For our August book club choice, we talked with journalist and author dwallacewells about his new book, The Uninhabitable Earth.
We want you to read with us! Each month, Teen Vogue Book Club will select a book and review it, and at the end of the month, we’ll have a video Q&A discussion with the author., starts off as a cascade of startling and deeply troubling facts. Read it and you’ll be the life of every party, as you spout a thousand fascinating tidbits about the earth’s future that’ll turn everyone’s faces white: Every passenger on a flight from New York to LA melts 30 square feet of Arctic ice.
Teen Vogue: When I mentioned to people that I was reading your book, I’d get a lot of responses along the lines of like, “I’ve been meaning to read that but I’m not ready for it yet,” or, “I’m not in the mood for something so depressing right now.” Which resonates with a lot of common wisdom about how people won't respond better to positive rather than negative emotions. And yet, this is a successful book! People are obviously reading it.
Fear is a quite powerful motivator. It's also corrosive and toxic and we don't want to let it get out of control, or be the only way we think about climate change. But, especially given that it is a rational response to the state of the science as we understand, I also don't think we should be scared of being scared. From a truth-telling perspective, the world is scary. We should trust the public with that information. Now, maybe the flame of fear burns bright but quickly.
Right, but when 60 percent of the energy that's produced by the electricity sector is lost as wasted heat, and Americans discard something like 60 percent of their food… You can imagine an austerity project that actually doesn't deprive people of anything if we just made these systems much more efficient and made people much more conscious of their waste. That’s one reason why the average European’s carbon footprint is much, much smaller than the average American.
The government could also subsidize lab-grown meat and that kind of thing, so prices fall down into line with animal-produced meat. There will be, one hopes, more widespread zero-carbon transportation options, such that people don't feel the pressure to fly all the time. So I think there will be lifestyle choices involved in this transition.
But the smallest ask is simply talking about the problem. The polls do show that many more people are scared about climate change than ever, but often aren’t discussing it with their loved ones. That means that we are all carrying around private anxiety, which we can translate into some kind of collective activation, which can have a real impact.According to the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report, we need to halve our emissions by 2030, to cover catastrophic warming.
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