Losing Earth

by Nathaniel Rich

  The U.S. government knew. Roger Revelle began serving as a Kennedy administration adviser in 1961, five years after establishing the Mauna Loa carbon dioxide program, and every president since has debated the merits of acting on climate policy. Congress has been holding hearings for forty years; the intelligence community has been tracking the crisis even longer. The preeminent scientific journals, Nature and Science, have been publishing climate change studies for nearly a half century.

  The environmentalists knew too—items appeared in the newsletters for the Sierra Club and the National Resources Defense Council in the late 1970s. With the exceptions of Friends of the Earth and the World Resources Institute, however, there was no sustained effort by activists to address the crisis until the late 1980s.

  Everybody knew. In 1953, four years before Revelle and Seuss’s landmark paper on humanity’s “large-scale geophysical experiment,” Time, The New York Times, and Popular Mechanics ran articles about the Canadian physicist Gilbert Plass, who had found that fossil fuels might have already warmed Earth by 1 degree Celsius. Worse was yet to come, Plass predicted, but the Times’ science editor, Waldemar Kaempffert, saw where things were headed. “Coal and oil are still plentiful and cheap in many parts of the world,” he wrote, “and there is every reason to believe that both will be consumed by industry so long as it pays to do so.”

  In 1956, Time published a profile of Revelle (“One Big Greenhouse”), questioning whether “man’s factory chimneys and auto exhausts will eventually cause salt water to flow in the streets of New York and London.” The same year, Life, with its 5.7 million circulation, published a lengthy essay about the “long-term change in world climate” that was already raising global temperatures. In 1958, the Bell Science Hour, one of the most popular educational film series in American history, aired in prime time The Unchained Goddess, a film about meteorological wonders, produced by Frank Capra, a dozen years removed from It’s a Wonderful Life. In one scene, the kindly host, bald, bespectacled Dr. Research (Frank Baxter), warns his costar, the tan, tie-loosened Writer (Richard Carlson), that “man may be unwittingly changing the world’s climate” through the release of carbon dioxide from factories and automobiles.

  “This is bad?” asks the Writer, speaking for us all.

  As Capra runs footage of glaciers collapsing like downed skyscrapers and a crude animation of a sightseeing boat tour floating above an underwater city, Dr. Research confirms that it is very bad indeed:

  A few degrees’ rise in the earth’s temperature would melt the polar ice caps. And if this happens, an inland sea would fill a good portion of the Mississippi Valley. Tourists in glass-bottomed boats would be viewing the drowned towers of Miami through one hundred and fifty feet of tropical water. For, in weather, we’re not only dealing with forces of a far greater variety than even the atomic physicist encounters, but with life itself.

  Life itself. Capra’s film was shown in American science classes for decades.

  * * *

  Everyone knew—and we all still know. We know that the transformations of our planet, which will come gradually and suddenly, will reconfigure the political world order. We know that if we don’t sharply reduce emissions, we risk the collapse of civilization. We know that 2 degrees of warming is considerably worse than 1.5 degrees, and that the use of half-degree intervals is itself euphemistic; every gradient is worse than the last: 2.1 degrees is considerably better than 2.2 degrees, which is dramatically better than 2.3 degrees. We also know that the coming changes will be worse for our children, worse yet for their children, and even worse still for their children’s children, whose lives, our actions have demonstrated, mean nothing to us.

  It is not easy to accept this. The equivocations spring up like oxalis after a downpour: The situation must not be quite so terrible as that; surely there’s time for a sensible transition to renewable energy; of course we care about our grandchildren. But it’s unseemly to cherry-pick the scientific projections or pretend that the climate will cease warming at some fixed date, fifty or one hundred years from now. The carbon cycle is ignorant of our windows and timetables, our “foreseeable future.”

  We do not like to think about loss, or death; Americans, in particular, do not like to think about death. No matter how obsessively one follows the politics of climate change, it is difficult to contemplate soberly an existential threat to the species. Our queasiness even infects the language we use to describe it: the banalities of “global warming” and “climate change” perform the linguistic equivalent of rolling on sanitary gloves to palpate a hemorrhaging wound. The globe and the climate will be fine, of course. They have changed drastically before and will do so again. Human beings will not be fine. Beyond an increase of 5 degrees we face the prospect of a new dark age. It is difficult to look at this fact squarely and not flinch. But doing so has a clarifying influence. It brings into relief a dimension of the crisis that to this point has been largely absent: the moral dimension, which is to say, the heart of the matter.

