David Wallace-Wells needs to stop gaslighting us about climate solutions

From apathy inducing rhetoric to describing fossil-fuel funded CCS as "climate reparations"--I'm so over it.

Jan 26, 2022

New York is the scene for many dystopic visions of climate futurism, mostly centering on floods. Last year, some of those visions came true with the flooded subway infrastructure during the heavy rainfalls of Hurricane Ida.

It’s also home to the headquarters of the largest banks financing the fossil-fueled continuation of climate change.

It is this fair NYC where we lay our scene.

Brooklyn-born author David Wallace Wells grew up in Riverdale, attended University of Chicago and earned a degree in history at Brown University in 2004. He became a prominent climate voice thanks to his long-form article, "The Uninhabitable Earth,” published in 2017, which he later expanded into a book by the same title, published in 2019. He now works as editor of New York, a left-leaning magazine where he writes about the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change.

In “Uninhabitable,” (the article) he took pains to say that our fixation on flooding overshadowed significant “other” scientific and social concerns. He highlighted the problems of permafrost melting, the albedo effect of more sunlight reflection with less ice, more cloud cover trapping heat, and fewer forests and fauna to help mitigate the carbon emission.

He covered the social issues of heat stress, the food shortage problem, the release of ancient diseases trapped in ice, the reduced oxygen content of air, conflict, poverty, sulfide laced oceans, and the problem of individual perceptions about climate change.

Indeed, climate change is an all-encompassing issue. He got that right.

This was a rallying cry for us to get scared. “No matter how well informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough,” he wrote, echoing the boy who cried wolf.

The problem is the point of his article was not to scare us into changing fossil fuel powered systems. Quite the opposite.

His article suggests that even if we do something about it, it won’t make a difference: “Most people talk as if Miami and Bangladesh still have a chance of surviving; most of the scientists I spoke with assume we’ll lose them within the century, even if we stop burning fossil fuel in the next decade.”

In other words, he used personal accountability and shame to emphasize the point that we’re too far gone to do anything.

But that’s not what other media outlets tell us. From Scientific American to Teen Vogue climate writers are telling us that “every degree counts.”

Shame on you

As a person currently addressing my own PTSD and depression, I have learned a lot about how shame and guilt impact the brain. They can turn off the prefrontal cortex and put us in a survival mode state of numbness, fear, and anxiety. Check out the book Mindsight or this TED talk by Nadine Burke Harris for more on that.

Shame and guilt are not exactly solutions-oriented frames of mind.

If we use this approach as a rallying cry, we are confusing the narrative of climate change with the narrative of depression: overwhelming feelings send us into a state of near-permanent apathy and a lack of motivation to act.

I’m not the first to say this. Much has been said about the negligible solutions-oriented impact of doom and gloom narratives of climate.

From apathy to blame-shifting

You’ll see this play out in the art that his work has inspired. David Wallace Wells’s work has inspired one of the most popular films on climate change of late: Don’t Look Up.

Spoiler alert: The ending shows a family and friend group of scientists sitting around a table praying. A comet impales the earth and they die. Meanwhile, older rich white people escape to another planet using cryogenics. In the end, scientists are to blame, because they failed to get the right message out in time.

The premise is essentially this:

scientists are bad communicators,
the media only wants clicks and views so it ignores the climate message,
politicians will only mobilize around something they can invest in,
they will also heighten divisions around the issue, and
they’ll pursue fraudulent techno-solutions at the expense of the global population’s well-being

“Uninhabited” follows a similar line of reasoning. He blames our “failure of imagination” to solve climate change on this: “[T]he timid language of scientific probabilities, which the climatologist James Hansen once called ‘scientific reticence’ in a paper chastising scientists for editing their own observations so conscientiously that they failed to communicate how dire the threat really was.”

In both works, we’re supposed to be “thankful” to these producers of cultural works that “cut through” and “get the message across.” But here’s the kicker: Neither gets the most important message across—the need to stop burning fossil fuels.

For climate journalist Mary Heglar, having a comet serve as a climate change metaphor allowed us to look at the interconnections of politicians and the media in the problem of climate change:

“There’s a lot of ways in which it breaks down as a metaphor for climate change. It’s not an industry-made wound. It’s just this random thing that comes out of nowhere. But by not having it be this industry-made thing, they didn’t have to create an analogy for the fossil fuel industry. That allowed them to villainize politicians and the media in a way that I’ve never really seen done in the scant bits of climate fiction or climate movies, rather. […] It allowed them to lay the blame at the feet of the media and the politicians in a way that I really think more people need to understand.”

While it may be helpful to complicate the problem, I find it a convenient blame shift, which serves the interest of the fossil fuel industry.

This is gaslighting

In this SNL rendition of the original “gaslight” movie, comedian Kate McKinnon impersonates Ingrid Bergman and calls out her husband for telling her a pineapple is a steak.

Similarly, the problem with climate science communication is not scientists, and their failure to “convince” politicians: it’s the fossil fuel corporations’ money trails and disinformation campaigns.

In Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes writes how fossil fuel companies spread doubt-inducing propaganda by citing cherry picked evidence from a handful of industry-funded scientific reports. Media outlets—possibly due to their own funding sources—played along and politicized the science of climate change by turning it into a debate rather presenting it as a set of facts.

