For decades, the climate movement has suffered from a debilitating self-inflicted wound: the assumption that “we can’t tell the public the truth” about the urgency of the crisis, or the scale and speed of the necessary solution. Many climate scientists joined forces with professional “climate communicators” and corporate philanthropies to decree: Fear doesn’t work as a motivator! Only hope “works,” so let’s keep things positive and promote gradualist policies like carbon pricing! This counterproductive mentality is finally changing — and author David Wallace-Wells is a major part of the reason why.
In July 2017, David Wallace-Wells broke through the iron curtain of euphemism, optimism and gradualism, pulled no punches and told the truth with the publication of his article “The Uninhabitable Earth” in New York Magazine. Wallace-Wells explored some of the worst-case scenarios of climate change in detail, making the potential nightmare of civilizational collapse and total destruction of our life-support system vivid and real for readers. No false optimism, only rigorous journalistic inquiry and true horror. Its publication caused an uproar amongst “climate communicators” — “You aren’t supposed to tell the whole truth,” they exclaimed — “it turns people off!” And yet people were not turned off. “The Uninhabitable Earth” became the most-read New York Magazine article in history, and was a key inflection point for the climate movement.
In his brand new book released this week, The Uninhabitable Earth; Life After Warming, Wallace-Wells has a chance to again transform, and critically, expand this conversation.
In his book, unlike his article, Wallace-Wells looks at the most likely outcomes. For example, Wallace-Wells describes how even the best-case scenarios for climate change will involve millions of deaths, and tens or hundreds of millions of refugees. We are looking at a “best-case outcome … death and suffering at the scale of…