Los Angeles Review of Books in what's left of Los Angeles
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Bill, you write about your trip to Fukushima in your recent two-volume work, Carbon Ideologies. I had the great pleasure of reading that, and I was struck by its narrative shape. It reads like a letter to the future that is part apology and part explanation for why we didn’t do more in the here and now to mitigate climate change. Why that structure?
WTV: Well, for one thing, it’s easier to be calm about the whole thing if we just suppose that it’s already over, that our generation is gone. The second reason is that, unfortunately, there really is very little that any of us in this room can do about [climate change]. It’s not a matter of setting the thermostat a little differently. A lot of greenhouse gases are released through processes such as agriculture. Rice growing in Japan, which seems very innocuous, releases 50 percent of that country’s methane, which is a very dangerous greenhouse gas. Manufacturing, all over the world, is extremely wasteful. When molten metal is turned into sheet metal, about half of the metal has to be re-melted, because we’re not bothering to really think about how to design our sheet metal. There are all these things that need to be worked on, and we can’t do it. All we can do is make a noise, and hope that we get some government officials to notice. I don’t have much hope there.
Speaking of not having much hope, I have a question for you, David. Last summer, you wrote the article “The Uninhabitable Earth” for New York Magazine. It generated a lot of attention; I think it was somebody at Slate who called it The Silent Spring of our time. But it also generated some criticism, even among people in the scientific and journalistic communities. They said that the piece was too scary, that it was actually damaging the conversations that could be happening. In the months since writing that piece, where is your thinking in terms of how we should be talking about climate change? Is fear a useful tool?
DWW: I think so, yes. Very much. After publishing that article, I heard from a lot of people who felt that the piece posed a risk of turning off possible activists or political activity. That it would cause a kind of burnout effect, or that people would give up hope and lose faith that anything could be done. Fear does pose a risk to people who’ve devoted themselves and their lives to this issue. They might give up. But when I look at the country as a whole, it strikes me as so transparently true that the average person is not scared enough about climate change.
It felt to me then and still feels to me now that if the risk is turning off a few activists, but the benefit is turning on many, many, many, many more people to political action, then that’s a trade-off worth making. And on top of that, there’s this argument of, like: What I said is the truth....
