Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Uninhabitable Earth, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Cascades, Systems Crises, and Interconnectedness
Human Responsibility and the Natural World
Optimism and Action vs. Despair and Nihilism
The Effects of Climate Change on Humanity
Summary
Analysis
The mantra of global markets is that economic growth has the power to save humanity from anything that comes its way. But economic growth the world over is inextricably tied to the discovery, processing, and production of fossil fuels—so much so that some scholars suggest that the “singular innovation” of burning fossil fuels is all that has allowed humanity to expand and amass more wealth and power from one generation to the next. This growth is, on a long enough timeline, probably an “aberration.”
With this chapter, the book begins to move away from the natural and biological consequences of warming as it takes a closer look at how climate change will affect our man-made institutions, and particularly economics. The book isn’t just exploring how climate change affects the natural world or the ability of humans to sustain life: it’s also going to interrogate how the systems we’ve engineered to mark success and govern ourselves will fall apart as climate change takes hold of more and more of the Earth.
Themes
Just as fossil fuels caused warming, warming causes a drop in economic growth—scientists currently project more than 20 percent losses in per-capita earning the world over by 2100. Climate change reduces global output of resources—and as GDP declines at rates triple (or more) than it did during the Great Depression, the world economy will surely be devastated. The economic halt on the horizon is not a depression or a recession, but instead a “dying.”
Our global economy is not built to withstand the global natural and societal transformations that climate change will set off. In a way, climate change has been engineered in service of skyrocketing profits—pursuit of a healthy economy has decimated the health of the planet. Now, climate change will completely derail the global economy, according to all available projections.
Themes
The cascading effects of natural disasters and public health crises aren’t just devastating but expensive. Costs to agriculture and arable land, the destruction of homes and businesses, and the breaking-down of expensive infrastructure will all produce an economic setback from which the world might not be able to recover. The world was “simply not built for climate change.”
The costs of building new infrastructure, relocating farmlands, and protecting against further disaster will all prove to be too much once the Earth reaches a certain level of warming. Already, at just one degree, swaths of the world economy are suffering and whole towns destroyed by natural disasters remain unfixed. There’s not enough wealth to go around now, and there certainly won’t be in the future.
Themes
Even as humanity has innovated in new sectors like technology, climate change and its negative cognitive effects have stymied productivity and clarity of thought. Since heat is directly linked to increases in crime and decreases in test scores and employment, the hotter it gets, the harder all sectors of production and economy will be hit. Even countries like the United States that are poised to endure such a crisis will no doubt feel the ripple effects of a decimated world economy.
Yet another insidious effect of climate change is how it lowers brain function and thus productivity. In an economy based entirely around exponential production goals and a constant trajectory of growth, this means that our economy is already behind where it would need to be to sustain us through warming. And the book underscores that in the future, people will only become more incapacitated by warming’s ravages.
Themes
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Many countries treat economic growth as the best metric of a healthy society—but as warming continues and climate change racks up damage within those countries (some research suggests the figures could reach up to $550 trillion), economic superpowers will have to decide how to respond. A rapid energy transition could cost $26 trillion—a large figure, but one dwarfed by the cost of inaction. If the world acts now according to the commitments outlined in the Paris Agreement, the world’s economy may stabilize at a 15-25 percent loss in GDP. Still, there may not be a way to bounce back from those numbers.
The book is deeply critical of the fact that human society uses the economy as a measure of success and progress. In reality, pursuing profits and economic growth is largely what has gotten us into this mess. The world is not healthy—and on a long enough timeline, the economy will begin to reflect what’s actually happening all around the world. And at that point, it won’t just be too late to save the economy—it may well be too late to save the planet. A shock to the economy now in the form of immediate action towards a rapid energy transition may save it from total destruction later.
Themes
