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
There are many cognitive biases that prevent people from seeing the threat of climate change clearly. From anchoring, in which people are unable to look away from the mental models they build for themselves (for example, being unable to imagine the Earth other than it is today), to the bystander effect, to the illusion of control, people’s minds will often literally refuse to let them comprehend the planet on which they live. The fact that climate change engages so many human biases is a mark of just how much of human life it affects. The scope of climate change is so immense that people instinctually look away, as if turning from the glare of the sun. But throwing our hands up at the size of the problem and becoming complacent is exactly what allows climate crises to grow so hugely out of hand.
Our brains are, arguably, not wired to fully understand the looming casualties associated with climate change. It’s a daunting prospect to consider: a complete rearrangement of life as we know it, and the destruction or sudden obsoleteness of so much of our social, political, and economic fabric. But realizing that these biases must be overcome is the first step to meeting climate change’s many threats with decisive action.
Themes
In addition, the system of capitalism is so enormous and so ingrained that it is difficult to look directly at it or to revise it. “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism,” says one literary critic. Capitalism and global warming are two monoliths that humanity has created yet cannot seem to halt. But the climate isn’t governed by capitalism: capitalism is threatened by climate.
Just as it’s hard to imagine the Earth looking or functioning differently from how it does today, it’s hard to imagine the end of the social, political, and economic systems that govern humanity. But climate change promises to rewire those systems—some of them so extensively that they’re no longer relevant to how we’ll live our lives under the effects of warming.
Themes
Many wonder if capitalism can survive climate change. David Wallace-Wells predicts that some aspects of capitalist systems, such as trade and rent-seeking, will endure. Even in a world where every major economy faces shocks and assaults in the form of extreme weather, it seems that capitalist systems will scramble to endure. The promise of constant growth is one that corporations and governments will likely try to keep alive even in the face of stagnation and increasingly stark financial inequality.
In this passage, the book examines the bleak forecast concerning global capitalism. We as a human society are so entrenched in capitalistic systems that even at the end of life as we know it, it seems impossible to leave behind the very systems that hastened the escalation of climate crisis. By all metrics, the Earth is headed for radical changes and serious destruction, but it may be impossible to eradicate these systems even in the face of all that. Humans will cling to the trappings of normal life even when it becomes clear that we cannot keep ourselves separate from nature’s ravages through our economy.
Themes
The market’s promises of trickle-down economics and equality for all have long been failures, and leading economists have, in recent years, begun to admit that the “science” of capitalism is nothing but a fantasy. The promise of growth has justified injustice and exploitation for centuries. Now, with even more “wounds to salve” due to climate crisis, that promise will be put to the ultimate test.
A major transformation is due—no matter how big it is, capitalism as it exists right now cannot endure the debts and damages that will begin to accrue at further degrees of warming. Wallace-Wells suggests that capitalism has made empty promises to billions of people, and now, it is time to reckon with capitalism’s actual effect on the world.
Themes
Get the entire The Uninhabitable Earth LitChart as a printable PDF.
The largest looming cost to capitalism is the necessity of new forms of adaptation and mitigation to combat warming. Decarbonizing the economy and building preventative infrastructure will be a long and costly fight. The planet will need to mobilize as it did during World War II in order to secure negative emissions. Carbon capture plants will require over a third of the planet’s available land to prove effective and over $30 trillion just to start up. It would be less expensive to simply stop putting carbon in the atmosphere now than to engineer the technology that would remove it—but for now, capitalism’s iron grip is difficult to escape.
Here, Wallace-Wells underscores just how tightly we hold capitalism in a death grip—or, how tightly it holds humanity in a death grip of its own. Even though it would make more financial sense to stop carbon emissions now, our society struggles to let go of the idea that growth and profit are the only goalposts worth aiming for. If no serious action is taken, and soon, not only will the global economy be destined to fail—but the compounding damage done to the planet in the decades to come will be impossible to reign in.
Themes
