The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here

OECD refers to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The OECD is a grouping of highly developed countries located in North America and the European Union and also including Israel, Japan, New Zealand, and Australia. Of the planet’s seven billion people, about one billion people live in OECD countries. OECD countries consume the vast majority of the world’s resources, including its meat, fish, grains, and fossil fuels. They also produce the most trash and human waste.

OECD nations play a critical role in the globe’s great imbalance of need, which is a major theme in Jahren’s book. Wealthier populations, particularly Americans, make consumerist choices that negatively affect people living in poorer nations.

Aquaculture is the practice of farming fish within contained underwater tanks. In 2020, 50% of the globe’s supply of fish grew up on aquaculture farms rather than swimming freely in the open ocean. It’s not only fish that are farmed: Other species such as scallops or prawns have also been adapted to aquaculture. Similar to the advances in agriculture and meat for slaughter, aquaculture allows for higher yields to feed an ever-larger global population. Fish raised in aquaculture consume a significant number of smaller fish caught in the open ocean, including anchovies, herring, and sardines. It takes animals to feed animals.

Jahren defines fossil fuels simply as “long-dead plants” (129). Fossil fuels are mined from the depths of the Earth as oil, natural gas, and coal. They are not considered a renewable resource because they took millions of years to form in the first place. Renewable forms of energy are those technologies that collect energy from a resource that easily replicates itself, such as solar, wind, or water energy.

When burned, fossil fuels become a source of energy that run our cars, light up our homes, and turn on our cellphones. In the process of converting raw fossil fuels into energy, however, we release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and into the oceans. As carbon dioxide warms our planet, it is causing extreme environmental and climatological changes.

While there is clear, indisputable evidence that the atmosphere has warmed by 1.5 F in the last century, that warming will do more than simply make our daily temperatures hotter. Instead, global warming is causing erratic weather patterns: floods, fires, droughts, torrential rain, snowstorms, cold shocks, tornadoes, and hurricanes. “Global weirding” is a term that better describes the results of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

In the last few decades, there have been international attempts by countries to come together, reduce their carbon emissions, and combat global weirding. However, these efforts have been largely performative. Global weirding will predominantly affect poorer nations with less access to money, tools, and infrastructure to respond to erratic weather patterns.