Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

by Bill McKibben

  But these warnings also somehow seem to give us confidence, because, after all, things continued. Rome fell, and something else rose. The Fertile Crescent turned to desert, but we found other places to grow our food. The cautionary tales about transcending our limits (the apple in Eden, the Tower of Babel, Icarus) seem silly to us because we’re still here, and we keep transcending one limit after another.

  Sometimes we scare ourselves for a season, but then we shake it off. As the postwar explosion in consumption spread across much of the planet, for instance, modern environmentalism also took shape, questioning whether this trajectory was sustainable. That movement reached its first height in 1972, with the publication of a slim book called The Limits to Growth. Without specifying precisely how and when, the authors of that book, and the computer models they built, predicted that our pell-mell growth would, “sometime within the next hundred years,” collide with many natural limits, and that without dramatic change, “the most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.” Alternately, they said, the nations of the world could “create a condition of ecological and economic stability that is sustainable far into the future,” a task that would be easier the sooner we began.15 Needless to say, we’ve not done that. Though we’ve taken the environmental idea semi-seriously, passing the laws that cleaned air and water, we’ve never taken it anywhere near as seriously as we’ve taken further growth. On his way to the theoretically groundbreaking Rio environmental summit in 1992, the first President Bush famously declared, “The American way of life is not up for negotiation,”16 and as it turns out, he was correct—and speaking for much of the world. And so far, we’ve gotten away with it: even as we keep accelerating, the game spins on.

  * * *

  So, why should you take seriously my fear that the game, in fact, may be starting to play itself out? The source of my disquiet can be summed up in a single word, a word that will be repeated regularly in this book: leverage. We’re simply so big, and moving so fast, that every decision carries enormous risk.

  Rome’s collapse was, of course, a large-ish deal. But given that there were vast swaths of the world that didn’t even know there was a Roman Empire, it wasn’t a big deal everywhere. Rome fell, and the Mayans didn’t tremble, nor the Chinese, nor the Inuit. But an interconnected world is different. It offers a certain kind of stability—everyone in every country can all hear the scientists warning of impending climate change, say—but it removes the defense of distance. And the sheer size of our consumption means we have enormous leverage of a different sort—no Roman emperor could change the pH of the oceans, but we’ve managed that trick in short order. And, finally, the new scale of our technological reach amplifies our power in extraordinary ways: much of this book will be devoted to examining the godlike powers that come with our rapid increases in computing speed, everything from human genetic engineering to artificial intelligence.

  We are putting the human game at risk, that is, from things going powerfully wrong and powerfully right. As we shall see, humans have now emerged as a destructive geologic force—the rapid degradation of the planet’s physical systems that was still theoretical when I wrote The End of Nature is now under way. Indeed, it’s much farther advanced than most people realize. In 2015, at the Paris climate talks, the world’s governments set a goal of holding temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius and, at the very least, below 2 degrees; by the fall of 2018 the IPCC reported that we might go past that 1.5 degree mark by 2030. That is to say, we will have drawn a line in the sand and then watched a rising tide erase it, all in a decade and a half.

  And humans have simultaneously emerged as a massive creative force, in ways that threaten the human game not through destruction but through substitution. Robots are not just another technology, and artificial intelligence not just one more improvement like asphalt shingles. They are instead a replacement technology, and the thing’s that’s going obsolete may well be us. If we’re not humans, then the human game makes no sense.

  Over our short career as a species, human history has risen and fallen, gotten stuck and raced ahead, stagnated and flourished. Only now, though, have we achieved enough leverage that we can bring it to an end, both by carelessness and by design. As a team of scientists pointed out recently in Nature, the physical changes we’re currently making by warming the climate will “extend longer than the entire history of human civilization thus far.”17 And as the Israeli historian and futurist Yuval Harari recently wrote, “Once technology enables us to re-engineer human minds, Homo sapiens will disappear, human history will come to an end, and a completely new process will begin, which people like you and me cannot comprehend.”18 That is to say, the game that we’ve been playing may end with neither a bang nor a whimper, but with the burble of a rising ocean and the soft beep of some digital future being birthed.

  The outsize leverage is so crucial because, for the first time, we threaten to cut off our own lines of retreat. When Rome fell, something else was there. We had, to draw on pinball, perhaps the most delightfully pointless of games, another silver ball, another chance. But our current changes are so big that they’re starting to tilt the whole machine, at which point it will fall silent. And as we shall see, because of the radical inequality we’ve allowed to overtake our society, the key decisions have been and will be made by a handful of humans in a handful of places: oil company executives in Houston, say, and tech moguls in Silicon Valley and Shanghai. Particular people in particular places at a particular moment in time following a particular philosophic bent: that’s leverage piled on top of leverage. And their ability to skew our politics with their wealth is one more layer of leverage. It scares me.

