmei describes how after witnessing a fire, an earthquake, and a typhoon in Kyoto, he leaves society and goes to live in a hut.
Seven hundred years later, Basil Bunting, the Northumberland poet, wrote his own rendition of Chōmei’s story:
Oh! There’s nothing to complain about.
Buddha says: “None of the world is good.”
I am fond of my hut…
But even if I wanted to renounce the world, I wouldn’t be able to afford a hut in California.
as old as John Maynard Keynes: Keynes extended the prediction—much, much talked about ever since—in an essay notably published in 1930, just after the stock market crash of 1929: John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” Nation and Athenaeum, October 11 and 18, 1930.
“You can see the computer age”: This line first appeared in Robert M. Solow, “We’d Better Watch Out,” review of Manufacturing Matters by Stephen S. Cohen and John Zysman, The New York Times Book Review, July 12, 1987.
a million transatlantic flights: Alex Hern, “Bitcoin’s Energy Usage Is Huge—We Can’t Afford to Ignore It,” The Guardian, January 17, 2018.
“If we don’t act quickly”: Bill McKibben, “Winning Is the Same as Losing,” Rolling Stone, December 1, 2017. “Another way of saying this: By 2075, the world will be powered by solar panels and windmills—free energy is a hard business proposition to beat,” McKibben wrote. “But on current trajectories, they’ll light up a busted planet. The decisions we make in 2075 won’t matter; indeed, the decisions we make in 2025 will matter much less than the ones we make in the next few years. The leverage is now.”
“The future is already here”: The quip first appeared in The Economist in 2003.
less than 10 percent of the world: IDC, “Smartphone OS Market Share,” www.idc.com/promo/smartphone-market-share/os.
somewhere between a quarter and a third: David Murphy, “2.4BN Smartphone Users in 2017, Says eMarketer,” Mobile Marketing, April 28, 2017, https://mobilemarketingmagazine.com/24bn-smartphone-users-in-2017-says-emarketer.
global decarbonization in 2000: These figures come from Robbie Andrew, a senior researcher at the Center for International Climate Research, and his presentation “Global Collective Effort,” which he published on his website in May 2018 (http://folk.uio.no/roberan/t/2C.shtml). He was drawing on figures put forward by Michael R. Raupach et al. in “Sharing a Quota on Cumulative Carbon Emissions,” Nature Climate Change (September 2014).
only one year: “UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres Calls for Climate Leadership, Outlines Expectations for Next Three Years,” UN Climate Change News, September 10, 2018: “If we do not change course by 2020, we risk missing the point where we can avoid runaway climate change, with disastrous consequences for people and all the natural systems that sustain us.”
poured more concrete in three years: Jocelyn Timperley, “Q&A: Why Cement Emissions Matter for Climate Change,” Carbon Brief, September 13, 2018, www.carbonbrief.org/qa-why-cement-emissions-matter-for-climate-change.
the world would need to add: Ken Caldeira, “Climate Sensitivity Uncertainty and the Need for Energy Without CO2 Emission,” Science 299 (March 2003): pp. 2052–54.
in four hundred years: James Temple, “At This Rate, It’s Going to Take Nearly 400 Years to Transform the Energy System,” MIT Technology Review, March 14, 2018, www.technologyreview.com/s/610457/at-this-rate-its-going-to-take-nearly-400-years-to-transform-the-energy-system.
official death count is 47: U.N. Information Service, “New Report on Health Effects Due to Radiation from the Chernobyl Accident,” February 28, 2011, www.unis.unvienna.org/unis/en/pressrels/2011/unisinf398.html.
as high as 4,000: World Health Organization, “Chernobyl: The True Scale of the Accident,” September 5, 2005, www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38.
“no discernible increased incidence”: United Nations, “Report of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation” (May 2013): p. 11, www.unscear.org/docs/GAreports/A-68-46_e_V1385727.pdf.
an additional 1,400 Americans: Lisa Friedman, “Cost of New E.P.A. Coal Rules: Up to 1,400 More Deaths a Year,” The New York Times, August 21, 2018.
nine million each year: Pamela Das and Richard Horton, “Pollution, Health, and the Planet: Time for Decisive Action,” The Lancet 391, no. 10119 (October 2017): pp. 407–8, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(17)3
2588-6.
growing its carbon emissions: James Conca, “Why Aren’t Renewables Decreasing Germany’s Carbon Emissions?” Forbes, October 10, 2017.
“How many will play augmented reality games”: Andreas Malm, The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World (London: Verso, 2018).
The poet and musician Kate Tempest: These are lyrics to her song “Tunnel Vision.”
Politics of Consumption
a note, handwritten: Annie Correal, “What Drove a Man to Set Himself on Fire in Brooklyn?” The New York Times, May 28, 2018.
a longer letter, typed: For an in-depth account of this letter, see Theodore Parisienne et al., “Famed Gay Rights Lawyer Sets Himself on Fire at Prospect Park in Protest Suicide Against Fossil Fuels,” New York Daily News, April 14, 2018.
moral arms race: Citizens who now clean their consciences with philanthropic donations directed toward medical research, college scholarships, or museums and literary magazines may begin increasingly to do so by buying carbon offsets or investing in carbon-capture funds (indeed, some progressive nations may invest the proceeds of carbon taxes directly into CCS and BECCS). Progressive scientists will apply gene therapy to climate change, as they have already begun to do with the woolly mammoth—which they hope, once brought back to life, might restore the grasslands of the Eurasian steppe and prevent methane release from permafrost—and will probably do soon with the mosquito, hoping to eradicate mosquito-borne disease. Perhaps a rogue billionaire will try to single-handedly cool the earth with geoengineering, flying a few private planes around the equator to disperse sulfur and citing the model of Bill Gates and his mosquito nets.
“apparatus of justification”: Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
The Uninhabitable Earth Page 32