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Reviews tagging 'Animal death'
The 2084 Report: An Oral History of the Great Warming by James Lawrence Powell
2 reviews
schnaucl's review
challenging
dark
informative
sad
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
3.5
The conceit is that it's a book of oral interviews in 2084 dealing with climate change. It's an interesting idea but there were times I was frustrated by the execution.
The idea is apparently based on another book, but the one I was reminded of was World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. One of the things that made that one so effective was that the interviewees were often ordinary people. I think this book would have benefited from at least a few interviews with non experts. Not because experts aren't worth listening to, but I was definitely reminded of the line about how one person is a tragedy and 1,000 (or whatever high number) is a statistic. There were a lot of facts and statistics which I think has a distancing effect as opposed to a heartfelt story about how climate change impacted an individual person or family.
Many of the interviews focused largely on our present, partly because of course the book is actually written now and the real project is to persuade people of the urgency of taking action, and partly because these are actually thought to really be the last few years before we reach the tipping point so of course any review of how we got to where we are would focus on our present.
I wish the author had written this after the Covid lock downs when people could actually see the environmental effects of shutting down the world economy for several months since I have to think that would have merited some analysis of the scale of what's required.
I did appreciate that the book had perspectives from around the world and it wasn't just focused on the US.
I found the first chapter frustrating, which probably had an effect on how I perceived the rest of the book. The first chapter is basically why people let climate change happen and the conclusion is they could have stopped it but just chose not to without really going into all the reasons that might be. And from a purely fictional perspective, I get it, I couldn't pass a quiz on all the social, political, and economic forces in play sixty years ago in my own country, let alone around the world, but a) I think some of the reasons are not specific to a time and place but simply human nature, and b) an expert on the history of climate change should have a much better answer than they just chose not to.
I think there are a lot of reasons that more progress isn't made on climate change. One is that humans generally are really bad at long-term thinking especially when the consequences won't be felt for a decade or more. Everyone knows to be healthy in old age you should eat well, exercise daily, sleep well at night, have regular doctor visits, etc and yet most people fail to do some or all of those things regularly. People know they should save for retirement but even when people can afford to, many don't make it a priority (and many people can't afford to even if they want to). It's easy to make a choice that leads to short term gain and long term catastrophe.
People, or at least Americans, tend to be overly optimistic or prone to magical thinking. So for some people there's a feeling God (or whoever) will take care of it. Other people believe science will magically fix it. There's actually some of that at the end of the book which I'll get to later. But we definitely have a culture that places a huge value on technological innovation. Climate change will be disrupted and everything will be fine so we just have to wait for a genius to invent the thing that will save us.
Conversely, one party has spent the last few decades trying to persuade their voters that experts are elitists who are to be distrusted (see also vaccines) and a media that seems to believe they have to present every story with two equally balanced sides in the the name of fairness or objectivity even when the reality is that the sides aren't equal The vast majority of scientists believe that climate change is real and that humans have made it much worse is presented as some scientists say it's a thing but other scientists disagree.
To say nothing of the financial incentives and how deeply entrenched the oil and gas industry is in at least American politics, not to mention the auto industry. There's a reason there's so much focus on coal miners even though the industry employs fewer workers than, say, retail, which was also having a massive problem with layoffs pre-Covid but didn't get nearly as much attention (also, those workers tend to be women and People of Color).
People only have so much bandwidth and people are worried about how they're going to keep a roof over their heads or pay for college or their parents' care or their own medical care or finding or keeping a job or they're focused on other causes, worrying about the state of democracy in America and around the world, or the unhoused or animal welfare or income inequality. And yes, some of those things are related.
There are countries who legitimately feel like the worst polluting nations made their fortunes and power exploiting their own natural resources (and those of other countries) and feel it's unfair that they're being told they can't for the good of the planet. It seems especially unfair when the largest polluters haven't made meaningful sacrifices to curb their pollution.
