Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
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6. Benjamin Snyder, “This Google Exec Says We Can Live to 500,” Fortune, March 9, 2015.
7. Katrina Brooker, “Google Ventures and Bill Maris’ Search for Immortality,” stuff.co.nz, March 11, 2015.
8. Sy Mukherjee, “We’re Finally Learning More Details about Alphabet’s Secretive Anti-Aging Startup Calico,” Fortune, December 14, 2017.
9. Nikhil Swaminathan, “A Silicon Valley Scientist and Entrepreneur Who Invented a Drug to Explode Double Chins Is Now Working on a Cure for Aging,” qz.com, January 6, 2017.
10. Jamie Nimmo, “Life … UNLIMITED: Beating Ageing Is Set to Become the Biggest Business in the World, Say Tycoons,” thisismoney.co.uk, March 17, 2018.
11. Zack Guzman, “This Company Will Freeze Your Dead Body for $200,000,” nbcnews.com, April 26, 2016.
12. Mark O’Connell, To Be a Machine (New York: Doubleday, 2017), p. 23.
13. Antonio Regalado, “A Startup Is Pitching a Mind-Uploading Service that Is ‘100 Percent Fatal,’” MIT Technology Review, March 13, 2018.
14. Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York: Viking, 1999), p. 97.
15. Tad Friend, “Silicon Valley’s Quest to Live Forever,” The New Yorker, April 3, 2017.
16. Sage Crossroads, The Fight over the Future: A Collection of Sage Crossroads Debates that Examine the Implications of Aging-Related Research (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2004), p. 25.
PART FOUR: AN OUTSIDE CHANCE
CHAPTER 19
1. Address of His Holiness Pope Francis, June 7, 2018 wz.vatican.va/Francesco/en/speeches/2018/june/documents/popa.francesco_20180609_imprenditori-energia.html
2. Maggie Astor, “Want to Be Happy? Try Moving to Finland,” New York Times, March 14, 2018.
3. “Few Americans Support Cuts to Most Government Programs, Including Medicaid,” Pew Research Center, Washington, DC, May 26, 2017.
4. Doudna and Sternberg, Crack in Creation, p. 234.
5. Lester Thurow, Creating Wealth: Building the Wealth Pyramid for Individuals, Corporations, and Society (New York: Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 1999), p. 33.
6. Emily Baumgartner, “As D.I.Y. Gene Editing Gains Popularity, ‘Someone Is Going to Get Hurt,’” New York Times, May 14, 2018.
7. Maxwell Mehlman, “Regulating Genetic Enhancement,” Wake Forest Law Review 34 (Fall 1999): 714.
8. Eugene Volokh, “If It Becomes Possible to Safely Genetically Increase Babies’ IQ, It Will Become Inevitable,” Washington Post, July 14, 2015.
9. Daniela Hernandez, “How to Survive a Robot Apocalypse: Just Close the Door,” Wall Street Journal, November 10, 2017.
10. Olivia Solon, “The Rise of Pseudo-AI: How Tech Firms Quietly Use Humans to Do Bots’ Work,” Guardian, July 6, 2018.
11. James Vincent, “Elon Musk Says We Need to Regulate AI Before It Becomes a Danger to Humanity,” theverge.com, July 17, 2017.
12. Preetika Rana, “China, Unhampered by Rules, Races Ahead in Gene-Editing Trials,” Wall Street Journal, January 21, 2018.
13. “Biggest AI Startup Boosts Fundraising to $1.2 Billion,” Bloomberg News, May 30, 2018.
14. James Vincent, “Putin Says the Nation that Leads in AI ‘Will Be the Ruler of the World,’” theverge.com, September 4, 2017.
15. Maureen Dowd, “Will Mark Zuckerberg ‘Like’ This Column?” New York Times, November 23, 2017.
16. Susan Ratcliffe, ed., “J. Robert Oppenheimer 1904–67, American Physicist,” oxfordreference.com, 2016.
17. Barrat, Our Final Invention, p. 52.
18. Julian Savulescu, “As a Species, We Have a Moral Obligation to Enhance Ourselves,” ideas.ted.com, February 19, 2014.
19. Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu, Unfit for the Future: The Need for Moral Enhancement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 1–2.
