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
Technology may have the power to save humanity—but few leading technologists seem to have an interest in doing so. Many are more concerned with the threats from artificial intelligence than the threats from climate change. Climate change is just one of many threats of annihilation that the tech world considers, but by sidelining the very real threat of climate change in favor of entertaining scenarios such as a simulation shutdown or a revolution of badly-programmed superintelligence, tech contributes to humanity’s inertia.
The tech industry, like capitalism, has long promised to democratize and improve the way people around the globe live their lives. But the book shows that, in reality, tech—like capitalism—is just another institution that largely ignores the threats of climate crisis, preferring to focus on implausible, far-fetched threats rather than the existential crisis that is already here in front of us.
Themes
For many of the Bay Area’s “futurist vanguard,” the goal is to eliminate humanity and engineer “posthumanity” in order to escape, rather than confront, the very real disasters that humanity will be forced to reckon with in the years to come. Eternal existence in a cloud or on a hard drive is not the comfort these tech giants believe it to be, and Wallace-Wells believes that it is nothing more than a “fantasy” that humanity will “escape the body and transcend the world.” Carving out an existence on our degraded but still perhaps livable planet is much more doable than creating a colony on, say, Mars.
The tech world isn’t only engaging in climate denialism by imagining the biggest threats to humanity to be supercomputers or simulations. It’s further perpetuating the illusion that humanity can—and will—escape from the natural world and create an entirely new sphere detached from nature. This is a harmful fallacy, and one that will swiftly and overwhelmingly be disproven in the course of time. Rather than searching for improbable escapes from our Earth, we should be finding new, innovative ways to save the planet we already have.
Themes
“Technology will take care of everything,” some tech workers say—but in spite of transformative technological advancements, humanity has in many ways been left high and dry by both big tech and the green energy “revolution.” The market continues adding new advancements to the same old systems rather than undertaking the radical changes that need to be made to truly secure economic and existential well-being for the planet.
The capitalist tech sector’s promises don’t acknowledge the fact that structural, societal change to combat climate crisis needs to happen now—not in a decade or two. Without a real mobilization of tech’s valuable potential, the tech world becomes just another cog in a machine that denies the realities of climate crisis.
Themes
Even though renewable energy sources are more affordable than ever, the world is still burning 80 percent more coal than it was just 20 years ago. The world is powered more than ever by “dirty energy,” and the challenge of changing that is daunting: methods of deforestation, agriculture, raising livestock, and waste disposal must be overhauled, an international accord must be reached, and preventative structures to quell the effects of climate disaster must be erected. And even if all of that is managed, a sustainable future will be an ongoing, unceasing fight.
The gap between the renewable energies available to us today and our failure to seize upon them illustrates that the climate crisis is largely enabled by inaction. Whether the cause of that inertia is denial, despair, or pride, it is a position of extreme stillness that the world can no longer afford.
Themes
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Climate change moves quickly, but tech does not. Technology needs to transform rapidly in order to help the globe cut emissions at a rate that will make continued life on this planet possible. Electricity, communications, and agriculture all run on carbon—these systems need to be “replaced at the root,” and fast. An undertaking like this has never been attempted or even imagined—and while it will surely discomfit consumers and corporate interests alike, the fate of life as we know it hinges on its success. Carbon capture plants are the best chance humanity has to buy more time until a revolution like this one—something that will take, experts predict, hundreds of years to complete—can be achieved.
Humanity is living on borrowed time—and we will be until there is a swift, widespread halt of carbon emissions. By illustrating just how expansive a change to our systems this requires, the book underscores that there’s no more time to waste. Humanity needs to come up with new solutions, now, rather than turning to despair or disinterest. There is still time to uphold our duty to our planet—but accomplishing that goal requires collective, organized action.
Themes
Nuclear power promised to revolutionize the world in this way back in the 1950s—but the threat of nuclear warfare derailed humanity’s attempts to devote itself to nuclear solutions. The destructive meltdowns of several major nuclear plants, too—Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima—scared many away from the promises of nuclear energy. But it’s worth considering that the number of lives lost in these disasters was comparatively small to the lives that will be lost if the world continues to sideline nuclear solutions. Even the 4,000 deaths associated with Chernobyl are dwarfed by the 10,000 people who die each day from small-particle pollution, a byproduct of burning carbon.
Climate change demands new ways of thinking. This includes revisiting what we know about nuclear power—its benefits and its tradeoffs. While the nuclear power accidents that occurred in the 20th and 21st century were frightening and devastating, we must reframe the scales we use to measure loss. The loss of a habitable Earth—and billions of lives along with it—is a loss from which we could never recover. Nuclear power, for all its uncertainties and liabilities, also holds great promise in terms of helping humanity reduce carbon emissions or, one day halt them altogether.
Themes
So far, one of the tech world’s best potential contributions to a climate-ravaged world is the escape into augmented reality it provides. While increased screen time and obsessions with video games now seem like liabilities, a generation from now—when the destruction of climate change is everywhere—addiction to escapist tech may well be considered “adaptive.”
Climate change promises to have cascading effects over all aspects of our lives—including how and where we live them. While escapist tech now seems like a threat to how we handle climate change, creating a greater sense of distance and inaction, if the world continues to warm and self-destruct this same escapist inaction may become a survival tactic. This passage warns against such inaction while also admitting that if things continue on their current course for long enough, inaction may be the only option available.
Themes