And yes, there are also some people who think they'll be dead by the time it becomes a catastrophe so it won't be their problem and screw everyone else.
So yeah, people "chose" not to, but the fact that the chapter on how we got here didn't really acknowledge how many forces are designed to make sure progress is slow or nonexistent made me reluctant to distrust the rest of what was said because it didn't feel honest.
In fairness, the book also raised several good points. If I'd known about the connection between lower water levels and insufficient water to power hydroelectricity, I'd forgotten it. As someone who lives in Washington State where we have cheap electricity thanks to hydro power that feels particularly relevant. Of course the mass extinction of species will get worse and a terrible human toll as cities begin to run out of water, something that's already started to happen (and a story that would have been perfect to tell from the point of view of a non expert person). Coastal cities will flood and become uninhabitable. The real estate market will crash. I appreciate that the interview about that topic was about Myrtle Beach rather than Florida. I would also have liked to see a chapter on urban flooding relating to more ordinary weather rather than massive hurricanes. (See lack of zoning in Houston).
If anything I suspect the destabilizing effect of climate change was probably underplayed, although I think the author was absolutely right that it would lead to a rise in authoritarianism and fascism. And when enough people or governments become desperate it may well lead to a nuclear war. There will be parts of the planet where it's not safe to be outside for more than a few minutes due to the wet bulb temperatures. Famine will increase as previously fertile land becomes arid. The range of places where things can grow will change. Animals will die as their habitable areas move too far away. I hadn't heard animal habits expressed as a pyramid before but it was a good one. People will be exposed to diseases that were previously located in other areas and they won't have the same immunities to it.
I was a little surprised there was never a real reckoning with the people who did know and lied about it. I'm thinking something along the lines of the trials of the executives of the cigarette companies. Maybe the insurance companies who have known how bad it might be for decades. The people in Congress who made it so that the military isn't allowed to plan for climate change related instability and contingencies.
I was very frustrated by the end which seemed to conclude that nuclear power (and some form of carbon tax) would be a miracle solution. It's true that people probably think the chances of a nuclear accident are higher than they actually are. It's also true that some of our current nuclear power plants are well past their planned end of life (something that wasn't really addressed) and we're not really sure what to do with them and the person being interviewed doesn't discuss that aspect of it. As previously mentioned, I live in Washington State, home of the Hanford Nuclear Power Plant, now decommissioned, So I've seen news stories about the workers exposed to radiation and the nuclear waste being stored in places with imperfect containment. Neither is really addressed aside from a brief discussion of how to safely dispose of nuclear waste which mostly that there won't be much of it and also Yucca mountain (which has its own problems, of course). Nothing about how Hanford is a Superfund site and chronically underfunded and will probably never be clean in our lifetimes. Also built on fault lines they didn't know existed, which is neither here nor there but a fun fact for reading this far. And obviously people working in coal mines and coal fueled power plants are also exposed to a number of hazards, as are people who live in areas with fracking (which in addition to toxic chemicals also uses huge amounts of water, which weirdly wasn't really touched on).
There's an acknowledgement that Sweden managed to build all its nuclear power plants before the protest movement started but no grappling with the fact that the movement exists now so at least in the US it would probably be decades before a plant could be built because it would be tied up in litigation (and no doubt relegated to the parts of the country where people without much political power live).
The aforementioned part about technological optimism comes when the interview subject acknowledges that storage of power is a problem but literally dismisses it with a line saying it would have been solved. Oh, would it? Just because we need it to be? Cool.
And I really think there needs to be an acknowledgement that there would need to be massive sacrifices, especially from world's leading polluters, including corporations. I was glad the author avoided the notion that if individuals just stopped using plastic bags or whatever that would do it. Don't get me wrong, it absolutely helps. But it's also a way of shifting the burden from the people who actually have the power to make large scale changes to the average individual and then, of course, when the average person can't prevent global warming they can be blamed for the failure. It's not the entrenched interests of the fossil fuel industry, you see, it's because you didn't recycle that newspaper or forgot to bring a cloth bag when you went grocery shopping. So points for that.
