Snarking into the Void: William T. Vollmann’s Carbon Ideologies (Environmental Book Review #6)
No Immediate Danger: Volume One of Carbon Ideologies and No Good Alternative: Volume Two of Carbon Ideologies, William T. Vollmann
(2018, Penguin)
In Albert Camus’ The Plague, the citizens of Oran are trapped in the city together as an illness begins to kill many people. They are faced with the decision of whether or not to hide inside and never expose themselves to risk, or to try and contribute to the social good of the city while it is going through this crisis, despite the risk that they will catch the illness and die. It is a novel about how individuals should respond to absurd circumstances where they do not have control over wider events. The novel is ultimately positive about humanity and the consequences of behaving altruistically even when it is unclear if individuals, or society, will survive. Indeed Camus might say that behaving ethically is the only way to find meaning in an absurd existence: to do otherwise is give in to meaninglessness.
The Plague isn’t necessarily a good metaphor for the Covid-19 epidemic. With Covid, the virus is spread between people, not rats, and the best way to contribute to society is to minimize spread by reducing social interaction. Staying inside and doing nothing is the socially right behaviour, while springing to action could be quite harmful. However, The Plague may provide a better metaphor for the climate crisis. In this crisis, nothing is guaranteed and there is the real prospect of human failure leading to devastating consequences. It is endlessly possible to point to the failure of other people to act as a reason to do nothing. Camus’ absurdist philosophy — which seeks ultimately to show why we should go on living, and living ethically, in the face of our absurd existence, provides a position for continuing to strive for something better in a world plagued by climate change.
One day in 2018 I was exiting Myopic Books, a second-hand bookstore in Chicago, when I saw a hefty tome in the window with the title No Good Alternative. The description on the back cover conveyed to me that it was the type of book I had been hoping someone would produce: a definitive analysis of different forms of energy and the possibility of us really shifting from carbon-polluting energy production to other options. However, as it was only the second volume of the series, I decided to leave it and see if I could find the first. Two years’ later, when I finally opened No Immediate Danger, the first of William T. Vollmann’s two-volume Carbon Ideologies, I had a different attitude to the idea of a “definitive work” on climate change. Climate change, and environmental problems facing the world, seemed complex and dispersed, requiring many voices and actions to overcome. The idea of a massive, comprehensive work on climate change also reminded me of a certain kind of person I had come across in working on climate issues, people who would not want to be involved unless they could do the one thing that would solve the problem, rather than committing to do the small things alongside other people that might produce change in sum.
In any case, Vollmann’s book is not the analysis I was expecting. Despite being two volumes and covering four different types of energy production (nuclear, coal, oil and natural gas), it is really three books. The first is Vollmann’s sweeping “primer” on energy production and carbon emissions; the second is an investigation in Fukushima, Japan, into the long-term consequences of the explosion at a nuclear power plant; and the third is Vollmann going to various sites of fossil fuel production and extraction to interview people about their thoughts about the fuel and climate change. The second and third books are largely detailed reportage, featuring lengthy interviews with people involved or affected by the different industries he is investigating, and range across the world, from Mexico to Bangladesh to several parts of the USA. The first book is awful. The second book is okay. The third book is overall pretty good.
These books are extremely indulgent. They stretch to nearly 1300 pages of writing, and it seems as though every thought Vollmann has had in his head he has decided to include, alongside everything anyone said to him during his research. He alludes early on to a struggle to convince his editors to allow the books to be this long. I have to say I wish the editors had won, indeed that they had been able to shape the book a lot more. As it is, there is a lot of material in the book that doesn’t need to be there and detracts from the good parts of the work. Large sections of the part in Fukushima are taken up with Vollmann exhaustively documenting spots he visits and radiation readings he collects, without it ever being particularly clear what the point is (this section compares poorly with Fred Pearce’s Fallout, as Vollmann never really cuts through the confusing information to any clarity). He repeats the same sarcastic references throughout the books. For example, the titles of the books, No Immediate Danger and No Good Alternative, become repeated refrains to beat over the head of powerful liars. Some of it gets bizarre: there are several digressions into off-putting sexual references. Much of the books read like travelogues rather than discussions of climate and energy politics, as Vollmann gives extensive detail on the locations and people he witnesses, and much of the things going through his head as he encounters them.
Early on, Vollmann sets out a few elements of the books that define the style of his writing. Firstly, he introduces a literary device whereby he addresses the books to a future reader who is living through the environmental apocalypse. He presumably doesn’t believe the struggling humans of the future are going to find and then read these enormous volumes, so this seems to articulate a purpose of understanding our collective failure to take action on climate change. This prefaces the second point: that Vollmann has decided we are doomed, and he is seeking more to explain why than prove that point itself. Similar assumptions arise throughout the volumes. He sets out in one sentence his belief that we should not be using nuclear power due to the problem of nuclear waste, and instead of going into detail on that point spends several hundred pages on telling us the readings on his radiation meter. He clearly thinks it is wrong to use fossil fuels, but despite spending more than 200 pages on a “primer” on energy and climate change he doesn’t really set out how climate change occurs or the degree of threat it presents.
