The Uninhabitable Earth

The same can be said, believe it or not, for the much-heralded green energy “revolution,” which has yielded productivity gains in energy and cost reductions far beyond the predictions of even the most doe-eyed optimists, and yet has not even bent the curve of carbon emissions downward. We are, in other words, billions of dollars and thousands of dramatic breakthroughs later, precisely where we started when hippies were affixing solar panels to their geodesic domes. That is because the market has not responded to these developments by seamlessly retiring dirty energy sources and replacing them with clean ones. It has responded by simply adding the new capacity to the same system.
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This is what my father-in-law, describing what happens to men with the birth of children and then grandchildren, calls “the outer ring theory,” and it more or less encapsulates the meaning of any imagined alien encounter: suddenly humans are major players in a drama of almost inconceivable scale, the lasting lesson of which, unfortunately, is that we’re total nobodies—or, at best, a lot less unique and important than we thought we were.