Jonathan Franzen’s Climate Pessimism Is Justified. His Fatalism Is Not.
By Eric
Levitz@EricLevitz
Nine months
ago, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told a crowd at the Riverside Church in
Manhattan, “The world is going to end in 12 years if we do not address climate
change.” In some respects, the congresswoman’s statement was excessively
optimistic.
If the
climate crisis were as binary and undiscriminating as AOC suggested, it would
be much easier to avert. If 1.5 degrees of warming marked an unambiguous
dividing line between a “healthy” climate and total ecological catastrophe —
which is to say, an equal-opportunity extinction event that would wipe out Xi
Jinping’s daughter and Barron Trump just as surely as it would peasants in
Bangladesh — then carbon-dioxide emissions probably wouldn’t have risen by 2.7
percent last year. The absence of a single do-or-die climate deadline, from
which no country or class is exempt, enables complacency and procrastination,
especially among the aging plutocrats who rule so much of our world.
Meanwhile,
the ambiguities and inequities of the ecological crisis also pose challenges
for mobilizing activists behind climate action. The facts of our predicament
don’t always make for punchy slogans. No one is ever going to rally a crowd by
pumping her fist and shouting:
“We have
already burned an unsafe amount of carbon, and nothing we do now is likely to
prevent the climate from growing evermore inhospitable for the rest of our
lives. We cannot know with certainty quite how much ecological devastation
we’ve already bought ourselves, or exactly how much carbon we can burn without
triggering mass starvation, civilizational collapse, or human extinction. Those
1.5- and two-degree warming targets you’ve heard so much about are informed by
science, but they’re still inescapably arbitrary. Keeping warming below 1.5
degrees won’t be sufficient to prevent wrenching ecological disruptions (some
of which will be tantamount to “end of the world” for those most severely
afflicted). And at the rate we’re going, we almost certainly not going to keep
warming below even two degrees, anyway. A better climate (than our current one)
is not possible; at least, not for us, or our children, or their children. But
the faster we decarbonize the global economy, the better our chances of sparing
the world’s most vulnerable communities from near-term destruction — and our
civilization from medium-term collapse — will be.”
So,
instead, climate activists say things like, “We have 12 years to save the
planet.” And heads of state solemnly swear to “solve” climate change by keeping
warming below two degrees. We tell ourselves stories in order to do politics.
But
Jonathan Franzen is sick of it. In an essay for the New Yorker, the novelist
takes exception to the left’s “pretending” on climate change. Franzen argues
that when figures like Ocasio-Cortez frame the Green New Deal as “our last
chance to avert catastrophe and save the planet,” they are promulgating a form
of climate denial because there is no serious prospect of humanity keeping
warming below two degrees, and thus “the radical destabilization of life on
earth” is already inevitable. Instead of imagining that a globe-spanning
revolution is waiting in the wings, Franzen implores environmentalists to
accept that the political dynamics that have obstructed climate action for the
past three decades aren’t going to disappear in the next 16 months. The “war on
climate change” is no longer “winnable.” Activists should carry on fighting to
reduce emissions through “half measures,” the novelist explains, since it is
still possible to delay the onset of apocalypse. But it no longer makes sense
for the left to insist that climate change must be “everyone’s overriding
priority forever” — or that “gargantuan renewable-energy projects” must take
precedence over the conservation of “living ecosystems.”
There are a
lot of problems with Franzen’s thinking on this subject. But the biggest — and
most ironic — is that the novelist has himself mistaken politically expedient
rhetorical tropes for scientific truths.
Some of
Franzen’s arguments bear a vague resemblance to cogent points.
Before
looking at where Franzen goes astray, however, it’s worth noting what he gets
half-right. Franzen writes that climate change is already guaranteed to produce
“the radical destabilization of life on earth — massive crop failures,
apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of
refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent
drought.” It is unclear what it means, scientifically, for a flood to be
“epic,” or a fire, “apocalyptic.” But I imagine many residents of Houston,
Texas, or Butte County, California, would say that much of Franzen’s dark
prophecy has already been realized. And the warming we’ve already bought
ourselves will likely be sufficient to implode some economies, cause
significant crop failures, and displace large masses of people. If these are
the defining features of climate disaster, then climate disaster is already
inevitable. And one can plausibly argue that progressive rhetoric elides how
much trouble we’re already in. Climate reporter Emily Atkin assembled a version
of that case for The New Republic last year:
“The whole
idea that everything’s going to work out isn’t really helpful, because it isn’t
going to work out,” said Kate Marvel, a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard
Institute for Space Studies. Climate change is going to worsen to a point where
millions of lives, homes, and species are put at risk, she said. The only thing
humans can do is decide how many lives, homes, and species they’re willing to
lose due to climate change — how long they’re willing to allow their respective
governments to stall on what we know to be technically achievable.