20. Ibid., p. 116.
21. David Roberts, “Americans Are Willing to Pay $177 a Year to Avoid Climate Change,” vox.com, October 13, 2017.
CHAPTER 20
1. Worster, Shrinking the Earth, p. 116.
2. World Bank, “State of Electricity Access Report (SEAR) 2017,” worldbank.org.
3. Russell and Kennedy, Horsemen of the Apocalypse, pp. 109–10.
4. Ryan Koronowski, “Exxon CEO: What Good Is It to Save the Planet If Humanity Suffers?” thinkprogress.org, May 30, 2013.
5. Simon Evans, “Renewables Will Give More People Access to Electricity than Coal, Says IEA,” carbonbrief.org, October 19, 2017.
6. David Roberts, “Wind Power Costs Could Drop 50%. Solar PV Could Provide up to 50% of Global Power. Damn,” vox.com, August 31, 2017.
7. Jake Richardson, “Solar Power Energy Payback Time Is Now Super Short,” cleantechnica.com, March 25, 2018.
8. Lorraine Chow, “100% Renewable Energy Worldwide Isn’t Just Possible—It’s Also More Cost-Effective,” ecowatch.com, December 22, 2017.
9. Personal conversation with author, September 22, 2016.
10. Natasha Geiling, “New Study Gives 150 Million Reasons to Reduce Carbon Emissions,” March 20, 2018, thinkprogress.org.
11. Steve Hanley, “Network of Tesla Powerwall Batteries Saves Green Mountain Power $500,000 During Heat Wave,” cleantechnica.com, July 27, 2018.
12. Nick Harmsen, “Elon Musk’s Tesla and SA Labor Reach Deal to Give Solar Panels and Batteries to 50,000 Homes,” abc.net.au, February 3, 2018.
CHAPTER 21
1. Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. Constitution.org/civ/civildis.htm
2. Jonathan Schell, The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003), p. 144. (Emphasis mine.)
3. Harari, Homo Deus, p. 277.
4. Heidi M. Przybyla, “Report: Anti-Protester Bills Gain Traction in State Legislatures,” USA Today, August 29, 2017.
5. Megan Darby, “Pope Francis Tells Oil Chiefs to Keep It in the Ground,” climatechangenews.com, June 9, 2018.
6. Phil McKenna, “Ranchers Fight Keystone XL Pipeline by Building Solar Panels in Its Path,” InsideClimate News, July 11, 2017.
CHAPTER 22
1. “Poll: Voters in America’s Heartland Don’t Want Changes to National Monuments,” nationalparkstraveler.org, November 7, 2017.
2. Coral Davenport and Lisa Friedman, “GOP Pushes to Overhaul Law Meant to Protect At-Risk Species,” New York Times, July 22, 2018.
3. Wendell Berry, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” In Context 30 (Fall/Winter 1991).
4. “75 Percent of the German Energy Coops Finance with Local Coop Banks,” Die Genossenschaften, dgrv.de https://www.dgrv.de/en/services/energycooperatives/energycoopsfinancewithlocalcoopbanks.html
5. Christine Emba, “Our Socialist Youth: Why Millennials Are Embracing a Bad, Old Term,” Washington Post, March 21, 2016.
6. David Fleming, ed. Shaun Chamberlin, Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival, and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2016), p. 27.
7. Clint Carter, “We Will Not Get Bigger, We Will Not Get Faster,” medium.com, July 26, 2018.
8. Adrien Marck et al., “Are We Reaching the Limits of Homo Sapiens,” Frontiers in Physiology, October 24, 2017.
9. Richard Price, “Stephen Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: the Flynn Effect,” richardprice.io, April 6, 2018.
