Los Angeles Review of Books - Franz Baumann*
BILL MCKIBBEN, and this is meant as a compliment, is the Don Quixote
of the environmental movement, or perhaps its Vivaldi. For over 30
years, he has been tilting at the windmills of ignorance, indifference,
and interests — and composed the same concerto a few hundred times.
Since his groundbreaking
The End of Nature in 1989, he
has written 16 more books and countless articles on humanity’s
predatory and self-destructive relationship with nature. All are
readable, measured, sensible, informative, factual, and incisive, yet
short on polemics, hyperbole, and dubious assertions.
Puzzled by the recklessness with which the planetary branch we are sitting on is being sawed off, McKibben in
Falter
once more explains nature’s workings, asks profound questions, and
tells wonderful stories. Unable to do otherwise, McKibben goes after the
same windmills yet again — and crafts another lyrical masterpiece.
Falter reads like a book-length article in
The New Yorker,
which is not surprising since McKibben began his professional life
there as a staff writer in the 1980s. This book is the latest
installment of a trilogy of environmental disaster chronicles published
within the space of a few weeks in the spring of this year. First came
David Wallace-Wells’s
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, then Nathaniel Rich’s
Losing Earth: A Recent History, and now
Falter. Binge-readers and political activists will benefit from all three.
Falter, organized in four parts and an epilogue, is broadest
in scope. It is a humane and wise book, even a beautiful one, if that’s
not oxymoronic, given its subject. Amply sourced and referenced for
deeper study or for skeptics, it tracks the state of the natural world
in exhaustive detail, and identifies the forces imperiling it: the
blistering heatwaves in North America and Europe; the droughts in
Africa, Asia, and Australia; the typhoons in South-East Asia; the dying
old-growth forests attacked by pests and diseases unleashed by climate
change; the rising sea levels and unexpectedly speedy warming of the
Earth’s oceans as well as their expectedly speedy acidification as well
as their overfishing and choking with plastics, “the dead zones at the
mouths of all major rivers where fertilizers pour into the sea”; the
plummeting corn, rice, sorghum, and wheat crop yields resulting from
higher temperatures as well as uncertain rainfall; the biological
annihilation of species.
McKibben minces no words on the first page: “Put simply, between
ecological destruction and technological hubris, the human experiment is
now in question.” To avert catastrophe, no less is required than, in
the clinical language of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC), “systems transitions” that are technically possible, yet
“unprecedented in terms of scale.” The implication is that we are in
existential peril and nothing short of a World War II–like mobilization
in terms of commitment, focus, resources, and global reach will do. Too
much time has been lost in the past decades — squandered actually.
Those who think we have never had it so good, for instance the
obnoxiously cheerful author Steven Pinker, are off base because the
implied assumption that past performance is indicative of future
results. Climate change is so vexing precisely because it is the flip
side of the phenomenal accomplishments of the past century or so. Things
went right for too long, especially since World War II. Life
expectancy, health, calorie intake, disposable income, car ownership,
air travel, living space, and other treats rose to historically
unprecedented levels. The bill for all this good living is now coming
due, quite like the heart attack that strikes down the middle-aged,
obese, sedentary, hard-drinking, chain-smoking guy, shattering his
self-image of invulnerability. Except that, in the case of global
heating, the cost for this generation’s profligacy is passed on to the
next, and all generations thereafter. The combination of abundant cheap
energy — fossil fuels all, first coal, then oil, and now gas — and
scientific as well as technological progress has resulted in
historically unparalleled economic growth, wealth, and opportunities.
Humans, on account of numbers and consumption, have become a
geological force. “[N]o Roman emperor could change the pH of the oceans,
but we’ve managed that trick in short order.” Humans have changed the
energy balance of the planet, and thus fundamentally the way the world
operates. To wit, the hottest five years on record were the last five
years, and 20 of the hottest years happened in the last 22 years.
McKibben has a knack for scare facts, all backed up by documentary
evidence. Who knew that humanity’s energy and resource usage during the
past 35 years was more than during all of previous history? Or that more
than “half of all the greenhouse gases emitted since the start of the
Industrial Revolution have spewed from exhaust pipes and smokestacks
since 1988”? Or that the carbon dioxide we’re emitting into the
atmosphere is the equivalent of “400,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs every
day, or four each second”? Or that, “if the billions of years of life on
Earth were scaled to a twenty-four-hour day, our settled civilization
began about a fifth of a second ago”? Or that a barrel of oil,
“currently about sixty dollars, provides energy equivalent to about
twenty-three thousand hours of human labor”? It is the scale and speed
of humanity’s impact that has nature reeling.
The science is clear, and has been for a long time — for two
centuries actually. As any encyclopedia or biology, chemistry, or
physics textbook will confirm, the greenhouse effect was mentioned as
early as 1824 by the French mathematician and physicist Joseph Fourier.
The argument and the evidence were further strengthened by another
French scientist, Claude Pouillet, and the Irish physicist John Tyndall.
In 1896, the Swedish physicist and eventual Nobel Prize winner (in
chemistry) Svante Arrhenius more fully quantified the greenhouse effect.
McKibben notes that in November 2017, 15,000 scientists from 184
countries issued a forthright “Warning to Humanity,” which, within
months, became the sixth-most-discussed academic paper in history. It
has now been signed by well over 20,000 scientists. A similar
initiative, Scientists for Future (S4F) of German, Austrian, and Swiss
scientists, collected nearly 27,000 signatures in March 2019. Scientific
uncertainty is certainly not the issue.
