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

by Bill McKibben

  The summer of 2018 was the hottest ever measured across large stretches of this planet. Africa recorded its highest temperature ever in June, the Korean Peninsula in July, and Europe in August; in America, Death Valley produced the hottest month ever seen on our continent. The world saw the warmest night in history, when the mercury in one Omani city stayed above 109 degrees Fahrenheit till morning. In Algeria, a New York Times reporter found employees at a petroleum plant simply walking off the job as the temperature neared 124 degrees. “We couldn’t keep up,” said one worker. “It was impossible to do the work. It was hell.” In Nawabshah, Pakistan, the heat set a new local record, 122 degrees Fahrenheit, and “shops didn’t bother to open. Taxi drivers kept off the street to avoid the blazing sun.”14 In Montreal, where a heat wave had killed seventy-seven people, a homeless man described his life: he moved two or three blocks at a time, from one air-conditioned mall to the next, waiting to be turned out. “We need more water fountains in the park,” he told reporters for the Guardian, who also interviewed a student in Cairo, where the temperature was a mere 104 degrees. His extended family had saved up to buy one air-conditioning unit for the living room, and “now that’s where everyone spends their day—preparing food, watching TV, playing or studying.”15 In other words, their world had shriveled to a single room. When a city gets that hot, as one reporter put it, “the pavements are empty, the parks quiet, entire neighborhoods appear uninhabited. Nobody with a choice ventures outside.”16

  And as with the heat, so with the oceans. Their rise is driving people away from the places we’ve always inhabited. The same Asian peasant farmers having to cope with hideous heat in the fields are also watching as saltwater wrecks those soils—tens of thousands now evacuate Vietnam’s sublimely fertile Mekong Delta annually. You don’t have to search to find the scary details, given that most coastal communities have at least begun to study the possible impacts. In one week at the end of 2017, without making any special effort, I came across stories from Louisiana, where government officials were already finalizing a plan to move thousands of people from rising seas (“Not everybody is going to be able to live where they are now and continue their way of life,” said one state official);17 from Hawaii, where a new study was predicting that, over the next few decades, thirty-eight miles of coastal roads would be chronically flooded and impassable, “jeopardizing critical access to many communities”;18 from Jakarta, Indonesia’s mega-city, where a rising Java Sea earlier that month had briefly turned “streets into rivers and brought this vast area of nearly 30 million residents to a virtual halt”;19 and from Boston, where a simple nor’easter in the first days of 2018 managed to flood some of the city’s priciest neighborhoods, floating Dumpsters and sedans through the Financial District. “If anyone wants to question global warming, just see where the flood zones are,” Boston’s mayor said. “Some of those zones did not flood thirty years ago.”20

  If you trace out the area that’s ten meters above current sea levels, it covers only 2 percent of the earth’s land area, so the game board won’t shrink enormously from sea level rise. But that 2 percent of the surface contains 10 percent of the people, and generates 10 percent of the gross world product.21 And it’s not defensible, not most of it—no one is going to pay to build a seawall around the Bengali coast; or to defend Accra, the capital of Ghana, which already floods during storms. “On the outskirts of Lomé, the capital of Togo, rows of destroyed buildings line the beaches,” Jeff Goodell reports.22 Anyone want to estimate how much money the world is likely to spend defending the capital of Togo? “Like it or not, we will retreat from most of the world’s non-urban shorelines in the not very distant future,” the Duke University sea level rise expert Orrin Pilkey wrote in 2016. “Our retreat options can be characterized as either difficult or catastrophic. We can plan now and retreat in a strategic and calculated fashion, or we can worry about it later and retreat in tactical disarray in response to devastating storms. In other words, we can walk away methodically, or we can flee in panic.”23