10. Rory Smith, “IQ Scores Are Falling and Have Been for Decades, New Study Finds,” CNN.com, June 14, 2018.
11. Adrien Marck et al., “Are We Reaching the Limits of Homo sapiens?” Frontiers in Physiology, frontiersin.org, October 24, 2017.
12. Steven Pinker, “The Moral Imperative for Bioethics,” Boston Globe, July 31, 2015.
13. Derrick O’Keefe, “Décroissance in America: Say Degrowth!” Reporterre, May 8, 2010.
14. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book I, chapter 9. “On the Profits of Stock,” available online econolib.org/library/smith/smwn.htm
15. J
ohn Stuart Mill, “Of the Stationary State of Wealth and Population,” quoted at bartleby.com.
16. The Arts Council of Great Britain, “First Annual Report 1945–6” (London: Baynard Press, 1946), p. i.
CHAPTER 23
1. Clay Routledge, “Suicides Have Increased. Is This an Existential Crisis?” New York Times, June 23, 2018.
2. Ibid.
3. Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017), p. 123.
4. Steven Overly, “Trump’s Pick for Labor Secretary Has Said Machines Are Cheaper, Easier to Manage than Humans,” Washington Post, December 8, 2016.
EPILOGUE: GROUNDED
1. Christian Davenport, “Jeff Bezos on Nuclear Reactors in Space, the Lack of Bacon on Mars and Humanity’s Destiny in the Solar System,” Washington Post, September 15, 2016.
2. Ibid.
3. Arjun Kharpal, “When Elon Musk Sends People to the Moon There May Be a Mobile Network So They Can Check Facebook,” cnbc.com, March 2, 2018.
4. Ben Guarino, “Stephen Hawking Calls for a Return to Moon as Earth’s Clock Runs Out,” Washington Post, June 21, 2017.
5. Freeman Dyson, “Should Humans Colonize Space?” Letters, New York Review of Books, May 25, 2017.
6. Charles Wohlforth and Amanda Hendrix, “Humans May Dream of Traveling to Mars, but Our Bodies Aren’t Built for It,” Los Angeles Times, November 28, 2016.
7. Rae Paoletta, “Will Human Beings Have to Upgrade Their Bodies to Survive on Mars?” gizmodo.com, March 17, 2017.
8. Sarah Scoles, “The Floating Robot with an IBM Brain Is Headed to Space,” Wired, June 28, 2018.
9. “The 12 Greatest Challenges for Space Exploration,” Wired, February 16, 2016.
10. Kim Stanley Robinson, Aurora (New York: Orbit, 2015), p. 501.
11. John Muir, The Ten Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf, chapter 5, available online vault.sierraclub.org
12. Luke Bailey, “Three Hundred Turtles Were Found Dead in an Old Fishing Net,” inews.co.uk, September 4, 2018.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book is dedicated to Koreti Tiumalu, a gifted activist and a dear friend, who died much too early, in 2017. I hope that as her young son, Viliamu, grows, he will know how much his mother meant to the climate fight. The dedication is broader than that, however—it extends to all the climate activists I’ve had the chance to work with over the years. I can’t begin to say how much their willingness to fight means to me: every one of them realizes that this is a battle against long odds, with no guarantee of victory (indeed, a guarantee of at least some defeats), and yet they persevere with creativity and passion and love. I spend the most time with my colleagues at 350.org, of course, and it has been a great privilege to watch the young people who launched it grow into full adulthood—the weddings, and the birth announcements, are happy days on the calendar every year. To work with people whom one loves and admires is a great privilege. Day to day, my ace colleague Vanessa Arcara keeps me going.
