In February 2020, I attended a conference in Vancouver called Globe 2020. For climate-and-energy wonks in Canada, the Globe conference is one of the biggest dates on the calendar—the kind of event where the federal government sends cabinet ministers to make major climate-policy announcements, oil-company CEOs sit on panels with climate activists, and electric-vehicle makers display their latest and greatest cars.
One of the keynote speakers on the first morning was David Wallace-Wells, an American journalist who’d written the latest bestseller on the imminent climate-caused peril of humanity, The Uninhabitable Earth. Wallace-Wells was composed and passionate, his speech short and punchy like a TED Talk. He began with a careful recitation of the many inconvenient truths—the climate crisis already upon us, catastrophic disaster underway and worsening, a humanitarian tragedy of flooded cities and climate refugees all but guaranteed in our far-too-near future. But the problem, he argued, was ours to solve. “The main driver of climate change is human action,” Wallace-Wells said, “which is to say how much carbon we put into the atmosphere. And our hands are collectively on those levers. Which means we can write a different story if we choose to. And not just can—will, must.” Then he chastised Canada’s prime minister for continuing to support oil pipelines and suggested we were all “living in denial” about the climate crisis, locked in selfish, nationalistic, hypocritical political structures that only intensified the problem.