The idea is apparently based on another book, but the one I was reminded of was World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. One of the things that made that one so effective was that the interviewees were often ordinary people. I think this book would have benefited from at least a few interviews with non experts. Not because experts aren't worth listening to, but I was definitely reminded of the line about how one person is a tragedy and 1,000 (or whatever high number) is a statistic. There were a lot of facts and statistics which I think has a distancing effect as opposed to a heartfelt story about how climate change impacted an individual person or family.
Many of the interviews focused largely on our present, partly because of course the book is actually written now and the real project is to persuade people of the urgency of taking action, and partly because these are actually thought to really be the last few years before we reach the tipping point so of course any review of how we got to where we are would focus on our present.
I wish the author had written this after the Covid lock downs when people could actually see the environmental effects of shutting down the world economy for several months since I have to think that would have merited some analysis of the scale of what's required.
I did appreciate that the book had perspectives from around the world and it wasn't just focused on the US.
I think there are a lot of reasons that more progress isn't made on climate change. One is that humans generally are really bad at long-term thinking especially when the consequences won't be felt for a decade or more. Everyone knows to be healthy in old age you should eat well, exercise daily, sleep well at night, have regular doctor visits, etc and yet most people fail to do some or all of those things regularly. People know they should save for retirement but even when people can afford to, many don't make it a priority (and many people can't afford to even if they want to). It's easy to make a choice that leads to short term gain and long term catastrophe.
People, or at least Americans, tend to be overly optimistic or prone to magical thinking. So for some people there's a feeling God (or whoever) will take care of it. Other people believe science will magically fix it. There's actually some of that at the end of the book which I'll get to later. But we definitely have a culture that places a huge value on technological innovation. Climate change will be disrupted and everything will be fine so we just have to wait for a genius to invent the thing that will save us.
Conversely, one party has spent the last few decades trying to persuade their voters that experts are elitists who are to be distrusted (see also vaccines) and a media that seems to believe they have to present every story with two equally balanced sides in the the name of fairness or objectivity even when the reality is that the sides aren't equal The vast majority of scientists believe that climate change is real and that humans have made it much worse is presented as some scientists say it's a thing but other scientists disagree.
To say nothing of the financial incentives and how deeply entrenched the oil and gas industry is in at least American politics, not to mention the auto industry. There's a reason there's so much focus on coal miners even though the industry employs fewer workers than, say, retail, which was also having a massive problem with layoffs pre-Covid but didn't get nearly as much attention (also, those workers tend to be women and People of Color).
People only have so much bandwidth and people are worried about how they're going to keep a roof over their heads or pay for college or their parents' care or their own medical care or finding or keeping a job or they're focused on other causes, worrying about the state of democracy in America and around the world, or the unhoused or animal welfare or income inequality. And yes, some of those things are related.
There are countries who legitimately feel like the worst polluting nations made their fortunes and power exploiting their own natural resources (and those of other countries) and feel it's unfair that they're being told they can't for the good of the planet. It seems especially unfair when the largest polluters haven't made meaningful sacrifices to curb their pollution.
And yes, there are also some people who think they'll be dead by the time it becomes a catastrophe so it won't be their problem and screw everyone else.
So yeah, people "chose" not to, but the fact that the chapter on how we got here didn't really acknowledge how many forces are designed to make sure progress is slow or nonexistent made me reluctant to distrust the rest of what was said because it didn't feel honest.
In fairness, the book also raised several good points. If I'd known about the connection between lower water levels and insufficient water to power hydroelectricity, I'd forgotten it. As someone who lives in Washington State where we have cheap electricity thanks to hydro power that feels particularly relevant. Of course the mass extinction of species will get worse and a terrible human toll as cities begin to run out of water, something that's already started to happen (and a story that would have been perfect to tell from the point of view of a non expert person). Coastal cities will flood and become uninhabitable. The real estate market will crash. I appreciate that the interview about that topic was about Myrtle Beach rather than Florida. I would also have liked to see a chapter on urban flooding relating to more ordinary weather rather than massive hurricanes. (See lack of zoning in Houston).
