The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What's Possible in the Age of Warming

By Eric Holthaus

The first hopeful book about climate change, The Future Earth shows readers how to reverse the short- and long-term effects of climate change over the next three decades.

The basics of climate science are easy. We know it is entirely human-caused. Which means its solutions will be similarly human-led. In The Future Earth, leading climate change advocate and weather-related journalist Eric Holthaus (“the Rebel Nerd of Meteorology”—Rolling Stone) offers a radical vision of our future, specifically how to reverse the short- and long-term effects of climate change over the next three decades. Anchored by world-class reporting, interviews with futurists, climatologists, biologists, economists, and climate change activists, it shows what the world could look like if we implemented radical solutions on the scale of the crises we face. 

• What could happen if we reduced carbon emissions by 50 percent in the next decade?
• What could living in a city look like in 2030?
• How could the world operate in 2040, if the proposed Green New Deal created a 100 percent net carbon-free economy in the United States?

This is the book for anyone who feels overwhelmed by the current state of our environment. Hopeful and prophetic, The Future Earth invites us to imagine how we can reverse the effects of climate change in our own lifetime and encourages us to enter a deeper relationship with the earth as conscientious stewards and to re-affirm our commitment to one another in our shared humanity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jun 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9780062883186

Eric Holthaus

Eric Holthaus is the leading journalist on all things weather and climate change. He has written regularly for the Wall Street Journal, Slate, Grist, and The Correspondent, where he currently covers our interconnected relationship with the climate. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

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Part I

A Living Emergency

In September 2017, Puerto Rico was just beginning to recover from one of the worst multiyear droughts in its history. Faced with severe water shortages during the height of the drought, the island’s government rationed water use for two hundred thousand residents in the San Juan area, a drastic step worsened by years of austerity and colonial neglect. People there were allowed to run their taps only once every three days, forgoing one of the basic requirements of life.

Then Hurricane Maria struck, beginning the worst humanitarian crisis in modern American history.

In the span of a few hours, Hurricane Maria’s 155-mile-per-hour winds and torrential rains triggered a months-long power outage that reshaped the basics of civilization in Puerto Rico. Following the storm, survivors struggled for weeks to find potable water, edible food, reliable shelter, and adequate health care. With no other options, some residents of Puerto Rico were forced to collect drinking water from toxic waste sites. Hundreds of people died because hospitals, even if they were physically accessible, didn’t have electricity to provide basic services.

For survivors, Maria looked and felt like an utter reimagining of reality. Firsthand stories carried waves of shock and anguish.

In the early days after Maria, Ly Pérez, a student at the University of Puerto Rico, told me via text message that the only way she and her fellow students knew what was happening around them was by listening to the radio. [Today’s] the first time I saw pictures, and it’s absolutely horrifying. They kept mentioning the word ‘disaster,’ and your mind would create scenarios. But in no way does it compare to the absolutely heartbreaking reality.

We have reached a point at which all weather, in every season, and in every country on Earth, is directly connected to the changes we’ve inflicted on our planet’s atmosphere. Hurricane Maria was no exception. A 2019 study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters found that global warming made Maria’s disastrous floods nearly five times more likely than it would have been in 1956, when high-quality rainfall record keeping began in Puerto Rico. Lead author David Keellings told the American Geophysical Union that Maria is more extreme in its precipitation than anything else that the island has ever seen.

Hurricane Maria damaged or destroyed about 30 million trees, inflicting profound and unprecedented changes on the landscape. With the climate warming so quickly, biologists in Puerto Rico think the forests Maria destroyed will never return to their previous diversity. Many of the island’s largest and slowest-growing hardwood trees, like tabonuco and balata, suffered the worst damage. Their vast canopies provide habitats for birds, bats, and tree frogs. If future hurricanes are as strong (or even stronger) than Maria, Puerto Rico’s forests will eventually feature only smaller and shorter trees that are more resilient to high winds and scouring floods, which will leave local species without shelter. More than a year after the storm made landfall, satellite images showed that the island appeared definitively less green.