  It scares me even though the human game is not perfect—in fact, no one gets out of it alive, and no one without sadness and loss. For too many people, it’s much more tragic than it needs to be—indeed, it’s wretched, and often because its rules have been rigged to favor some and damage others. Given that I’ve been in the luckier fraction, the game may seem more appealing to me than to others. And perhaps its loss will not feel as acute to those being born now: certainly, they will not mourn the absence of things they did not know, just as we are not wrenched by the loss of the dinosaurs. If you back up far enough, it’s possible to be philosophical about anything—the sun is going to blow up eventually, after all. But that’s more philosophy than I can manage; for me, and for many others, the loss of this game is the largest conceivable tragedy, if, indeed, we can conceive it.

  And so, we will fight—some of us already are fighting. And we can, I think, see some of the ways out, even if the odds of their succeeding are not great. Success would require real changes in thinking from both conservatives and progressives. (Conservatives, oddly, tend not to worry about conservation; progressives tend to think all progress is good.) But if those changes came fast enough, the game could roll on: scientists estimate that we have five billion years until the sun turns into a red giant and expands past Earth’s orbit. I’m neither optimistic nor pessimistic, just realistic—enough to know engagement is our only chance.

  I said before that the human game we’ve been playing has no rules and no end, but it does come with two logical imperatives. The first is to keep it going, and the second is to keep it human.

  2

  To walk the roads through even a corner of Alberta’s vast tar sands complex is to visit a kind of hell. This may be the largest industrial complex on our planet—the largest dam on Earth holds back one of the many vast settling “ponds,” where sludge from the mines combines with water and toxic chemicals in a black soup. Because any bird that landed on the filthy water would die, cannons fire day and night to scare them away. If you listen to the crack of the guns, and to the stories of the area’s original inhabitants, whose forest was ripped up for the mines, you understand that you are in a war zone. The army is mustered by the Kochs (the biggest leaseholders in the tar sands) and ConocoP
hillips and PetroChina and the rest, and their enemy is all that is wild and holy. And they are winning.

  It is hideous, a vandalism of the natural and human world that can scarcely be imagined. I’ve spent years working to end it, and my efforts have been small compared to the unending fight of the people who live there. And yet, giant as this scar is, in itself it represents no real threat to the human game. The Earth is not infinite, but it is very large, and if you retreat far enough, even this scab (the single ugliest sight I’ve witnessed in a lifetime of traveling the planet) gets swallowed up in the vastness that is Canada’s boreal forest, and that in the vastness of North America, and that in the vastness of the hemisphere.

  Likewise, to wake up in Delhi at the moment is to wake up in a gray, grim purgatory. The clatter and smell of one of the planet’s most crowded cities assail you as always, but some days the smog grows so thick you can’t see the end of the block. Walking down the pavement, you seem almost alone, and the city noise seems as if it must be made by ghosts. When the air is at its worst, when the smoke from the region’s farms burning off stubble combines with the exhaust of cars and buses and the cooking fires of the slums, it’s almost unbearable: in one recent outbreak, the international airlines scrubbed their flights into Delhi because the runway was invisible, and then cars began crashing on the highways, and then the city’s trains were cancelled due to poor visibility. Imagine how bad the air must be to cancel a train, which runs on a track. At a big international cricket match the next month, with pollution levels fifteen times the global standard for safety, players began “continuously vomiting.” After halting play for twenty minutes, the umpire said, “There aren’t too many rules regarding pollution.”1

  Delhi’s air pollution may currently be the worst in the world, besting even the smoke-racked Chinese cities where the authorities installed giant LED screens to show video of the sun rising. Or maybe Lahore, in Pakistan, deserves the crown: particulate levels there have reached thirty times the safe level, producing a soupy brown haze likened by one journalist to a “giant airport smokers’ lounge.”2 Asian authorities routinely close schools because of the bad air, but because most homes lack filters, that doesn’t help much. A large-scale study found that, of the 4.4 million children in Delhi, fully half had irreversible lung damage from breathing the air.3 Around the world, pollution kills 9 million people a year, far more than AIDS, malaria, TB, and warfare combined.4 In the worst years, a third of the deaths in China can be blamed on smog, and by 2030, it may claim 100 million victims worldwide.5

  It is sick, sad, unnecessary—the biggest public health crisis on the planet. And yet, even it represents no existential threat to the human game. If the devastation of the tar sands is limited in space, this assault is limited in time. It can and will be solved, too slowly, with far too much human anguish, but that is the lesson from London, from Los Angeles, even from Beijing, which has begun, haltingly, to clear its air.

  The list of such severe environmental problems grows ever longer: dead zones in the oceans where fertilizer pours off farms along with irreplaceable topsoil; great gyres of plastic waste spinning in the seas; suburbs spilling across agricultural land, and agricultural land overrunning tropical forest; water tables quickly sinking as aquifers drain. These issues rightly demand, and even rightly monopolize, our attention because the threats they represent are so stark and so immediate. And yet, one imagines that we will survive them as a species, impoverished in many ways, but not threatened in our basic existence. People, and other creatures, will be robbed of dignity—they’re all signs of a game badly played—but the game goes on.