  As some people flee more water (in the form of humidity or of sea level rise), others will be moving because there’s too little. Remember: wet areas get wetter as the planet warms, but arid areas get even more droughty. In late 2017 a study estimated that by 2050, even if the world manages to hit the Paris climate target of “only” a two-degree Celsius rise in temperature, a quarter of the earth would experience serious drought and desertification. “Our research predicts that aridification would emerge over about 20 to 30 percent of the world land surface,” said the study’s lead author. Another study from the same year found that as hotter days led to more evaporation, corn and soybean yields across the U.S. Grain Belt could fall by 22 to 49 percent. Extensive irrigation could help—except that we’ve already overpumped the aquifers that lie beneath most of the world’s breadbaskets.24 Some Americans can still remember what drought-driven dislocation looks like: Okies piled into rattling pickups streaming out of the Dust Bowl and into California’s pastures of plenty (and one Harvard researcher recently predicted that America’s climate migration will be twice the size of that Depression-era exodus).25 But now, as we’ve seen, even reliable escape routes are blocked. California’s snowpack keeps dwindling as hot, dry years pile up; the state faces a drop of as much as 70 or 80 percent in its water supply.26

  Even in those places where you’d expect the field of play to be expanding, we’re seeing the opposite. Warmer temperatures should make the Arctic into the new Kansas, right? Here’s how Rex Tillerson cheerfully put it, back when he was the CEO of Exxon: “Changes to weather patterns that move crop production areas around—we’ll adapt to that.” Except Iowa is Iowa not just because of the temperature. There’s also that topsoil, none of which you find once you move north; instead, the ground there is underlain with ice. And as that permafrost melts, it spews more carbon into the atmosphere—no small matter, given that permafrost makes up one-fifth of the Northern Hemisphere. But that thawing layer also cracks roads, tilts houses, and even uproots trees to create what scientists call “drunken forests.” Economic losses from a warming Arctic could approach $90 trillion over the course of the century, far outweighing the gains from easier shipping lanes, according to ninety scientists who released a joint report in 2017.27

  You get a sense of why by looking at particular places: Churchill, Manitoba, say, on the edge of Canada’s Hudson Bay. A single rail line connects it to the lower world, but in the spring of 2017, record floods washed away much of the track. The company that owns the rail line says it can’t justify the price of fixing it, “particularly in a warming climate.” To cancel its contract, the company declared what lawyers call a “force majeure,” an unforeseen event beyond its responsibility. “To fix things in the era of climate change, well, it’s fixed but you don’t count on it being the fix forever,” an engineer for the company explained. “Things are changing that we can’t arrest or change or govern.” Even construction of a new research center to study the effects of climate change ceased when the train shut down.28

  If you have enough money you can ward off anything for a while. The Canadian government reopened the rail line in the summer of 2018 at the cost of $117 million—about $130,000 per resident of Churchill. But next time? Churchill “claims a mythic place in the Canadian psyche,” up there at the end of the rail line. And so do many of the other places that we may abandon before too long. Fort Sumter? The Kennedy Space Center? Mar-a-Lago? It’s worth noting that those Iraqi cities with the increasingly impossible temperatures sit close to where biblical scholars place the Garden of Eden. In 2018, Scottish archaeologists reported that thousands of prehistoric sites—stone circles, Norse halls, Neolithic tombs—were at risk from rising seas. Each tide washes away artifacts—washes away our history.29

  Lots of people already hesitate to walk across a grassy meadow because hot weather has spread ticks bearing Lyme disease. On plenty of beaches, people now sit stranded on the sand because jellyfish, which thriv
e as warming seas kill off other marine life, have taken over the waves. The planet’s diameter will remain eight thousand miles, and its surface will still cover two hundred million square miles, but the earth, for humans, has begun to shrink, under our feet and in our minds.

