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Bill McKibben

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? Hardcover – April 16, 2019

by Bill McKibben (Author)

4.4 486 ratings

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Thirty years ago Bill McKibben offered one of the earliest warnings about climate change. Now he broadens the warning: the entire human game, he suggests, has begun to play itself out.

Bill McKibben’s groundbreaking book The End of Nature -- issued in dozens of languages and long regarded as a classic -- was the first book to alert us to global warming. But the danger is broader than that: even as climate change shrinks the space where our civilization can exist, new technologies like artificial intelligence and robotics threaten to bleach away the variety of human experience.

Falter tells the story of these converging trends and of the ideological fervor that keeps us from bringing them under control. And then, drawing on McKibben’s experience in building 350.org, the first truly global citizens movement to combat climate change, it offers some possible ways out of the trap. We’re at a bleak moment in human history -- and we’ll either confront that bleakness or watch the civilization our forebears built slip away.

Falter is a powerful and sobering call to arms, to save not only our planet but also our humanity.

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Print length

304 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Henry Holt and Co.
Publication date

April 16, 2019
Dimensions

6.5 x 1 x 9.5 inches
ISBN-10

1250178266
ISBN-13

978-1250178268
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DougC

A sobering review of the science and politics of climate change, AI, and genetic engineering

Reviewed in the United States on May 24, 2019

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Bill McKibben’s Falter is a well-written, well-reasoned and well-sourced book about climate change and other threats to civilization, primarily artificial intelligence and genetic engineering affecting the germline. McKibben lays out his concerns and makes clear that time is running out – we’re faltering and need a course correction. At the end of the book, he offers hope in the form of two strange bed-fellows: solar energy and civil disobedience.

The book discusses climate change resulting from the burning of fossil fuels. McKibben summarizes the science most of us are familiar with – the greenhouse effect of CO2 (and other gases) reducing the amount of energy from the Sun radiating back into space, causing Earth’s temperature to rise. And he notes that prior eras of mass extinction were also the result of climbing CO2 levels – yes, even the dinosaurs, when the asteroid that hit Earth 65 million years ago increased volcanic activity, causing a rise in CO2, global warming and ocean acidification. The difference between then and now is that the current rise in CO2 is not due to natural causes.

McKibben devotes a couple of chapters to the Ayn Rand books that influenced many powerful political and business people who opposed attempts to reduce CO2 emissions when it could have been done at far less cost – if it can still be done at all – and before all the enormous damage to the environment occurred and continues to occur. For many of them, the individual came before the greater good, including their own. “Government is bad. Selfishness is good.” But the resulting havoc that is now beginning in the form of extreme weather and its consequences (heat, rain, drought, flooding, wildfires, tornadoes) and rising acidic seas will affect them, too.

The book reminded me of Carl Sagan’s warning when he tallied the number of possible advanced civilizations in the universe – he speculated that many don’t cross the threshold from low-tech to high-tech without destroying themselves. The next 100 years (50?) will probably tell the tale for us.

This book also reminded me of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine when McKibben discussed designer babies whose new genes would be passed to their offspring, permanently affecting some homo sapiens. McKibben sees the possibility of two pools of genes, the natural and the enhanced, with the enhanced only affordable by the rich. Two types of humans could evolve, much as Wells depicted the Eloi and the Morlocks. The comparison is far from exact, of course – those races were not separated by wealth. But Wells showed what can happen when genetic paths diverge. In the short term, perhaps, it could create the ultimate gap between the rich and the poor.

McKibben judges the above issues against what it means to be human. Climate change concerns the world we exist in, so it is the foundation for all else. Artificial intelligence and genetic engineering concern the world inside us – do we forfeit our humanity by genetically juicing up our IQs (which are apparently declining because of unknown reasons), or outsourcing our work (and thinking) to robots? These decisions are creeping up on us, and we may well lose ourselves before we know it.

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Joy Bringer

A Must Read

Reviewed in the United States on November 29, 2022

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If you care about this planet and its future reading this book is essential. I thought I was well informed, but this book provided important insight into things I hadn’t considered as a part of the equation…AI, CRISPER and gene manipulation, how community solar panels can provide the ability to greatly improve equality in 3rd world countries, and how we can all fight for our future by utilizing nonviolent protests and getting solar panels on every rooftop.