If anything I suspect the destabilizing effect of climate change was probably underplayed, although I think the author was absolutely right that it would lead to a rise in authoritarianism and fascism. And when enough people or governments become desperate it may well lead to a nuclear war. There will be parts of the planet where it's not safe to be outside for more than a few minutes due to the wet bulb temperatures. Famine will increase as previously fertile land becomes arid. The range of places where things can grow will change. Animals will die as their habitable areas move too far away. I hadn't heard animal habits expressed as a pyramid before but it was a good one. People will be exposed to diseases that were previously located in other areas and they won't have the same immunities to it.
I was a little surprised there was never a real reckoning with the people who did know and lied about it. I'm thinking something along the lines of the trials of the executives of the cigarette companies. Maybe the insurance companies who have known how bad it might be for decades. The people in Congress who made it so that the military isn't allowed to plan for climate change related instability and contingencies.
I was very frustrated by the end which seemed to conclude that nuclear power (and some form of carbon tax) would be a miracle solution. It's true that people probably think the chances of a nuclear accident are higher than they actually are. It's also true that some of our current nuclear power plants are well past their planned end of life (something that wasn't really addressed) and we're not really sure what to do with them and the person being interviewed doesn't discuss that aspect of it. As previously mentioned, I live in Washington State, home of the Hanford Nuclear Power Plant, now decommissioned, So I've seen news stories about the workers exposed to radiation and the nuclear waste being stored in places with imperfect containment. Neither is really addressed aside from a brief discussion of how to safely dispose of nuclear waste which mostly that there won't be much of it and also Yucca mountain (which has its own problems, of course). Nothing about how Hanford is a Superfund site and chronically underfunded and will probably never be clean in our lifetimes. Also built on fault lines they didn't know existed, which is neither here nor there but a fun fact for reading this far. And obviously people working in coal mines and coal fueled power plants are also exposed to a number of hazards, as are people who live in areas with fracking (which in addition to toxic chemicals also uses huge amounts of water, which weirdly wasn't really touched on).
There's an acknowledgement that Sweden managed to build all its nuclear power plants before the protest movement started but no grappling with the fact that the movement exists now so at least in the US it would probably be decades before a plant could be built because it would be tied up in litigation (and no doubt relegated to the parts of the country where people without much political power live).
The aforementioned part about technological optimism comes when the interview subject acknowledges that storage of power is a problem but literally dismisses it with a line saying it would have been solved. Oh, would it? Just because we need it to be? Cool.
And I really think there needs to be an acknowledgement that there would need to be massive sacrifices, especially from world's leading polluters, including corporations. I was glad the author avoided the notion that if individuals just stopped using plastic bags or whatever that would do it. Don't get me wrong, it absolutely helps. But it's also a way of shifting the burden from the people who actually have the power to make large scale changes to the average individual and then, of course, when the average person can't prevent global warming they can be blamed for the failure. It's not the entrenched interests of the fossil fuel industry, you see, it's because you didn't recycle that newspaper or forgot to bring a cloth bag when you went grocery shopping. So points for that.
Content Warnings
Minor: Animal death, Death, Suicide, Terminal illness, and War
sydneyyreads's review against another edition
3.0
I really vibed with this book most of the time. It's terrifying. It takes current climate science and uses it to extrapolate what might happen by the year 2084. I really loved the advocacy of nuclear power, because we need to utilize nuclear power more. I fucking hated that the Uighurs were the main reason for the Chinese water shortages. I also hated that the Inuit were called Eskimos because Eskimo is a derogatory term.
Content Warnings
Minor: Animal death and Suicide
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