Before you stroll the streets of First Friday, check out this book suggestion, courtesy of Dudley’s Bookshop Café. Then head down to the shop for a discount on the book
OK, let’s get this out of the way: this book is equal parts fascinating science and statistics, train-wreck gaping and real-life horror show. At one point later in the book, Wallace-Wells acknowledges the difficulty of what you’re being asked to reckon with.
“If you have made it this far, you are a brave reader,” he writes. That difficulty shouldn’t stop you, though. I feel like it should be required reading for all of us, to shake us out of our widespread complacency.
Here in the West we’re seeing shifting weather patterns, more extreme storm cycles, and the beginnings of coastal flooding. Sadly, this is nothing compared to what is happening right now in Africa, the Middle East and Southern Asia, and what is coming for us in the coming decades. The meat of the book consists of 12 meticulously documented chapters showing all the areas where things are getting worse and how much worse they’ll likely get if we stay on our current path: Unbreathable air, hunger, economics, freshwater, dying oceans, resource conflicts, etc.
Right now, you’re thinking, “Why do I want to read this? This sounds awful.” It is, but Wallace-Wells is also hopeful. As opposed to a natural planetary cycle we can do absolutely nothing about, he rightly believes that we have the technology to solve this problem. All that’s missing is the will. The Green New Deal has proven to be unpalatable to most, but in the end, it or something similar may be the only deal we’re offered if we hope to halt or forestall the vision Wallace-Wells has laid out before his readers.
This article appears in Apr 3-10, 2019.
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Remarkable. The US opted out of the Paris agreement and yet is the only major industrialized nation to reduce carbon emissions. Remarkable. China and India decline to participate in the Paris agreement because adherence thereto would cripple their economies. Remarkable. Scientists at a Melbourne university discover a cost-effective methodology to reduce carbon emissions and yet greens studiously ignore any discussion thereof.
Remarkable. Any reasoned examination of the Green New Deal’s costs leads to the inescapable conclusion that the US couldn’t possibly afford it and it would require citizens to give up control of their lives, economically and otherwise to satisfy an unproven, uneconomic theory that’s highly unlikely to materially and positively affect us during our lifetimes. Remarkable. And yet America’s left keeps advocating the US handicap its citizens so that the two biggest polluters in the world can continue to do nothing.