  But not every threat is like that. There’s a small category (a list with three items) of physical threats so different in quantity that they become different in quality, their effects so far-reaching that we can’t be confident of surviving them with our civilizations more or less intact. One is large-scale nuclear war; it’s always worth recalling J. Robert Oppenheimer’s words as he watched the first bomb test, quoting from Hindu scripture: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” So far, the cobbled-together and jury-rigged international efforts to forestall an atomic war have worked, and indeed, for much of the last fifty years those safeguards, formal and informal, have seemed to be strengthening. That we have nuclear nightmares again is mostly testimony to the childishness of President Trump and his pal in North Korea—they seem nearly alone in not understanding “why we can’t use them.”

  Second on that list of threats is the small group of chemicals that, just in time, scientists discovered were eroding the ozone layer, a protective shield that 99 percent of us didn’t even know existed. Had those scientists not sounded the alarm, we would have walked blindly off a cliff—literally, in many cases, as cataracts are one of the most common symptoms of being bathed in the ultraviolet radiation that the ozone layer blocks. Within a decade, the chemical companies had ceased their obstruction and the Montreal Protocol began removing chlorofluorocarbons from the atmosphere. The ozone hole over the Antarctic now grows smaller with each decade, and now scientists expect it will be wholly healed by 2060.

  And the third, of course, is climate change, perhaps the greatest of all these challenges, and certainly the one about which we’ve done the least. It may not be quite game-ending, but it seems set, at the very least, to utterly change the board on which the game is played, and in more profound ways than almost anyone now imagines. The habitable planet has literally begun to shrink, a novel development that will be the great story of our century.

  * * *

  Climate change has become such a familiar term that we tend to read past it—it’s part of our mental furniture, like urban sprawl or gun violence. So, let’s remember exactly what we’ve been up to, because it should fill us with awe; it’s by far the biggest thing humans have ever done. Those of us in the fossil fuel–consuming classes have, over the last two hundred years, dug up immense quantities of coal and gas and oil, and burned them: in car motors, basement furnaces, power plants, steel mills. When we burn them, the carbon atoms combine with oxygen atoms in the air to produce carbon dioxide. The molecular structure of carbon dioxide traps heat that would otherwise have radiated back out to space. We have, in other words, changed the energy balance of our planet, the amount of the sun’s heat that is returned to space. Those of us who burn lots of fossil fuel have changed the way the world operates, fundamentally.

  The scale of this change is the problem. If we just burned a little bit of fossil fuel, it wouldn’t matter. But we’ve burned enough to raise the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from 275 parts per million to 400 parts per million in the course of two hundred years. We’re on our way, on the present trajectory, to 700 parts per million or more. Because none of us knows what a “part per million” feels like, let me put it in other terms. The extra heat that we trap near the planet because of the carbon dioxide we’ve spewed is equivalent to the heat from 400,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs every day, or four each second.6 As we will see, this extraordinary amount of heat is wreaking enormous changes, but for now, don’t worry about the effects; just marvel at the magnitude: the extra carbon released to date, if it could be amassed in one place, would form a solid graphite column twenty-five meters in diameter that would stretch from here to the moon.7 There are perhaps four other episodes in Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history where carbon dioxide has poured into the atmosphere in greater volumes, but never at greater speeds—right now we push about forty billion tons into the atmosphere annually. Even during the dramatic moments at the end of the Permian Age, when most life went extinct, the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere grew at perhaps one-tenth the current pace.8

  The results, already, have been extraordinary. In the thirty years I’ve been working on this crisis, we’ve seen all twenty of the hottest years ever recorded. So far, we have warmed the earth by roughly two degrees Fahrenheit, which in a masterpiece of understatement the New York Times once described as “a larg
e number for the surface of an entire planet.”9 This is humanity’s largest accomplishment, and indeed the largest thing any one species has ever done on our planet, at least since the days two billion years ago when cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) flooded the atmosphere with oxygen, killing off much of the rest of the archaic life on the planet. “Faster than expected” is the watchword of climate scientists—the damage to ice caps and oceans that scientists (conservative by nature) predicted for the end of the century showed up decades early. “I’ve never been at a climate conference where people say ‘that happened slower than I thought it would,’” one polar expert observed in the spring of 2018.10 At about the same time, a team of economists reported that there was a 35 percent chance that the United Nations’ previous “worst-case scenario” for global warming was in fact too optimistic.11 In January 2019 scientists concluded the Earth’s oceans were warming 40 percent faster than previously believed.

  “We are now truly in uncharted territory,” said the director of the World Meteorological Organization in the spring of 2017, after final data showed that the previous year had broken every heat record.12 He was speaking literally, not metaphorically—we were off the actual charts. That summer, an Atlantic hurricane developed well to the east of where any such storm had ever been seen before. Instead of crashing into Mexico and Louisiana and Florida, it spent its fury on Ireland and Scotland. When the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration showed the storm forecast on its computerized maps, the image looked odd: the cone of winds stopped abruptly in a straight line at latitude 60 degrees north—because, it turns out, it had never occurred to the people programming the forecasting models that a hurricane would reach that line. “That’s a pretty unusual place to have a tropical cyclone,” the programmer said. “Maybe that’s something we’ll have to go back and revisit what the boundary is.”13 Maybe so.