This is in spite of the long-standing scientific consensus among peer-reviewed literature about the reality and harm of climate change on our planet. Indeed, the propaganda machine of the fossil fuel industry is vast. It includes think tanks, lobbyists, and PR firms. Now, a group of 450 scientists is calling on PR firms to cut their ties with fossil fuel companies.

A 2019 Influence Map study reports: “the five largest publicly-traded oil and gas majors (ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, BP, and Total) have invested over $1Bn of shareholder funds in the three years following the Paris Agreement on misleading climate-related branding and lobbying.”

To this day, climate change is given very little media coverage, especially in broadcast media, and its coverage dropped during the height of the pandemic in 2020. Oddly, David Wallace-Wells has spent more time reporting on the pandemic than climate change lately.

Wallace-Wells actually cites Oreskes, but not for her most famous work in Merchants of Doubt. Here’s what he says about her work: “the climate writer Naomi Oreskes in particular has suggested stops us from preparing as though anything worse than a median outcome were even possible.” Mischaracterization much?

The framing of both “The Uninhabitable Earth” and Don’t Look Up is that the legitimate scientists haven’t done their part to defend the science. I’d argue that neither have they.

Where are the fossil fuels?

Why is the fossil-fuel accountability narrative absent in both David Wallace-Wells’s work? If there’s one fact that you need to know before you start solving climate change, it’s that 71% of all the world’s emissions are the result of just 100 fossil fuel corporations’ activities.

I know of no other climate journalist who shies away from calling out fossil fuel execs.

The gaslighting gets worse

In an even more intriguing plot twist, one of David Wallace-Wells’s latest op-eds makes a case for carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology as a form of “climate reparations.”

Yikes. Before we get to the “climate reparations” spin, let’s talk about CCS.

The problem with CCS is that it’s a key piece of the PR machine puzzle fossil fuel companies use to gain investment for their supposedly “green” activities. CCS is a flawed solution to climate change for a wide range of reasons:

Historically, the CCS industry has emitted way more than it’s ever captured.
CCS has only captured a sliver of projected CO2 storage, in spite of its huge expense funded by taxpayers.
- According to Food and Water Watch, “Between 2005 and 2012, the DOE spent $6.9 billion attempting to demonstrate the feasibility of CCS for coal, but little came of this investment, and between 2014 and 2016, less than 4 percent of the planned CCS capacity was deployed.”
- Chevron’s $3bn Gorgon CCS project, funded by Shell and Exxon, in Western Australia has become a poster child for a failure to meet carbon capture targets.
Capturing CO2 underground or in other forms like rocks is hard to do permanently, and it could contaminate groundwater.
CCS presents a conflict of interest problem, as its research and development is largely funded (roughly 70%) by the same fossil-fuel interests who are largely to blame for climate change to begin with.
Theoretically, you find a way to capture CO2, you enable the continued burning of CO2 to be offset, yet carbon neutrality doesn’t solve climate change in terms of the math.
One scholar argues CCS also potentially “locks in” the use of fossil fuels from a technological and political perspective.
CCS only generates income if there’s a price on carbon. It may appear scalable, except for its monetization problem.
In the US, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance is still mostly voluntary, apart from a regulated carbon market in California. As a result, there’s no concrete business case for CCS, yet. The fossil fuel industry likely prefers things to stay this way, because they’re so far getting aspirational CCS investment without the carbon price consequence.
We have other proven and scalable climate tech solutions like solar and wind renewable energy with far fewer barriers to implementation. CCS competes with them.

For all of the above reasons, CCS inspired this comedy sketch by The Juice Media.

The climate reparations article is not the first time Wallace-Wells brought up CCS either. He touts CCS as the best bet according to some of the original thinkers in climate science at the end of his most well-known article, “Uninhabitable.”

Even if this characterization of the scientists’ opinions is true, it’s odd that he refers to retired climate scientist “forefathers” rather than those most active ones today.

Climate science and modeling has advanced significantly in recent years thanks to machine learning and data science improvements. His “climate originalism” is the same kind of flawed logic that right wing originalists use to interpret the Constitution, as if history hadn’t happened and time stood still.

CCS as… Climate reparations????

But there’s still this other gaslighting issue, where David Wallace-Wells frames CCS as a form of climate reparations.

“Reparations” traditionally means payment for historical injustice to the communities who have disproportionately been impacted.

It is also true that a form of climate reparations are a part of the Paris Agreement. This became crystal clear when Barbados’s PM Mia Mottley spoke at COP26 about how the global North had failed on its $100 billion dollar promise to pay climate finance for adaptation to the countries least responsible for the problem.

Indeed, the United States is responsible for roughly 20% of historic climate change emissions globally, more than any other country. It also has some of the weakest climate policy compared to its outsized role in perpetuating the problem.

Yet, David Wallace-Wells proposes carbon capture and storage (CCS) as a form of “reparations,” when it mostly benefits the fossil fuel industry. This is gaslighting at its finest and it needs to stop.

I would like David Wallace-Wells to stop distorting climate priorities and solutions. I hope other solutions-oriented thought leaders drown out his negative impacts in climate discourse.

Floodplain by Erica Eller

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