I’m happy to report we are a small part of the solution by putting solar on our roof, and driving electric. We had already been doing all the conservation basics, composting, reusing and recycling, using gray water for gardening, no chemicals and pesticides, but feeling discouraged by how rapidly climate change is progressing. This book provides additional insights on how we can fight to save this beautiful planet by working together to combat the corporate and billionaires’ greed and consumerism that is destroying it.

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Yehezkel Dror

GREAT BOOK, WITH PROBLEMS

Reviewed in the United States on May 17, 2019

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This is a great and often wise book which presents clearly main fateful issues facing humanity. Also, it is up-to-date and pleasant to read.
However, it has a number of problems. The small ones include too many comments on current US politics; no serious discourse on nuclear energy; some strange remarks, such as ‘Practical problems are by definition theoretically soluble (p. 162); and so on. These do not matter, but there are some serious problems which are disturbing:
1. The author knows the world. But this book is USA-focused, in text and in thinking.
2. The book deals with two categories of issues: Hell on Earth now, especially inequality; and the future, if any, of the human species. But these are radically different: inequality is a time-bound problem, which can be handled by future generations. But inheritable human enhancement is irreversible.
3. Related is lack of discourse on intergenerational justice, which is cardinal for the subject of the book.
But most serious of all is vagueness on the critical issue ‘who shall decide?’. As nearly all books on the issues well discussed in this text, it makes hasty statements, such as ‘the power of people is not yet mobilized in sufficient strength’ (p. 191); ‘No one small group of people should get to make decisions like that by themselves. Such things should be decided (if anything should) by all of us’ (p. 195); no right future generations…. until we’ve all taken a vote’ (p. 195); and more.
I cannot believe that the clearly intelligent and knowledgeable author has seriously pondered the fateful question how globally enforced norms impacting on the future of generations to come can be legislated and enforced. Democracy, as a political philosophy and ideology, does not apply because future generations cannot vote (in addition to populism, science ignorance, tribalsm, short-termism etc.). ‘Will of the people’ is an empty concept given the global populations. The UN cannot enforce global norm. Instead of politically super-correct words, serious thinking is needed an a widely supported decisive and qualified global regime and on political leadership 2.0.
Professor Yehezkel Dror
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

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R H Fenner

Must Read

Reviewed in Germany on October 5, 2021

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Bill McKibben's 'Falter' gives an outlook on the problems of the future that our children, and probably we ourselves, are going to wrestle with: global warming, AI, global inequality.
Bill McKibben is an excellent writer with a very wide and deep knowledge of his subject. His vision of the future is frightening but utterly perspicaceous and, unfortunately, highly credible. Having read Naomi Klein, Yuval Harari and David Wallace-Wells, I found McKibben's 'Falter' totally unputdownable. I wish it were compulsory reading among our anti-Green and neoliberal politicians.

sean s.

An important book sounding the alarm

Reviewed in Canada on June 5, 2019

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Bill McKibben is a founder of the leading environmental organization 350.org. He writes:

‘To walk the roads through even a corner of Alberta’s vast tar sands complex is to visit a kind of hell. This may be the largest industrial complex on our planet – the largest dam on Earth holds back one of the many vast settling ponds, where sludge from the mines combines with water and toxic chemicals in a black soup. Because any bird that landed on the filthy water would die, cannons fire day and night to scare them away. If you listen to the crack of the guns, and to the stories of the area’s original inhabitants, whose forest was ripped up for the mines, you understand that you are in a war zone. The army is mustered by the billionaires Charles and David Koch (the biggest lease holders in the tar sands) and ConocoPhillips and PetroChina and the rest. It is hideous, a vandalism of the natural and human world that can scarcely be imagined…

In 1978, one of Exxon’s senior scientists, James F. Black, spoke to a large pool of the company’s executives. Independent researchers, he said, estimated that a doubling of the carbon dioxide concentration would increase average global temperatures by from 2 to 3 degrees Celsius, to as much as 10 degrees Celsius. Rainfall might get heavier in some regions, and other places might turn to desert.

