There is one civilization we know of, and it is still around, and kicking—for now, at least. Why should we be suspicious of our exceptionality or choose to understand it only by assuming an imminent demise? Why not choose to feel empowered by it?

The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells is an important read, and was labeled by my library as one of the ‘Best of the Best’. This is not an overstated title, and I do suggest that everyone ought to read this book. It deals primarily with an overview of the current science on climate change, as well as the various predictions and models we have for understanding what our options are for moving forward. There were many moments where I had to stop and take notes, or just take a moment to exhale, because this book pummels you with the bleakest climate realities—and it does not pull its punches one bit. On the other hand, the author is a bit of an optimist, I suppose; in a weird way, the book ends on a somewhat hopeful note, at least as much as can be expected after all of that despair.This won’t be a long review, because there isn’t too much left to say. The book is definitely meaningful and impactful; yet, at times, I found its message repetitive and poorly expressed. Much of this hinges on the fact that a lot of what is outlined is tentative—based on the unknowable course of future human actions. The other is that the book’s prose is sometimes stilted; I had to re-read some sentences several times to make sense of them. I’m used to reading high-level texts full of academic jargon, but this was different from that, and I’m not entirely sure why—perhaps due to this author’s particularly convoluted writing style. So, I do wish that this book could have been more compelling on that front—it isn’t a great sign that it made me want to fall asleep on occasion. Nevertheless, I greatly appreciate what this book has done on collecting sources and statistics about climate change in one place; I look forward to going through my notes for things to read up on later. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this a primer to climate change, but it is a great read if you’re already familiar and want to get a more specific picture of how dire it is, and how much more horrific it can become.Quotes:※ ‘Seventy percent of the energy produced by the Planet, it's estimated, is lost as waste heat. If the average American were confined by the carbon footprint of her European counterpart, U.S. carbon emissions would fall by more than half. If the world's richest 10 percent were limited to that same footprint, global emissions would fall by a third.’※ ‘And cultural resistance has grown so rapidly that Whole Foods now advertises its house brand of seltzer as “GMO-free sparkling water.”’※ ‘That so many feel already acclimated to the prospect of a near-future world with dramatically higher oceans should be as dispiriting and disconcerting as if we'd already come to accept the inevitability of extended nuclear war—because that is the scale of devastation the rising oceans will unleash.’※ ‘But accusations of individual irresponsibility were a kind of weaponized red herring, as they often are in communities reckoning with the onset of climate pain. We frequently choose to obsess over personal consumption, in part because it is within our control and in part as a very contemporary form of virtue signaling. But ultimately those choices are, in almost all cases, trivial contributors, ones that blind us to the more important forces.’※ ‘95 percent of the world's population is breathing dangerously polluted air.’※ ‘In 2018, one paper calculated the global cost of a rapid energy transition, by 2030, to be negative $26 trillion—in other words, rebuilding the energy infrastructure of the world would make us all that much money, compared to a static system, in only a dozen years.’※ ‘Climate change does threaten the very basis of life on this planet, but a dramatically degraded environment here will still be much, much closer to livability than anything we might be able to hack out of the dry red soil of Mars.’※ ‘Innovation, in many cases, is the easy part. This is what the novelist William Gibson meant when he said, “The future is already here, it just isn’t evenly distributed.” Gadgets like the iPhone, talismanic for technologists, give a false picture of the pace of adaptation. To a wealthy American or Swede or Japanese, the market penetration may seem total, but more than a decade after its introduction, the device is used by less than 10 percent of the world…’※ ‘But to the extent that we live today under clouds of uncertainty about the future of climate change, those clouds are, overwhelmingly, not projections of collective ignorance about the natural world but of blindness about the human one, and they can be dispersed by human action. The question of how bad things will get is not, actually, a test of the science; it is a bet on human activity. How much will we do to forestall disaster and how quickly?’