William T. Vollmann Would Like a Word or Two About Climate Change. Or 1,200 Pages.
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Version 0 of 1. NO IMMEDIATE DANGER Volume 1 of Carbon Ideologies By William T. Vollmann 601 pp. Viking. $40. NO GOOD ALTERNATIVE Volume 2 of Carbon Ideologies By William T. Vollmann 667 pp. Viking. $40. As one of the greatest challenges facing the planet, climate change deserves serious treatment by a great writer who combines deep reporting with a compelling literary style — someone who can explain the overwhelming scientific evidence of warming and its human causes, and of the need for action. William T. Vollmann would seem to be just the writer for that challenging project. Superhumanly prolific and willing to take on the toughest topics, he packs research and voice into his impassioned works. “Rising Up and Rising Down,” his exploration of violence, spans seven volumes. He is also a celebrated novelist, winning the National Book Award in 2005 for “Europe Central.” So is this the book on climate change we’ve all been waiting for? Maybe not. “Carbon Ideologies,” Vollmann’s two-volume exploration of the energy sources we use and the mess we are in, is prodigiously reported but sprawling and undisciplined. At more than 1,200 pages, it is “several times longer than its contractually stipulated maximum,” he tells us. “My publisher asked me to cut it. But for some reason, I just didn’t want to.” Vollmann’s many fans are drawn to his literary hoarder aesthetic, and they will not be disappointed. The first volume, “No Immediate Danger,” deals mostly with the nuclear disaster at Fukushima; the second, “No Good Alternative,” takes on coal, oil and natural gas. He has stacked his reporting high, giving us interview after interview with local people in places ravaged by our need for power and by our wastefulness: those living near the nuclear plant, occupants of West Virginia hollers whose communities have suffered environmental wreckage from coal mining, unhappy neighbors of fracking pads, coal workers in Bangladesh and oil workers in Abu Dhabi. We hear them at great length, but with little interpretation or analysis. Vollmann also provides a lengthy primer on energy sources and calculations, discussing how much energy it takes to make, for example, concrete or nylon. This massive speed bump stretches from near the beginning of the first volume to Page 219. However, he allows, “since ‘Carbon Ideologies’ is primarily a record of people’s experiences, if you skip my tables and their numbers, my point will remain clear enough; better yet, any mathematical errors might then escape your censure.” (As for those mathematical errors, the writer Will Boisvert has pointed out that when Vollmann writes “in each two days of 2009, the world burned the entire oil output of 1990,” the figure is off by 289 days.) The interviews show people who, as Vollmann says of his Japanese subjects, “tried to believe in the goodness of corporations and the sincerity of cabinet ministers, or else shut out of mind what could not be helped. They lacked comprehension of the various waves and particles that threatened them, not to mention the units of measurement used in media pronouncements. We all learned to live with what we could not see.” Similar themes of ignorance and resignation play out in interviews with those he meets in Nitro, W.Va.; Ruwais, Abu Dhabi; or Greeley, Colo. Climate change, like the residual radiation in Japan, is invisible to them. They’re all just trying to get by. Meanwhile, boosters of these industries explain that the jury on climate change is still out (it isn’t), and that, as a Colorado banker states, “science is the new religion.” The prose can be moving. Of an evacuated town near Fukushima, Vollmann writes, “By now the trees had already started to decompose, so that when they formed up the sides of houses, they infiltrated them like subtly woven rattan, perfectly fitted by the weaver-upholster called death.” It also shows some of his trademark bawdiness: Vollmann samples radiation levels around Japan using a dosimeter and a device he becomes very fond of, a “pancake frisker,” of which he wants us to know: “Three buttons decorated it. When I pressed the leftmost one, the machine uttered a three-tone chirp not unlike the sound one of my sweetest girlfriends used to make when she climaxed.” In telling us all of this, Vollmann repeats phrases throughout the two volumes, sometimes as mournful echoes and elsewhere as sarcastic commentary. Discussing our wasteful ways, and the enormous amounts of energy that have gone into all of the things that we use and the things that we do, he asks a dozen times, “What was the work for?” Discussing the mendacity of officials in Japan, he repeats their warnings not to give in to or spread what they refer to as “harmful rumors.” The coal passages get heavy rotation of the phrase “the regulated community,” which he carries on into discussion of other regulation-averse fossil fuel industries. Throughout both volumes, he says he is writing this book not for today’s reader, but for those in the devastated future, repeatedly referring to the time “when I was alive.” Which brings us to the biggest problem with this monumental work: not its length, or the way it might test your tolerance for sarcasm, but the author’s tendency to assume the absolute worst consequences of climate change. After describing the amount of energy that goes into making glass, he adds, “I hope that you have at least inherited a few of our windowpanes. Maybe you pried them out of drowned properties and fitted them into your caves.” As someone who writes about climate change for a living, I can tell you that if we continue down the path we are on, things will get very bad. Coastal cities will be severely damaged, and some lost; international climate migration will uproot the lives of millions. Changed climate patterns will worsen drought and wildfires in some areas, and river flooding and hurricanes in others. And because carbon dioxide persists so long in the atmosphere, even if we magically flipped a switch today, things are already pretty certain to stay very bad for hundreds of years to come. All of that is awful enough, without having to go full-on Cormac McCarthy. I’m a fan of scientists like Katharine Hayhoe, who warns against overdosing on unwarranted gloom. As she puts it, “Doomsday messaging just doesn’t work.” Too much scare, and people give up hope and stop trying to bring about change. Vollmann, by contrast, gives short shrift to renewable energy sources like solar power that can help to provide a pathway to a less damaged future. He writes: “‘Carbon Ideologies’ largely neglects solar power, that being associated with decentralization and environmental benignity. Indeed, solar is an ideology of hope — not my department.” Toward the end of the second volume, Vollmann writes: “So I wouldn’t be surprised if you in the future had worked out efficient solar energy generation. Perhaps your solar-powered pumps have not yet failed to keep the ocean from overtopping your diked-up cities.” Reading these two books did have an effect on me; I became even more conscious of the resources I waste in my own life. I found myself wondering why I burn fossil fuels by driving two miles to a lovely park where I take my morning run, instead of trotting around my own neighborhood. It’s not that I stopped doing it, but I do feel worse about myself. Maybe that’s what the work was for. |