The storm of Hurricane Maria still hasn’t let up. A full-fledged mental health crisis is ongoing throughout the island, the largest psychosocial disaster in the United States according to Joseph Prewitt Diaz, disaster mental health advisor for the American Red Cross. The slow recovery has created a living emergency, a new normal that permeates daily life—characterized by despair, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress—which is more typical of refugee camps and conflict zones.

None of this was inevitable. None of this was a surprise. What is happening in Puerto Rico is the product of centuries of decisions made within a destructive system. We’ve known this for centuries, thanks in large part to the people whose voices were too often deemed dangerous or unworthy of our attention. Scientists are now certain that our use of fossil fuels and our destruction of the planet’s ecosystems are quickly bringing the future of human civilization into doubt. My goal with this book is to help you imagine your own part in building a better world that works for everyone, regardless of status or class or gender. And to remind you that you were born at exactly the right time to help change everything.

Because we refused to take action for decades, climate change is no longer just about science. It is now, at heart, an issue of justice. The fact that each year we are continuing to set new record highs in greenhouse gas emissions even as our planet is rapidly warming is a shocking symptom of a larger problem in the way our society is structured. An issue of justice, climate change is also a living emergency that touches everyone and every part of society, which makes it impossible to disentangle in any meaningful way the effects of increasingly extreme weather and the unfair system that caused it. The evidence is all around us: we need to embark rapidly on a different path.

But how?

* * *

The Latin root of the word disaster means ill-starred, literally a malevolent omen from the heavens. But climate-change-related disasters are no longer a matter of bad luck. We have tilted the odds toward catastrophe, particularly in the places that did the least to cause the problem. Meteorology has advanced to the point that we can now predict when and where disasters will take place. We also know that, due to the way our society is structured, the most economically and socially vulnerable parts of the planet will bear the brunt of these disasters—the people, like the survivors of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, who too often experience the worst of the injustices of history.

Today, climate change compounds natural disasters, giving people less time to recover before they are plunged back into crisis mode. Residents of small islands like Puerto Rico already face limited resources for fresh water. A 2018 study found that drought in the Caribbean is increasing in severity—even as hurricanes grow stronger and downpours get more intense. And this compounding of social and climate emergencies is happening all over the world, every single year.

In 2016, the year before Maria, on the other side of the world, Cyclone Winston rapidly strengthened to the most powerful storm ever measured in the Southern Hemisphere, just hours before its landfall in Fiji. In an address to the nation following the storm, Fijian president Jioji Konrote vowed that the country would do whatever is in its power to persuade the global community about the root cause: climate change. This is a fight we must win, he said. Our entire way of life is at stake. Years after landfall, as recovery drags on rainy season after rainy season, schools and families are still housed in government-issued tents.

In 2017, just a few days before Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, another hurricane tore through the Caribbean. Hurricane Irma, the strongest hurricane ever to make landfall anywhere in the Atlantic Ocean, hit the island of Barbuda with winds of up to 185 miles per hour. It demolished 90 percent of the island. The entire population fled, leaving the island completely uninhabited for the first time in hundreds of years. By law and tradition, land on the island is owned communally by its residents, but in the wake of the storm, private developers are now trying to pressure the government to change the law in order to encourage more tourism.

In 2018, Typhoon Yutu hit Saipan, the largest island in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, a US territory. With 180-mile-per-hour winds, it was the strongest storm in the history of the Mariana Islands. Before the storm, Saipan had been one of the world’s fastest-growing tourist destinations, but its casino, a primary draw, has struggled to remain profitable since Yutu struck, and the government has had to scale back its recovery efforts. This includes the reconstruction of its schools.

Cyclone Idai and Cyclone Kenneth struck Mozambique in 2019, within six weeks of each other. The country endured back-to-back landfalls at major hurricane force for the first time in recorded history. Idai would have been bad enough—the UN called it one of the worst weather-related disasters . . . in the southern hemisphere. But Kenneth proved to be the strongest storm ever to make landfall in mainland Africa. International relief efforts gathered only 25 percent of necessary funds during the storms’ immediate aftermath. To cover the gap and finance its own recovery, Mozambique was forced to take out millions of dollars of loans from the International Monetary Fund.

