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the world has, at most, about three decades to completely decarbonize before truly devastating climate horrors begin. You can't halfway your way to a solution to a crisis this large.

— The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells (Page 213)

That epic era once derided as "prehistory" accounts for about 95 percent of human history. For nearly all of that time, humans traversed the planet but left no meaningful mark. Which makes the history of mark-making – the entire history of civilization, the entire history we know as history – look less like an inevitable crescendo than like an anomaly, or blip. And makes industrialization and economic growth, the two forces that really gave the modern world the hurtling sensation of material progress, a blip inside a blip. A blip inside a blip that has brought us to the brink of a never-ending climat catastrophe.

— The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells (Page 198)

I have nothing to sell. The only thing I deal in is language.

— Scattered All Over the Earth by Yoko Tawada (Page 27)

But the main lesson from the church of technology runs in the other direction, instructing us in subtle and not-so-subtle ways to regard the world beyond our phones as less real, less urgent, and less meaningful than the worlds made available to us through those screens, which happen to be worlds protected from climate devastation. As Andreas Malm has wondered, "How many will play augmented reality games on a planet that is six degrees warmer?" The poet and musician Kate Tempest puts it more brinily: "Staring into the screen so we don't have to see the planet die."

— The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells (Page 185)

Over the last twenty-five years, the cost per unit of renewable energy has fallen so far that you can hardly measure the price, today, using the same scales (since just 2009, for instance, solar energy costs have fallen more than 80 percent). Over the same twenty-five years, the proportion of global energy use derived from renewables has not grown an inch. Solar isn't eating away at fossil fuel use, in other words, even slowly; it's just buttressing it. To the market, this is growth; to human civilization, it is almost suicide. We are now burning 80 percent more coal than we were just in the year 2000.

— The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells (Page 178)

Another way of looking at it is that the world's futurists have come to regard technology as a superstructure within which all other problems, and their solutions, are contained. From that perspective, the only threat to technology must come from technology, which is perhaps why so many in Silicon Valley seem less concerned with runaway climate change than they are with runaway artificial intelligence: the only fearsome power they are likely to take seriously is the one they themselves have unleashed.

— The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells (Page 172)

Whatever it means for the other animals on the planet, with global warming we have unwittingly claimed ownership of a system beyond our ability to control or tame in any day-to-day way.

— The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells (Page 156)

You wouldn't have to do much in rewrites to Independence Day to reboot it as cli-fi. But, in the place of aliens, who would its heroes be fighting against? Ourselves?

— The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells (Page 149)

The map of our new world will be drawn in part by natural processes that remain mysterious, but more definitely by human hands. At what point will the climate crisis grow undeniable, un-compartmentalizable? How much damage will have already been selfishly done? How quickly will we act to save ourselves and preserve as much of the way of life we know today as possible?

— The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells (Page 143)

The pace of that scholarship is exhilarating, but it also counsels humility; there remains so much we do not know about the way global warming affects the way we live today.

— The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells (Page 142)

The wheels of all communities are greased by abundance; baked by deprivation, they stall and crack. The paths are familiar ones, even to those who have only ever known affluence, their lives creamily frictionless but stimulated by entertainments tracing the arc of social decline: market breadowns, price gouging, the hoarding of goods and services by the well-of and well-armed, the retreat of law enforcement into self-enrichment, and the disappearance of any expectation of justice making survival suddenly a matter of entrepreneurial skill.

— The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells (Page 135)

This is what it means to suggest that climate change is an enveloping crisis, one that touches every aspect of the way we live on the planet today. But the world's suffering will be distributed unequally as its profits, with great divergences both between countries and within them. Already-hot countries like India and Pakistan will be hurt the most; within the United States, the costs will be shouldered largely in the South and Midwest, where some regions could lose up to 20 percent of county income.

— The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells (Page 124)

We have gotten used to setbacks on our erratic march along the arc of economic history, but we know them as setbacks and expect elastic recoveries. What climate change has in store is not that kind of thing – not a Great Recession or a Great Depression but, in economic terms, a Great Dying.

— The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells (Page 121)