That is to say, ten years before James Hansen’s Senate testimony made climate change a public issue, Exxon, the world’s largest oil company and, indeed, in those days, the world’s largest company period, understood that its product was going to wreck the planet. It just wasn’t telling the rest of us. As late as 2017, pollsters found that almost 90 percent of Americans didn’t know there was a scientific consensus on global warming…

The Koch brothers, Charles and David, are arguably the most powerful men in the Western world. They’re not as blustering as Donald Trump, and they’re uninterested in his flashiest hatreds and crusades, but they’re both the most important architects, and among the biggest beneficiaries, of his rule. On everything from tax cuts to environmental regulation, the Trump years have been what their biographer Jane Mayer calls ‘their dream come true.’

The Koch brothers have become such a shorthand for plutocratic excess that it’s important to remind ourselves that they are real men with real stories, also rooted in the twentieth century (and told most ably by Mayer in her book ‘Dark Money’)…

The Kochs set up a web of political groups such as Americans for Prosperity. They and their allies also erected think tanks and academic centers around the nation that churned out policy papers to back up their plans and to produce messaging to convince people to vote against their own interests…

Billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, America’s first partisan television network, emerged to amplify the stream of messages. Much of the work was done at the state and local level, where local billionaires – junior Kochs, as it were – concentrated on winning statehouses, gerrymandering districts, and enacting the voter suppression laws that reduced the size of the ‘mob’ they’d need to vanquish…

Arriving in Washington with no existing ideology except feeding his narcissism and enriching his family, Trump proved the perfect president finally to enact the full government-hating agenda. The billionaire Robert Mercer, who’d funded not only Trump’s campaign but also Cambridge Analytica, the source of so much Facebook skullduggery, was a key figure…’

Despite the incessant lobbying for destructive fossil fuels, there are some signs of hope:

‘The sun shines everywhere, and when it doesn’t, the wind is usually blowing. The latest studies, from labs such as Mark Jacobson’s at Stanford, make clear that every major nation on earth could be supplying 80 percent of its power from renewables by 2030, at prices far cheaper than paying the damage for climate change (cf. Jacobson and Delucci, ‘Green New Deal: Sorry, there’s no place here for nuclear energy, or biofuels or carbon capture’, Red, Green and Blue, January 2019)…

In the fall of 2018, a fifteen-year-old Swedish girl named Greta Thunberg staged a ‘school strike,’ sitting on the steps of Parliament instead of going to class on the theory that she couldn’t be bothered if the government couldn’t be bothered to care about the climate. Her action galvanized sentiment across northern Europe… (cf. ‘European Elections: Triumphant Greens Demand More Radical Climate Action’, The Guardian, May 2019).

In the United States, young people staged a sit-in at Congress to demand a special committee on a ‘Green New Deal’ (proposed by congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez). By early 2019, pollsters reported that 80% of Democrats and 60% of Republicans backed the idea, or at least the slogan…’

A poll by Abacus Data reveals that 61 percent of Canadians also support a Green New Deal for Canada (cf. ‘Majority of Canadians Support a Green New Deal, Poll Finds’, Toronto Star, April 2019).

Andrew Scheer has shown that he is firmly on the side of the fossil fuels industry (cf. ‘Scheer Leaves Himself Open to Claims He’s in Cahoots with Big Oil’, Globe & Mail, April 2019).

Therefore, it is up to the Trudeau Liberals and Canada’s other parties to accelerate the transition to renewable energy, with the modest carbon tax being only the first step.

Stanford’s Mark Jacobson and others have shown us the way forward, and every day of delay will only result in greater environmental destruction and climate chaos.

Along with David Wallace-Wells’ Uninhabitable Earth, Falter is one of the important recent books sounding the alarm about the urgency of the situation. We should all take heed, and take action.

6 people found this helpful

Clara Valverde

We have to get ready for the disaster that is coming

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 29, 2020

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Importante book on our future

dAVID

This Earth is the only planet, anywhere, to have life as we know it.

Reviewed in Australia on June 7, 2019

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A compassionate and reverential view of the brilliance of human ingenuity and intelligence which is failing to slow down and repair the only place known to have ever manifest life. Now is the time to make the choice towards irreversible suicide, or not. We cannot think about it anymore but must understand which choice we have made. Will we watch the death of our children and claim innocence?

Robert Campbell

This book goes a long way to explain the current dilemma our planet is facing at this time.

Reviewed in Canada on December 14, 2021

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The way the author has formatted this book allows you to read each chapter as a standalone. Depending on what topic you’re looking for, climate change, income inequality he approaches each one as a separate topic.

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