“The Uninhabitable Earth” gives readers’ emotions a thorough workout along that pessimism-to-despair spectrum, before we are brought round to the writer’s “acceptance of responsibility.” I stress the emotional aspect because it is crucial: We are facing a call to action that we are, on the evidence of our behavior so far, likely to ignore, unless we directly feel its urgency. We know this, because that’s what we have been doing. The science of global warming has been settled for 40 years, but we have not just continued to pollute, we have accelerated the rate at which we’ve been doing so. Most of the carbon humans have put into the atmosphere has been emitted in the last three decades. As Wallace-Wells tartly puts it, “We have done as much damage to the fate of the planet and its ability to sustain human life and civilization since Al Gore published his first book on the climate than in all the centuries — all the millenniums — that came before.”

This is part of the tragedy. It’s not just that we know what’s happening, it’s that we’ve known for years and done nothing. Nathaniel Rich observes in “Losing Earth: A Recent History” that “nearly every conversation we have in 2019 about climate change was being held in 1979.” His gripping, depressing, revelatory book is an expanded version of a whole-issue article that appeared in The New York Times Magazine last year. It is an account of what went wrong — of how it was that a moment of growing awareness of climate change, and an apparent willingness to act on the knowledge, was allowed to dissipate into stasis and inaction.

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The story runs from 1979 to 1989. Rich frames his narrative through a central character, Rafe Pomerance, a Friends of the Earth lobbyist who first came across the issue of global warming in a 1979 E.P.A. report. In the ’80s, Congress had several hearings into climate change, which was accepted as an urgent priority even by a figure as conservative and anti-intellectual as Dan Quayle: “The greenhouse effect is an important environmental issue. We need to get on with it.”

So why didn’t they?

Rich offers a number of reasons. Scientists struggled to put across a clear message with sufficient force, for one. Pomerance looked with envy at the clarity with which the “hole in the ozone layer” was targeted for action by concerned scientists, notwithstanding the fact that, as Rich writes, “there was no hole, and there was no layer.” The climate scientists’ honorable struggles with complexity, probability models and time-lags between cause and effect helped dilute the impact of their message. A 1983 report by the Academy of Sciences, “Changing Climate,” was interpreted as calling for “caution not panic.” Roger Revelle, one of America’s leading scientists and author of a 1957 paper that was one of the first to describe the greenhouse effect, said that “we’re flashing a yellow light but not a red light. It’s not an unmitigated disaster by any means. It’s just a change.” The effect of all this was that the fight against climate change lost momentum at a critical point.

The greater part of responsibility for the failure, however, lies with politicians and energy companies. The big fossil fuel firms knew the realities of human-caused climate change but chose to ignore them and to lobby for the right to damage the environment; the Republican Party had factions that were in league with Big Energy, overlapping with other factions in denial about the scientific realities. The Reagan administration fought hard against environmental protections of any kind; the Bush administration made rhetorical gestures but John Sununu, George H.W. Bush’s chief of staff, did not believe in anthropogenic climate change and fought the scientists hard, and ultimately successfully.

The first meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1989 ended without the thing it was convened to achieve, binding targets on global emissions. With American leadership, Rich writes, “warming could have been held to less than 1.5 degrees.” The United States chose to shoot down the agreement. “And with that a decade of excruciating, painful, exhilarating progress turned to air.” More carbon has been emitted into the atmosphere since that 1989 conference than in the preceding history of civilization.

Climate change is a tragedy, but Rich makes clear that it is also a crime — a thing that bad people knowingly made worse, for their personal gain. That, I suspect, is one of the many aspects to the climate change battle that posterity will find it hard to believe, and impossible to forgive.