  6

  Climate change has been a public issue for thirty years. It’s true that there were scientific reports and presidential memos scattered across the preceding decades that warned we might face trouble, and the pace accelerated in the 1980s. This early phase of climate politics was nicely outlined by Nathaniel Rich in a recent special issue of the New York Times Magazine. But the important thing to remember is that it all happened behind closed doors, in meetings confined to a few scientists and officials.1 The world, its leaders and its citizens, effectively knew nothing of the threat until the hot June day in 1988 when a mid-career NASA scientist named James Hansen testified before a Senate committee that “the greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now.”2

  In the weeks that followed, members of Congress introduced the National Energy Policy Act to “address … heat-trapping gases produced in burning fossil fuels.” The world’s atmospheric scientists announced the formation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to track the crisis. And Vice President George H. W. Bush, in the midst of a successful campaign for the White House, announced that he would “fight the greenhouse effect with the White House effect.” It looked like America meant business, that a response was starting to take shape.

  But, as it turned out, that didn’t really happen. In the three decades since, global carbon emissions have nearly doubled. More than half of all the greenhouse gases emitted since the start of the Industrial Revolution have spewed from exhaust pipes and smokestacks since 1988.3 In all but one year since 1988, we’ve burned more fossil fuel than the year before, and the exception was 2009, when the economy fell off a cliff.

  Which is to say, Donald Trump is a horrible human being who has done all that he can think of to retard progress on climate change, but it’s not his fault the planet is overheating.

  * * *

  The tepid response to what scientists were quickly calling the greatest challenge humans have ever faced was in certain ways predictable. I remember, in 1988, when I was finishing The End of Nature, interviewing a political scientist who described it as “the problem from hell.” There were too many different interests, he said, from too many parts of the world. Fossil fuel was at the center of the world’s economy, involved in every moment of a modern day—and yet it was the very thing that was killing us. It was as if a doctor had told you that your chief problem was that your heart and lungs were pumping poison through your body. There was nothing we could do, he said, at least not in the time we had.

  His assessment has so far turned out to be correct, and it’s worth taking a look at a few of the reasons for this.

  One is simple inertia, never to be underestimated. Anthropologists talk regularly about how we evolved to deal with a snarling tiger emerging from behind a tree: we’re geared to short-term thinking because that’s what allowed us to survive; whereas tomorrow was always a problem for tomorrow. But think how amplified that is when you have a literal investment in the present—when, say, a few hundred billion dollars are at stake. The mayor of Miami Beach, whose streets already flood regularly, told a crowd at the city’s one-hundredth-anniversary gala that “I believe in human innovation. If thirty or forty years ago, I’d told you that you were going to be able to communicate with your friends around the world by looking at your watch or with an iPhone, you’d think I was out of my mind.”4

  So: the snarling tiger is not actually eating us at this precise moment. Anyway, in thirty years maybe there will be an app to deal with snarling tigers. It’s easy enough to make fun of this kind of reaction, but in fact, it’s how almost all of us have reacted. We’ve gone on more or less as usual. We literally don’t want to hear about it.

  Even those politicians who have wanted to do something about it have wanted to do something easy. They’ve looked, naturally enough, for relatively small steps they could take that would provoke as little outcry as possible. And they’ve argued, with the persuasiveness of people who must get elected, that that’s all they can do. “Part of my job is to figure out what’s my fastest way to get from point A to point B—what’s the best way for us to get to a point where we’ve got a clean energy economy,” Barack Obama explained toward the end of his last year in office. “And somebody who is not involved in politics may say, ‘Well, the shortest line between two points is just a straight line; let’s just go straight to it.’ Well, unfortunately, in a democracy, I may have to zig and zag occasionally, and take into account very real concerns and interests.”5

