Jonathan Franzen is a very smart and occasionally insightful writer with a fairly dumb article out at the New Yorker. The novelist took a stab at his own think piece about climate change, and the results were about what you’d expect from a thoughtful essayist with no background in environmental science or public policy.
The Pulitzer Prize winner has long expressed pessimism over humanity’s ability to reduce greenhouse gas emissions enough to curb the more dire consequences of climate change, but in the New Yorker, he welcomes his perception of reality more willingly: “What if we stopped pretending?”
“As a non-scientist, I do my own kind of modelling,” Franzen writes. “I run various future scenarios through my brain, apply the constraints of human psychology and political reality, take note of the relentless rise in global energy consumption (thus far, the carbon savings provided by renewable energy have been more than offset by consumer demand), and count the scenarios in which collective action averts catastrophe. The scenarios, which I draw from the prescriptions of policy-makers and activists, share certain necessary conditions.”
Said conditions include the requirement that every nation on earth, including the most culpable China, crack down with forced conservation, that said crackdown is actually effective, and that humanity accept severe taxation and regulation of their daily life.
“Call me a pessimist or call me a humanist, but I don’t see human nature fundamentally changing anytime soon,” Franzen writes. “I can run ten thousand scenarios through my model, and in not one of them do I see the two-degree target being met.”
Franzen, who excoriates Republicans in the piece, wrongly ignores the proven efficacy of nuclear power’s ability to replace unclean energy sources, as well as the potential for America to levy trade powers against nations like China and India to convince and coerce them into lowering emissions. But he is correct that humanity, to some degree, will have to accept some ramifications of climate change and invest in the technology to counteract them.
Yet this isn’t why many on the left are Very Mad Online at Franzen. No, instead they’re livid that he took the left’s apocalyptic premises guiding the socialist cultists who hijacked the climate movement to their logical endpoint: that any attempt to stave off world destruction is futile.
quiz: is this jonathan franzen talking about climate change or me talking about how i decide when to pay the meter and when not to pay it https://t.co/D1IXe4vXYl
— wikipedia brown ||| abolish ICE. (@eveewing) September 8, 2019
This is such a shallow, poorly researched, self-indulgent piece.
Probably one of the worst climate pieces I’ve ever read outside the denier’s camp.
— Dr. Jonathan Foley (@GlobalEcoGuy) September 8, 2019
The whole “climate apocalypse” rhetoric is so toxic. It encourages the worst Calvinist tendencies in American political discourse. It ignores the fact that the Mad Max future is already dawning in places like Yemen. It neglects the bigger threat of eco-fascism and apartheid.
— Alexander Kaufman (@AlexCKaufman) September 8, 2019
For a year now, the climate movement has been guided by a Swedish child suffering psychological trauma from climate rhetoric and a congresswoman whose only scientific credentials are in the chemistry of cocktail making. The latter has been telling us that “like, the world will end in 12 years” if we don’t pass a $93 trillion spending package that will do absolutely nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions domestically or globally.
If you genuinely believe that 12 (or now closer to 11, I guess) years from now marks the absolute point of no return, then we’re screwed. Even if we overcame conspiratorial opposition to nuclear power and replaced all unclean energy sources with nuclear and renewables, it’s impossible to believe that we could get the rest of the planet on the path to carbon neutrality in that time. This is a manageable scenario if we understand that some progress is better than none, but after you’ve been screaming that the apocalypse is nigh for so long, you can’t exactly get mad that someone who actually took your word for it and drew the logical conclusions.
