New York Mag’s Climate Disaster Porn Gets It Painfully Wrong

The New York magazine piece “The Uninhabitable Earth” by David Wallace-Wells selectively fetishizes natural science and is socially and politically hopeless.

The classic image of eco-apartheid,
 from the perspective of the sky, in São Paulo. 

I’ll leave the science to Michael Mann, who lays it out on his Facebook page. Yes, obviously, absent any real action to reduce emissions we’re fucked. BUT: That is not going to happen. The actually realistic danger zone is a combination of too little decarbonization, too late, in the context of hardening inequalities of class, race, and gender  —  in short, eco-apartheid. Those brutal inequalities, and the bullets that maintain them  —  not molecules of methane  —  are what will kill people.

And that climate violence would not come because of an absence of emissions reductions. It is fully compatible with a huge reduction of emissions. Though of course, the less we slash emissions through a broad program of egalitarian economic intervention (or “democratic ecologies”), the more violence there is likely to be.

Read the piece on Jacobin by Daniel Aldana Cohen - “New York Mag’s Climate Disaster Porn Gets It Painfully Wrong.”