These disasters disproportionately harm women, the disabled, low-income, Black, and Indigenous communities, all of which have been marginalized for historical and contemporary reasons. In 2018, when Hurricane Michael tore through Florida and Georgia, it was just the fourth Category 5 hurricane landfall in US history. The areas most affected are some of the poorest parts of the country—impoverished counties of southern Georgia and the Florida Panhandle, which have been scarred by centuries of racism and slavery. Instead of bringing attention to these communities in the aftermath of Michael, most of the media coverage focused on the billions of dollars’ worth of ruined fighter planes at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida.

In Alaska, where 92 percent of the state’s revenue is still dependent on the oil and gas industry, summertime now means unusual thunderstorms, relentless wildfires, and unprecedented heat waves. In 2018, Alaska set an ominous milestone: for the first time, the state’s annual average temperature crossed 32°F (0°C). On July 4, 2019, as smoke from wildfires obscured the sky, temperatures in Anchorage hit 90°F (32°C), and sea ice near Alaska sunk to a new record low. The permafrost—frozen soil that traps billions of tons of carbon across the Arctic—is melting decades earlier than scientists expected, worsening the effects of climate change and crumbling homes, businesses, and roads—and even entire native communities. A NASA study late in 2019 confirmed that the Arctic had switched to a net emitter of greenhouse gases likely for the first time in tens of thousands of years. July 2019 was the hottest month in recorded history on our planet.

In early September 2019, Hurricane Dorian, another Category 5, stalled over the Abaco Islands in the Bahamas for nearly a day. Despite its destruction, the American press largely ignored Dorian and its aftermath, deciding to cover with great fervor President Trump’s use of a black Sharpie to alter an official National Hurricane Center forecast to make it seem as if it were in line with his erroneous tweet stating the storm threatened Alabama instead. But this is how the press often behaves, as if the people enduring the worsening climate emergency are irrelevant, as long as the disasters do not land on US soil.

By every account, Dorian inflicted on the Bahamas the worst single day of weather in the recorded history of the Western Hemisphere: sustained winds of 185 miles per hour, a surge in ocean levels of 23 feet, an unrelenting force that leveled even concrete storm shelters. Thousands of Haitian immigrants, many of whom worked in the luxury resorts on Treasure Cay, lost everything.

Every morning, you wake up, you open your door and you see the debris and it’s just getting to you, Eddie Floyd Bodie, a Bahamian pastor who grew up near where Dorian made landfall, told the Miami Herald. Your mind is wondering what’s going on. It’s a bad feeling knowing that you used to seeing things that you don’t see anymore. What do you say? You say you better try to get adjusted to it, but it’s hard. The pressure starts to get to you.

As the year came to a close, a firestorm erupted in Australia on New Year’s Eve. In the resort town of Mallacoota thousands of people took shelter on the beach, walled in by rapidly advancing flames on all sides. The fires were the largest in recorded history on the continent, covering an area eighty times the size of New York City. Entire ecosystems were wiped out. In the state of New South Wales alone, an estimated 480 million mammals, birds, and reptiles were killed. Prime Minister Scott Morrison watched fireworks in Sydney Harbor as his country burned.

Climate change doesn’t always take on such dramatic forms. More often, it’s insidious. Bugs can survive in places they couldn’t before, greatly increasing the threat of tropical diseases, even as far north as Alaska and Greenland. In search of cooler weather, trees, birds, mammals, and other species are creeping up mountain slopes and toward the poles. Spring green-up occurs earlier every year, shifting the timing of thousands of species’ interactions and rapidly shifting growing zones, which throw entire ecosystems dangerously off-balance. Heat waves have become prolonged and deadlier. Wildfire smoke is aggravating chronic illnesses hundreds of miles away from the flames. Air pollution, worsened by fossil fuel burning, kills more than nineteen thousand people a day, making it one of the leading causes of death in nearly every country on Earth. Young people growing up today are seeking treatment for mental health issues in numbers never seen before, in part because they are not always sure they’ll have a livable future.

