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Mypublisher maximum pages1/2/2023 ![]() As she puts it, “Doomsday messaging just doesn’t work.” Too much scare, and people give up hope and stop trying to bring about change. I’m a fan of scientists like Katharine Hayhoe, who warns against overdosing on unwarranted gloom. And because carbon dioxide persists so long in the atmosphere, even if we magically flipped a switch today, things are already pretty certain to stay very bad for hundreds of years to come.Īll of that is awful enough, without having to go full-on Cormac McCarthy. Changed climate patterns will worsen drought and wildfires in some areas, and river flooding and hurricanes in others. Coastal cities will be severely damaged, and some lost international climate migration will uproot the lives of millions. ![]() Maybe you pried them out of drowned properties and fitted them into your caves.”Īs someone who writes about climate change for a living, I can tell you that if we continue down the path we are on, things will get very bad. After describing the amount of energy that goes into making glass, he adds, “I hope that you have at least inherited a few of our windowpanes. Which brings us to the biggest problem with this monumental work: not its length, or the way it might test your tolerance for sarcasm, but the author’s tendency to assume the absolute worst consequences of climate change. Throughout both volumes, he says he is writing this book not for today’s reader, but for those in the devastated future, repeatedly referring to the time “when I was alive.” Discussing our wasteful ways, and the enormous amounts of energy that have gone into all of the things that we use and the things that we do, he asks a dozen times, “What was the work for?” Discussing the mendacity of officials in Japan, he repeats their warnings not to give in to or spread what they refer to as “harmful rumors.” The coal passages get heavy rotation of the phrase “the regulated community,” which he carries on into discussion of other regulation-averse fossil fuel industries. In telling us all of this, Vollmann repeats phrases throughout the two volumes, sometimes as mournful echoes and elsewhere as sarcastic commentary. Meanwhile, boosters of these industries explain that the jury on climate change is still out (it isn’t), and that, as a Colorado banker states, “science is the new religion.” Climate change, like the residual radiation in Japan, is invisible to them. We all learned to live with what we could not see.” Similar themes of ignorance and resignation play out in interviews with those he meets in Nitro, W.Va. They lacked comprehension of the various waves and particles that threatened them, not to mention the units of measurement used in media pronouncements. ![]() The interviews show people who, as Vollmann says of his Japanese subjects, “tried to believe in the goodness of corporations and the sincerity of cabinet ministers, or else shut out of mind what could not be helped. However, he allows, “since ‘Carbon Ideologies’ is primarily a record of people’s experiences, if you skip my tables and their numbers, my point will remain clear enough better yet, any mathematical errors might then escape your censure.” (As for those mathematical errors, the writer Will Boisvert has pointed out that when Vollmann writes “in each two days of 2009, the world burned the entire oil output of 1990,” the figure is off by 289 days.) This massive speed bump stretches from near the beginning of the first volume to. ![]() Vollmann also provides a lengthy primer on energy sources and calculations, discussing how much energy it takes to make, for example, concrete or nylon. We hear them at great length, but with little interpretation or analysis. ![]()
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