  We are well enough acquainted by now with the political story of climate change, the technological story, the economic story, the industry story. They have been told expertly, and exhaustively, by journalists and scholars. They are all critical to understanding how we got here. But what about the human story? How does a sentient person alive now—the world already having warmed by more than 1 degree Celsius, with another 0.5-degree warming inevitable, and emissions continuing to rise unabated—how does one live with the knowledge that the future will be far less hospitable than the present? Should we obsess over it, ignore it, find some tense middle territory? What do our failures say about our substance as a people, as a society, as a democracy? Will future generations be satisfied with the answers we offer for inaction? If we vote correctly, eat vegan, and commute by bicycle, are we excused the occasional airplane ticket, the laptop, the elevators, year-round strawberries, trash collection, refrigerators, Wi-Fi, modern health care, and every other civilized activity that we take for granted? What is the appropriate calculus? How do we begin to make sense of our own complicity, however reluctant, in this nightmare? I know that I’m complicit; my hands drip crude. Hell is murky.

  In the United States of America, where a growing percentage of the public regards the scientific method as vaguely sacrilegious, if not blasphemous, spiritual leaders have been divided on the significance of climate change. But the most eloquent attempt to articulate a moral vision of the issue has come from Pope Francis, in his second encyclical, Laudato si’, “On Care for Our Common Home.” He borrows one of his central insights from Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, the “Green Patriarch,” the spiritual leader of Orthodox Christians. Bartholomew has called on every living person to repent for the ecological damage we have contributed, “smaller or greater, to the disfigurement and destruction of creation.” The pope quotes Bartholomew at length:

  “For human beings to degrade the integrity of the earth by causing changes in its climate, by stripping the earth of its natural forests or destroying its wetlands; for human beings to contaminate the earth’s waters, its land, its air, and its life—these are sins.” For “to commit a crime against the natural world is a sin against ourselves and a sin against God.”

  At the same time, Bartholomew has drawn attention to the ethical and spiritual roots of environmental problems, which require that we look for solutions not only in technology but in a change of humanity; otherwise we would be dealing merely with symptoms.

  Until now we have tried to deal merely with the symptoms. We have had about as much success in treating the cancer of global warming as might any oncologist permitted to deal merely with the symptoms.

  As Al Gore and Tom Grumbly understood in 1980, the climate crisis, like most human dramas, has heroes, villains, and victims. Gore himself has occupied all three roles, particularly since the 2006 release of An Inconvenient Truth, a tutorial and polemic that owed some of its success, and much of the intense political backlash, to his cel
ebrity. Pope Francis and Bartholomew have acted with heroism, as have the many obscure officials, scientists, and activists who have dedicated their lives to an unpopular cause, particularly those from the ostracized communities that will suffer most from climatic changes. But any consideration of the moral dimension of the climate crisis must begin with the villains—those who have tried to bewitch an unassuming public with uncertainty, lies, and the gratuitous fantasies of denialism. The morality of these tactics can only be described as sociopathic. The rot extends, however, beyond the most cartoonish forms of denialism—the snowball brandished on the Senate floor, the “educational” videos sent to elementary schools, the actors hired by the local utility to pledge support for a new power plant at city council meetings. The failure to acknowledge the problem is itself a form of denialism: a gaslighting by omission. The moderator of a presidential debate who neglects to pose a single question about climate change; the editor who declines to devote regular coverage to the issue because there is no immediate “peg,” believing that a perpetual existential threat is not sufficiently newsy; the school board that skirts the topic because it seems too political or scientific—all make their own humble contributions to the thickening of the public ignorance.

  It is not yet widely understood, though it will be, that the politician who claims that climate change is uncertain betrays humanity in the same fashion as the politician who fabricates weapons of mass destruction in order to whip up support for a profiteering war. It is not yet widely understood, though it will be, that when a government relaxes regulations on coal-fired plants or erases scientific data from a federal website, it is guilty of more than merely bowing to corporate interests; it commits crimes against humanity. The rejection of reason—the molten core of denialism—opens the door to the rejection of morality, for morality relies on a shared faith in reason. Actions to hasten carbon dioxide emissions are the ineluctable corollary of climate denialism. Once it becomes possible to disregard the welfare of future generations, or those now vulnerable to flooding or drought or wildfire—once it becomes possible to abandon the constraints of human empathy—any monstrosity committed in the name of self-interest is permissible.

  The greatest trick of the professional denialists is not to convince the world that global warming is a hoax. The world remains unconvinced; even three-quarters of U.S. voters are unconvinced. The denialists’ greatest trick is to convince us that they are convinced—that they believe what they say. But with few exceptions—John Sununu, for one—they don’t. Observe their wry equivocations, their carefully phrased evasions spoken in the defiant tones of the paid spokesperson, the bully, the flat-earther. Statements like “I believe man has an impact on the climate, but what is not completely understood is what the impact is”; and “we don’t understand what the effects” of climate change are; and carbon dioxide is “not the primary knob that changes” global temperatures—these come from sworn congressional testimony by cabinet members of the current presidential administration—are exactly as honest as claims that cutting taxes on the rich will help the poor or that cigarette smoking aids digestion. The denialist does not care about winning a war of ideas, only about avoiding the appearance of amorality. If the science is uncertain, inaction is blameless.

