World Without End

Back in climate land: "World Without End: An Illustrated Guide to the Climate Crisis" is a translation of the 2021 comic novel "Le Monde sans fin, miracle énergétique et dérive climatique" by French illustrator Christophe Blain and climate expert Jean-Marc Jancovici. I encountered it last year on a mom & kid mini-break to (among other things) the Château de Saint-Maurice, a castle that is now a comic book museum. (Castle museums, they're a thing! What else are you going to do with your leftover castles?)

Here's a Guardian review by someone who didn't love it. Things did get little hand-wavy towards the end, and I rolled my eyes a bit at the fact that the proposed climate solutions (nuclear power, origin-controlled agricultural products) *just happen* to be French ones. But overall I thought it was excellent. Which is to say, terrifying. I made the mistake of reading half of it before bed one night, and barely slept. The second half of the book does move into analysis and solutions, but one thing I liked about it was that unlike the Climate Fresk, no great attempt was made to end things on a hopeful note. The earth as we know it is in a crisis of human creation; there are some things we might do to make the future less bad; we aren't doing them: that's the reality we have to come to terms with. I also liked the description of the problem in terms of energy consumption rather than carbon emissions. Jancovici emphasizes that renewable energies cannot replace our insatiable and growing appetites for fossil fuels without causing their own negative environmental impacts. To achieve a truly sustainable future we must reduce our energy consumption overall, and by a lot. That means degrowth, and the end of capitalism. He sees nuclear power as a stop-gap measure to meet our need for power while we're ramping down towards sustainability.

The very end of the book ventures into speculation about how we got into this mess, specifically the theories of Sébastien Bohler about (approximately; don't quote me on this) how the dopamine-addicted and safety-seeking parts of our brains are driving us down a path of individualism and doom, but if we could somehow put down our phones for a minute there's a glimmer of hope in our natural ability to form communities of mutual aid and implement cooperative solutions.

I often think of this graphic on the wall of the earth sciences museum at the ETH that depicts the history of the Earth as a 24-hour clock on which homo sapiens appears at 23:59:57. Rather arrogant, is it not, that we short-termers think we can even conceive of a "world without end"? Yet somehow that is our goal. The religious allusion goes unexplored but I doubt it's a coincidence that what is going to be required of us is another religious call. Repent!

"Earth formed at the beginning of the day at 00:00. The first traces of life can be found at 04:15 in the morning. It was not until 22:45 that the dinosaurs appeared and our ancestor, Homo sapiens, has been witnessing only the last three seconds of the day."