McKibben devotes a chapter to retracing how the fossil fuel companies
— the main villains of the book — knew as early as 1959 about the
warming effects of carbon dioxide. The initial concerns soon gave way to
salivating at the prospect of a warming arctic and thus lower drilling
costs there. Ignoring the findings of their in-house scientists, the
marketing folks took over, emphasizing the — nonexistent — uncertainty
in the scientific community about climate change. Before that happened,
Walter Cronkite reported as fact the looming dangers of climate change
on the evening news on Thursday, April 3, 1980.
Nathaniel Rich reminds us
that in 1988 32 climate bills were introduced in Congress, many
enjoying not only Democratic but also Republican support. In 2007, the
Republican Senator John McCain said:
The science tells us that urgent and significant action is needed. […] If the scientists are right and temperatures continue to rise, we could face environmental, economic, and national security consequences far beyond our ability to imagine. If they are wrong and the Earth finds a way to compensate for the unprecedented levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, what will we have accomplished? Cleaner air, greater energy efficiency, a more diverse and secure energy mix, and U.S. leadership in the technologies of the future. There is no doubt; failure to act is the far greater risk.
What flipped the Republican Party? Was it better data, unforeseen
facts, or new revelations? For politicians — given two-, four-, or
six-year election cycles, immediate grievances are paramount, such as
unemployment, depressed wages, rising inequality, immigration, and
whatnot — it is a losing strategy to campaign on a platform of
short-term sacrifices for long-term gains, regardless of the smallness
of the former and the vastness of the latter. A majority of “voters must
support the adoption of substantial restrictions on their excessively
consumerist lifestyle, and there is no indication they would be willing
to make such sacrifices,” McKibben quotes two analysts as declaring.
There is indeed a co-dependency between businesses and consumers, quite
like that between drug pushers and drug users. Addicts care only about
the daily fix. They cannot envision obvious solutions, let alone adopt
them, even if staying the course dooms all. But only tomorrow.
The Earth’s carrying capacity is a secondary concern, as are the
costs of delayed mitigation measures. McKibben quotes environmental
writer Alex Steffen, who coined the term
predatory delay, “the
blocking or slowing of needed change, in order to make money off
unsustainable, unjust systems in the meantime.” Those with no power
today and having contributed nothing to global heating — future
generations, the poor in the Global South, and other species — will
inherit a scorched Earth and an economic calamity.
Meanwhile, there are those who deny the climate problem altogether,
or those who find prohibitive the costs of decisive remedial action, or
those who, like McKibben, hope that technological progress will obviate
the need for a change in the Western lifestyle. I don’t believe that he
actually believes this. But he thinks, correctly, that solar energy is
the closest there is to a solution. Not only can it provide unlimited
clean power, but it also would reduce the power of a nefarious fossil
fuel industry, reduce pollution, and, as a “technology of repair, social
as well as environmental,” enhances the autonomy and dignity of people
everywhere. He cites studies “that every major nation on earth could be
supplying 80 percent of its power from renewables by 2030, at prices far
cheaper than paying the damage for climate change.” A just-published
German-Finnish analysis claims that
[a] global transition to 100% renewable energy across all sectors — power, heat, transport and desalination before 2050 is feasible. Existing renewable energy potential and technologies, including storage, is capable of generating a secure energy supply at every hour throughout the year.
The problem, though, goes far beyond power generation and requires a
radical restructuring of production, consumption, and mobility in
Western countries. The imperative is to pull off, in the next few years,
a mobilization on the scale of World War II. McKibben evokes how,
“[a]fter the attack on Pearl Harbor, the world’s largest industrial
plant under a single roof went up in six months, near Ypsilanti,
Michigan; […] within months, it was churning out a B-24 liberator bomber
every hour.”
Hope being more motivating than despair, the book is a call to arms:
“Let’s be, for a while, true optimists, and operate on the assumption
that human beings are not grossly defective. Let’s assume we’re capable
of acting together to do remarkable things.” It is a lovely sentiment,
but also a reminder that it is not only the climate change deniers who
are anti-science. So, too, are the technology enthusiasts and
renewable-energy optimists who entertain the fantasy that it will be
possible for 10 billion people — 40 percent more than today by the end
of the century — to live in the style of the American or European middle
class.
Population growth is one of the blind spots in
Falter;
nuclear energy, carbon pricing, carbon capture, and sequestration are
others. Sensing, perhaps, that the political traffic cannot bear much,
the book’s US-centrism avoids another uncomfortable insight, namely that
climate change is a global public policy problem that cannot be solved
in one country only, but requires international cooperation, compromise,
and cohesion. But these are not notions in sync with “America First.”
Possible, too, that McKibben prefers not to complicate matters, get
side-tracked, or cause paralyzing gloom, even though he acknowledges
that a “writer doesn’t owe a reader hope — the only obligation is
honesty.”
Nevertheless,
Falter provides ample evidence that we are on
the cusp of an avoidable disaster. Weighing future cataclysm against
short-term comfort should be a no-brainer because, if the climate breaks
down, all bets are off. Don Quixote’s exertions may turn out to be
worthwhile after all.
*Franz Baumann is a senior fellow and a member of the board of trustees at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin as well as a visiting professor at New York University. Prior to entering academia, he worked for the United Nations for over 30 years in many places and capacities. As an assistant secretary-general, his last assignment was special advisor on the Environment and Peace Operations.
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