Naomi Klein, Jane Mayer, and Rebecca Solnit read this book in draft form; each of them has been instrumental in shaping my thinking over the years, and the world owes them great thanks for their reporting and writing. Marcy Darnovsky also brought her sharp eye to bear on the chapters about genetic engineering, for which I am very grateful. Marcy and her colleague Rich Hayes helped me extensively fifteen years ago when I wrote a book on human genetic engineering called Enough; I’ve crossed my own tracks several times in this volume. And I’ve relied on the work of many others throughout: New Yorker reporters Tad Friend and Raffi Khatchadourian have provided superb coverage of Silicon Valley; Dick Russell has helped chronicle the saga of the oil companies and their fight to ward off climate action; Anne Heller and Jennifer Burns produced invaluable biographies of Ayn Rand. There is now a superb community of climate reporters, on the web and in print, which makes me feel very much less lonely than I did thirty years ago. In particular, day-in day-out climate reporting of the Guardian and the New York Times has been exceptional for years now; the eon-in eon-out geological reporting of Peter Brannen, Eelco Rohling, and Elizabeth Kolbert has broadened my understanding of this particular moment in time.
The New Yorker excerpted this book—thanks to Emily Stokes for her superb editing—and it provided support for much of the reporting that ended up in these pages, from Arizona to Africa to Australia. Thanks to all its fact-checkers and copy editors, and thanks most of all to David Remnick.
I am very grateful to my colleagues at Middlebury College, especially Laurie Patton, Nan Jenks-Jay, Janet Wiseman, Mike Hussey, and Jon Isham, and to the fine students who help keep me on my toes. Our neighbors in Vermont—Warren and Barry King above all—are crucial parts of my life.
I’ve had the good luck to have the same publishers for many years now—Paul Golob, Maggie Richards, Marian Brown, Caroline Wray, Fiora Elbers-Tibbitts, Austin Price, and their colleagues at Henry Holt always make my books much better. Since in some ways this book stems from The End of Nature, I’d like to thank again the two people who made that book a success: David Rosenthal and Annik Lafarge. And I’ve had the same agent all those decades: Gloria Loomis is a bulwark and friend, and now her assistant, Julia Masnik, plays a major role as well.
When people ask why I keep fighting, one clear answer is my daughter, Sophie. Her mother, Sue Halpern, is my great friend on earth, and constant companion.
INDEX
The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.
Abou, Naore
accelerating information returns
Adirondacks
Advanced Cell Technology
Africa
African Americans
agriculture
AIDS/HIV
air-conditioning
air pollution
Alabama
Alaska
Alberta
Alcor
Algeria
algorithms
Allen, Paul
alligators
Allpress, Bob
Alpha Centauri
Altman, Sam
altruism
Amazon (company)
Amazon Basin
Ambrosia
American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)
American Petroleum Institute (API)
American Revolution
Americans for Prosperity
American Society for Testing and Materials
Amoco
Andrea, Lembris
Anoh, Jean
Antarctica
anthrax
Anthropocene epoch
Apollo missions
aquifers
Arab Spring
archaeology
Archer Daniels Midland
Arctic
aridification
Aristotle
Arizona
Arizona Public Service (APS)
Armstrong, Lance
Armstrong, Neil
artificial general intelligence (AGI)
artificial intelligence (AI)
Ashland, Kansas
asphalt shingle
Athens
athletes
Atlas Shrugged (Rand)
Atlas Society
atmospheric temperature, rise in. See also heat waves
1.5 degrees Celsius
2 degrees Celsius
4 degrees Celsius
highest recorded
recent
Attah, Alloysius
Attenborough, David
Attica
Aurora (Robinson)
Austen, Jane
Australia
Austrian economics
automation
automobiles
driverless
electric
Baker, Ella
balance
Bangladesh
baobab
Barnet, Andrea
Barrat, James
“Basic AI Drives, The” (Omohundro)
Basu, Kaushik
batteries
Beaufort Sea
Becker, Ernest
Beijing
Bell Labs
Bengal
Berry, Wendell
Bezos, Jeff
Bikini Atoll
BioTime
Black, James F.
Black Star Energy
bluefin tuna
Blue Origin
Blue Planet II (TV series)
Boeing
Bolshevik Revolution
Bonds, Barry
Borkowski, Sara and Mark
Borsook, Paulina
Boston
Bostrom, Nick
Box, Jason
BP
Branden, Nathaniel
Brannen, Peter
Branson, Richard
Brazil