📰 Weekend Read — Food as You Know It Is About to Change By David Wallace-Wells

Last weekend, I introduced Elizabeth Kolbert, one of my favorite climate and environmental writers.

This week, I’d like to recommend David Wallace-Wells, the author of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. This book really opened my eyes to just how serious the challenges of climate change are.

The idea of more than 2 degrees of warming by 2100 is grim, but I appreciate what David said in an interview:

So how optimistic I am is based as much around 4 degrees of warming as it is around 2. Now, 2 degrees is hellish enough. I think it’s about our best-case scenario, and it is truly alarming. If we get to 2 degrees, one really remarkable paper demonstrated last year, the air pollution effects alone would kill an additional 150 million people beyond what the air pollution at 1.5 degrees would cost. That is our best-case scenario. So when I talk about being optimistic, I’m talking about a range that starts at a death toll of 150 million people and extends to a world 4 degrees warmer where we would have, eventually, hundreds of feet of sea level rise, horrible impacts on agriculture and public health beyond our comprehension.

The key takeaway for me is this: no matter how tough things get, there’s always room to make them less bad. Every ton of CO2 we stop from being emitted means fewer lives lost in the future. Every little bit of harm we avoid makes a real difference.

Currently, Wallace-Wells writes for the New York Times. Since this is mostly a plant-based diet blog, I think his column Food as You Know It Is About to Change is especially relevant. (Link to the Internet Archive) In it, he talks about how the global food system is facing more hunger, climate risks, and price instability. He also points out that innovations like resilient crops and plant-based diets give us hope. At the same time, he stresses how important it is to push for bigger changes and more investment to secure food for the future.

Here’s a snippet from the article:

In a few decades, we may find ourselves having solved the industrial problems of warming, only to be confronted instead by a persistent set of challenges that seem pre-modern by comparison—how to extract more calories from less land and how to do so without bankrupting the earth and its soils along the way.

This kind of future might sound daunting, but I see it as a reminder of how much power we have to shape what comes next. With thoughtful choices, collective effort, and a focus on solutions, we can work toward a better, more sustainable way of living—not just for ourselves but for the generations that follow.