It can’t go on like this. Somehow, some way, we have to learn how to care about one another again.

When we read stories about how climate change is altering the world, journalists often focus our attention on people and places far removed from our everyday experiences. Polar bears are majestic and fascinating creatures, but virtually none of us will ever interact with one. For the millions of people who do live in the Arctic, mass starvation of other animals is happening with increasing regularity and creating a much more immediate impact on their lives. In recent years, about a quarter of the caribou in Russia died due to unseasonably warm winter weather, which transformed the normally soft snow into a sheet of ice, preventing them from accessing the grass below. The loss of sea ice doesn’t affect only polar bears, which depend on the ice to hunt; it’s killing off the region’s entire food chain, from migratory whales to plankton. Sea birds, like puffins—leading indicators of oceanic health—are also experiencing a rapid demise. Just inland along the Arctic coastline, the growing season has almost doubled in length over the last decade as the open water offshore has transformed the landscape from tundra to a humid shrubland. The environment has been thrown into a tailspin.

Offshore, the opening of new waterways has transformed Arctic fishing industries: In Greenland, mackerel—migratory fish that also live in tropical waters—had never been seen locally until the start of the twenty-first century. They now arrive there every year, making up one-quarter of Greenland’s fishing economy. Salmon, too, pushed to the point of local extinction in California, have occasionally been spotted in the Arctic. All these changes are happening while the people who have lived there for thousands of years fight to preserve their ways of life and fend off greedy companies looking to establish Arctic shipping lanes and claim mineral rights.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are experiencing our own surreal encounters with the rapidly transforming planet, every day. In 2016, an octopus splayed out inside a Miami Beach parking garage went viral on the internet. Climate reporter Brian Kahn has kept a running log of these Dali-like moments on Twitter, labeling them Postcards from the Anthropocene. Recent features include: a man fly-fishing next to the Washington Monument (who ended up catching a carp); two men playing golf while a raging wildfire burns in the background; a man mowing his lawn while a tornado churns near his backyard; sunbathers during a heat wave in northern Finland sharing the water with a caribou; a police boat cruising down the center of a flooded interstate in North Carolina; servers and patrons carrying on with their dinner in ankle-deep water at a restaurant in Italy; and a firebomber airplane scooping up water just offshore from a surfing beach in California.

That Miami Beach octopus became famous because of a king tide, a phenomenon that occurs during the twice-monthly gravitational alignment of the Earth, the sun, and the moon, and is exacerbated by the rise in sea levels. It’s this kind of gradually escalating flooding that will likely force Floridians to permanently retreat from the coastline, not a devastating hurricane. By the 2040s, within the time span of most homeowners’ mortgages, the Union of Concerned Scientists predicts that chronic coastal flooding—defined as flooding that happens twenty-six or more times a year—could envelop 300,000 coastal homes currently worth a combined total of more than $100 billion. And that’s just in the United States. By the end of the century, that figure could balloon to hundreds of trillions of dollars worldwide in the worst-case sea-level-rise scenarios, a truly daunting prospect that climate scientist James Hansen has characterized as the loss of all coastal cities, most of the world’s largest cities, and all of their history.

Changes like these, at once pervasive and insidious, define our new planetary era. The simultaneous disturbance of nearly every ecosystem on Earth is helping opportunistic, weedy species flourish while specialized plants and animals race to adapt. There’s no better example of this than the worldwide boom in jellyfish, which have become a danger to swimming and power plants, and are newly dominating ecosystems all over the planet. Jellyfish expert Lisa-ann Gershwin said that after at least 585 million years of existence, the current moment might be the best thing that’s ever happened to jellyfish. Imagine a world where somebody else warms up the water that you’re living in so you grow faster, eat more—of course there’s more food available because the competitors are gone . . . you reproduce more and you live longer to do more of it, she explained. You would be pretty happy.

The same thing that’s happening in the ocean is happening on land. Warming temperatures are increasing the metabolism rate of soil microbes like bacteria and fungi. As the tiny organisms break down decaying plant and animal