The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells

Author:David Wallace-Wells
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf, azw3
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2019-02-19T06:00:00+00:00

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If we do succeed, and pull up short of two or even three degrees, the bigger bill will come due not in the name of liability but in the form of adaptation and mitigation—that is, the cost of building and then administering whatever systems we improvise to undo the damage a century of imperious industrial capitalism has wrought across the only planet on which we all can live.

The cost is large: a decarbonized economy, a perfectly renewable energy system, a reimagined system of agriculture, and perhaps even a meatless planet. In 2018, the IPCC compared the necessary transformation to the mobilization of World War II, but global. It took New York City forty-five years to build three new stops on a single subway line; the threat of catastrophic climate change means we need to entirely rebuild the world’s infrastructure in considerably less time.

This is one reason a single-shot cure-all offers an undeniable appeal—which brings us back to that magic phrase, “negative emissions.” Neither negative-emissions method—“natural” approaches involving revitalized forests and new agricultural practices, technological ones that would deploy machines to remove carbon from the atmosphere—requires wholesale transformation of the global economy as it is presently constituted. Which is perhaps why negative emissions, once a last-ditch, if-all-else-fails strategy, have recently been built into all conventional climate-action goals. Of 400 IPCC emissions models that land us below two degrees Celsius, 344 feature negative emissions, most of them significantly. Unfortunately, negative emissions are also, at this point, almost entirely theoretical. Neither method has yet been demonstrated to actually work at anything like the necessary scale, but the natural approach, though adored by environmentalists, faces much stiffer obstacles: one researcher suggested that, to succeed, it would require a third of the world’s farmable land; another suggested that, depending on exactly how the system was designed and deployed, it might have the opposite of its intended effect, not subtracting carbon from the atmosphere but adding it.

The carbon capture path, which would blanket the planet in anti-industrial plants out of a cyberpunk dream, seems, by contrast, more inviting. To begin with, we already have the technology, though it is expensive. The devices, Wallace Smith Broecker is fond of saying, have about the same mechanical complexity as a car, and cost about as much—roughly $30,000 each. To merely match the amount of carbon we are presently emitting into the atmosphere, Broecker calculates, would require 100 million of them. This would merely buy us some time—at a cost of $30 trillion, or about 40 percent of global GDP. To reduce the level of carbon in the atmosphere just by a few parts per million—which would buy us a little more time, matching not just our present emissions but our likely level a few years down the road—would take 500 million of these devices. To reduce the level of carbon by 20 parts per million per year, he calculates, would require 1 billion of them. This would immediately pull us back from the threshold, even buy us

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