  Against such rhetoric, rational arguments are self-defeating. They only help to shuttle the discourse out of the furnace of moral reckoning and into the arid corridors of policy debate. A human problem requires a human solution. One of our most effective weapons is mortal shame. Shame may have no influence on the handymen of industry, but an appeal to higher decency can work on the human beings who vote in elections. They are still, after all, human beings.

  There will eventually emerge a vigorous, populist campaign to hold to account those who did the most to block climate policy over the last forty years. The lawsuits now being pioneered against the oil and gas industry and the federal government are an initial front in this campaign, one that may seem tentative compared with the vengeance to come. Yet even the most aggressive remedies—international tribunals, truth and reconciliation commissions, reparations, asset forfeiture, nationalization of the energy industry—will not fully efface the moral stain. No judicial penalty for human tragedy can. A full reckoning requires understanding the degree to which all of our lives, even those of the moral paragons who walk among us, rely on the extraction and combustion of long-buried organic matter—of the earth’s ancient dead.

  Since human beings discovered fire, our quality of life, measured by any available metric—longevity, health outcomes, wealth, educational attainment—has advanced in near lockstep with our energy consumption. Until now, most of that energy has derived from fossil fuels. To the extent that we are an intelligent species, aware of our past and possessing the luxury to contemplate the future, we are beneficiaries of coal and oil and gas. Nobody who lives on the electrical grid can be let entirely off the hook; certainly not any American. The economic literature shows that, after an extreme level of socioeconomic development, the correlation between energy consumption and economic growth finally breaks down; this has happened throughout the Western world, including in the United States, where carbon emissions have broadly stabilized. Nevertheless a homeless American today consumes twice as much energy as the average global citizen.

  We all have a stake in the survival of civilization. Our individual stakes are not, however, equally allotted—not yet. The relationship between those who have burned the most fossil fuels and those who will suffer the most from a warming climate is perversely inverted. The inversion is both chronological (younger generations pay for their elders’ emissions) and socioeconomic (the poor suffer what the rich deserve). This, too, has been understood since the 1970s. The greatest victims will be the world’s most impoverished, particularly in those nations that have not yet enjoyed the benefits of industrial energy consumption, and particularly those who do not have white skin, who will disproportionately suffer from natural disasters, declines in arable land, food and water shortages, and migratory chaos. Climate change amplifies social inequity. It disadvantages the disadvantaged, oppresses the oppressed, discriminates against the discriminated against.

  In Noordwijk, when the environmental minister of Kiribati used his anatomy to demonstrate the dangers of rising seas, he did not say—did not have to say—that his nation is one of the lowest emitters of carbon dioxide on the planet, not only in aggregate but per capita. The world’s island nations began years ago to make a moral plea for action. “We cannot accept that climate change be treated as an inevitability,” said James Michel, president of the Seychelles, at a 2014 meeting of the Alliance of Small Island States, ahead of that year’s global IPCC summit:

  We cannot accept that any island be lost to sea level rise. We do not have the economic means to build sophisticated defenses. We do not have the latest technology to better adapt to the problem … nor do we have the economic might to apply sanctions on those most guilty of causing the problem. But we have something that is invaluable, something that is powerful: we are the conscience of these negotiations. We stand as the defenders of the moral rights of every citizen of our planet.

  A year later the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands said that the islanders’ forced abandonment of their homes and cultures “is equivalent in our minds to genocide.”

  The American college students leading the movement to demand a Green New Deal—an omnibus piece of legislation not unlike those proposed by Timothy Wirth and Claudine Schneider in 1988 and Barack Obama in 2008—increasingly speak in the same register as the leaders of the sinking island nations. The hundreds of students who staged a sit-in at Nancy Pelosi’s office after the Democrats regained control of the House of Representatives in 2018, demanding comprehensive climate legislation, said things like: “We are angry at the cowardice of our leaders,” “We are standing for our future,” “Our lives are at stake.” We all live on islands; some just have longer coastlines than others.

  The
inverted cruelties of climate change extend even to Earth’s wealthiest nations. In the longer term, though, we all become impoverished. Like the economic models that chart the depreciation of the GDP against sea level rise, beyond a certain threshold, the asymptote recoils violently to the axis. There is no escaping it once the pillars of society fall—not only the pillars of the global economy, like grain production and stable international relations, but the pillars of the human spirit. An underexamined worst-case scenario is the violence done to our belief in a shared humanity. The failure to act erodes our trust in human fellowship as it does our glaciers. After another generation or two of willful neglect, who will be able to take seriously the fundamental ideals—egalitarianism, fraternity, liberty—claimed as the basis for democracy?

  Our collective failure to respond to the crises heightened by rising temperatures, Pope Francis writes, “points to the loss of that sense of responsibility for our fellow men and women upon which all civil society is founded.” There can be no civil society without a stable climate. There can be no stable climate without a civil society. The fight to preserve one is the same as the fight to preserve the other. If a clod be washed away by the sea, all are diminished. There can be no future unless it is understood—if not by all, then at least by a safe majority of American voters—that our future will be commonly shared.