His final introductory point is that he seeks to not judge the people he is encountering on his journey, except when he thinks that is clearly justified as in the case of lying politicians. This is the first major problem I have with the work. As a writer, should his job not be to judge? Should he not be seeking to identify responsibility for the problems he sees and state clearly where he finds it? He encounters a lot of people who, despite being wrapped up in the fossil fuel industry, certainly don’t deserve blame. But he doesn’t need to blame them: he is more than welcome to explain why they are the victims and others cause the problem. Vollmann’s own complicity seems to restrain him in laying blame more, as he spends a lot of time worrying about his own time flying and using air conditioning rather than speaking truth to power.
The second major problem with the work is structural. The “primer” is not very useful for introducing basic problems related to climate change, energy, and industry. It is not set out clearly and fails to have any basic summary explaining its ultimate point. It’s not a good sign that Vollmann practically begs us not to read it in his introduction, on the basis that is a thicket of statistics and numbers that is much less interesting than the human content in the rest of the work. On page 202 of the first volume, towards the end of this primer, Vollmann finally expresses that “we could not only sustain, but accelerate the rise in atmospheric carbon levels, all the while expressing confusion, powerlessness, and resentment. Thus the true subject of Carbon Ideologies.” He could have introduced the subject of the books about 200 pages earlier.
This “true subject”, especially the “confusion”, is the third major problem. Vollmann inundates the reader with information, in the seeming intent of conveying how difficult it is to understand the underlying truth about the dangers of energy production. I can’t agree with the idea that conveying confusion is his job. A reader of a book on this complex subject can reasonably ask for clarity and insightful explanation. If the point is that things are very confusing, he didn’t need 1300 pages of exhausting detail to explain that. A few examples of the contradictory information people are subject to could have sufficed.
Buried in these problems is some very good content. Vollmann has done a lot of research and investigating, and there are some gripping passages in the books. His interviews with the people forced to leave the area around Fukushima are poignant. In one segment he visits the United Arab Emirates and breaks local laws so that he can interview migrant workers about the conditions they face in the oil industry. This section is striking and yields information that is, due to the very constraints on expression he reports on, rare. His section on the West Virginia coal industry is devastating in its deconstruction of the politics of the State. But all this is good precisely because the pretension slips away and the reality comes into focus: the individual stories are devastating and the actions of powerful companies and corrupt politicians become clear.
Vollmann’s determination to turn this granular local reportage into a grand story about humanity’s destructive dependence on harmful energy sources prevents the book from being the great work it could have been. The “true subject” is found in the individual and local stories he finds, the very present harm being wrought and the inequalities forcing people to stay involved in such harmful work. Instead, Vollmann apparently draws from his reporting (and his own helplessness) the lesson that humanity is doomed to inaction on climate change, consistently emphasizing the way in which his interview subjects reject the idea that climate change is happening or that anything can be done about it. His problem is that his reporting is too specific to possibly prove this. Of course going and interviewing frackers in Oklahoma and coal miners in Bangladesh is going to result in denial and excuses. Despite referring to supporters of renewable energy as “carbon ideologues” like anyone else, he doesn’t talk to any of them. He doesn’t offer much discussion on trends in renewable energy or look into any of the active movements trying to change the way we use energy. The coal industry in the United States is still not flourishing, despite the awful State-level politics of West Virginia, because West Virginia does not decide what happens in the entire world. The tragedy, as revealed by Vollmann, is that people in West Virginia are sold a lie about “the War on Coal” while encouraged to make coal a part of their identity by myopic leadership. They suffer, and the rest of the world continues to use less coal.
Moreover, Vollmann doesn’t offer much to say in response to our apparent inaction than tossing our hands in the air and feeling bad about it. Albert Camus would have responded very differently: climate change poses an ultimate in the absurdity of human existence, where we can only trust others beyond our control to act in the right manner, and possibly face destruction no matter what we do. But he would likely have concluded we should still behave ethically or lose all meaning in our existence. I significantly prefer this to Vollmann’s despair.
A mitigating factor for Vollmann’s attitude is that he was writing this book immediately after the election of Donald Trump, when it must have seemed as though the world was determined to ignore warnings about climate change. But that doesn’t excuse his lack of restraint, which has turned some excellent research into two barely readable books. The main problem with the work is Vollmann himself. But given the amount of self-loathing contained within the pages of Carbon Ideologies, perhaps that is the point.