  Obama’s “zigs and zags” are illustrative—they neither saved the day nor wrecked our chances for survival, but they did reflect just how hard even a good-faith effort on this “problem from hell” can be. Environmentalism was not his main concern, but Obama understood that climate change was important: the night he clinched the Democratic nomination in 2008, he said that “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” And it seemed like his timing was, as usual, impeccable. His term in office coincided with the large-scale advent of fracking. Suddenly, it appeared that America had an enormous supply of natural gas that could be liberated easily from shale in Texas and the Appalachians. For environmentalists, that initially seemed like very good news, because when you burn natural gas it gives off half as much carbon dioxide as the coal that powered most of the nation’s, and the world’s, electric supply. For Obama, it was a godsend. He could reduce America’s carbon emissions with minimal upset. The big oil companies controlled much of the natural gas supply, and they wouldn’t protest. Utilities liked it because it kept their infrastructure essentially intact—in many cases, you could actually just convert the old coal-fired power plant to burn the new supplies of gas. And though the use of natural gas did continue the slow-motion implosion of the coal industry, that was more than offset by the way gas helped spark the dead-in-the-water economy Obama had inherited. Manufacturing jobs were returning from overseas, attracted by the newly abundant energy. In his 2012 State of the Union address, the president declared that new natural gas supplies would not only last the nation a century, but also create six hundred thousand new jobs by decade’s end. He boasted that under his administration, they’d “added enough new gas pipelines to encircle the Earth and then some.”6

  So, no one wanted to hear the chemists when they began to raise an uncomfortable issue about natural gas. It’s indeed true, they said, that methane produces only half as much carbon as coal when you burn it. But if you don’t burn it—if it escapes into the air before it can be captured in a pipeline, or anywhere else along its route to a power plant or your stove—then it traps heat in the atmosphere about eighty times more efficiently than carbon dioxide. Two Cornell professors, Robert Howarth and Tony Ingraffea, produced a series of elegant papers showing that if even a small percentage of fracked gas leaked, maybe as little as 3 percent, then it would do more climate damage than coal. And their preliminary data showed that leak rates could be at least that high—that between the fracking operations and the thousands of miles of pipes and the compressor stations, somewhere between 3.6 and 7.9 percent of methane gas from shale-drilling operations actually escapes into the atmosphere. In June 2018 a new study found that the amount of methane leaking from oil and gas fields was 60 percent higher than the official EPA estimate.7 Eventually, in fact, satellite data showed that U.S. methane emissions had spiked by 30 percent since 2002. That meant that total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions (carbon dioxide and methane combined) had barely budged during the Obama years. In fact, they might have gone up. Carbon dioxide emissions declined, yes, but they were offset by the rising spew of methane. In other words, a crucial decade had been wasted—worse than wasted, because all the new drill rigs and pipelines and gas-
fired power plants will be in operation for decades to come.

  It’s not, at some level, Obama’s fault. He was elected to run a political and economic system based on endless growth. He feared that if he upset it too much he wouldn’t be reelected, which would have done no one any good. (Though it’s worth noting that he continued to boast about it even after leaving office. In November 2018 he told a Texas audience that during his term America had passed Russia and Saudi Arabia as the biggest oil and gas producer. “That was me, people,” he said.)8 It’s the same around the planet, though different leaders fear different things: angry central committees, upset oligarchs, mobs angry at higher gasoline prices. Against this kind of institutional inertia, even charisma counts for little. Consider the handsomest, most progressive, most apparently “woke” leader on the planet, Canada’s Justin Trudeau. He’s far more outspoken on climate change than Obama ever was: it was Canadian diplomats, at his insistence, who persuaded the nations of the world to lower their preferred climate target from 2 degrees Celsius to 1.5 degrees in the final days of the Paris negotiations. “There is no country on the planet that can walk away from the challenge and reality of climate change,” Trudeau told the UN General Assembly. “We have a responsibility to future generations and we will uphold it.”9 And yet, Trudeau’s country contains one of the two largest deposits of tar sands on earth, that vast swath of Northern Alberta that can, at great cost to water and forest, be mined for sludgy oil. And Trudeau refuses to slow its expansion. When a pipeline company tried to back out of building a new pipeline to the British Columbia coast in 2018, Trudeau nationalized it, committing more than ten billion dollars in taxpayer money.