Further,
Franzen’s assessment of our prospects for averting two degrees of temperature
rise is very likely correct. If every signatory of the Paris Agreement honored
its emission-reduction commitment under the accord, the Earth would still be at
least three degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial levels by 2100. And only
a tiny fraction of signatories are on pace to honor those commitments.
Thus,
Franzen’s pessimism on this score is neither uncommon nor novel. In fact, New
York Times climate reporter Brad Plumer declared that keeping warming below two
degrees was all but impossible back in 2014 (when he was still writing for
Vox):
By now,
countries have delayed action for so long that the necessary emissions cuts will
have to be extremely sharp. In April 2014, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that if we want to stay
below the 2°C limit, global greenhouse-gas emissions would have to decline
between 1.3 percent and 3.1 percent each year, on average, between 2010 and
2050.
To
put that in perspective, global emissions declined by just 1 percent for a
single year after the 2008 financial crisis, during a brutal recession when
factories and buildings around the world were idling. To stay below 2°C, we may
have to triple that pace of cuts, and sustain it year after year.
… “Ten
years ago, it was possible to model a path to 2°C without all these heroic
assumptions,” says Peter Frumhoff of the Union of Concerned Scientists. “But
because we’ve dallied for so long, that’s no longer true.”
Five years
later, the path to two degrees requires assumptions even more heroic. So,
Franzen is probably right that we aren’t going to keep warming below that
threshold. He’s just badly wrong about what that means.
Franzen’s
understanding of climate science could use a few corrections.
Even as the
author mocks the baseless optimism of progressive rhetoric on climate, he
treats the center-left’s most convenient rhetorical contrivance on the subject
as gospel: that two degrees of warming (give or take) marks a “point of no
return,” at which the climate “spins completely out of control,” and near-term
civilizational collapse becomes inevitable. “In the long run, it probably makes
no difference how badly we overshoot two degrees,” Franzen writes. “[O]nce the
point of no return is passed, the world will become self-transforming.”
This is
extremely wrong. As David Wallace-Wells writes (in a book that Franzen cites in
his essay, but perhaps did not read very closely):
[G]lobal
warming is not binary. It is not a matter of “yes” or “no,” not a question of
“fucked” or “not.” Instead, it is a problem that gets worse over time the
longer we produce greenhouse gas, and can be made better if we choose to stop.
Which means that no matter how hot it gets, no matter how fully climate change
transforms the planet and the way we live on it, it will always be the case
that the next decade could contain more warming, and more suffering, or less
warming and less suffering. Just how much is up to us, and always will be.
But don’t
take my colleague’s word for it — take co-author of the 2018 IPCC report Myles
Allen’s. “Bad stuff is already happening and every half a degree of warming
matters,” Allen recently wrote, “but the IPCC does not draw a ‘planetary
boundary’ at 1.5°C beyond which lie climate dragons.”
Given both
the technical feasibility of keeping warming below two degrees (or even below
1.5) — and the immense human consequences of every incremental increase in
global temperatures — there is a strong argument for politicians and activists
to hold the line on conventional warming targets, no matter how politically
dubious or scientifically arbitrary they may be. That said, there is a
difference between refusing to acquiesce to political probability, and refusing
to make contingency plans in light of it. Given what the available evidence
tells us about the prospects of rapid decarbonization over the next decade, it
would be grossly irresponsible to oppose investments in carbon capture and
other “negative emissions” technologies. We no longer have the luxury of forswearing
such “moral hazards.” Similarly, given the certainty of wrenching ecological
disruptions, Franzen is on firm ground when he calls on his readers to make
comprehensive preparations for a world of climate chaos:
Preparing
for fires and floods and refugees is a directly pertinent example. But the
impending catastrophe heightens the urgency of almost any world-improving
action. In times of increasing chaos, people seek protection in tribalism and
armed force, rather than in the rule of law, and our best defense against this
kind of dystopia is to maintain functioning democracies, functioning legal
systems, functioning communities. In this respect, any movement toward a more
just and civil society can now be considered a meaningful climate action. Securing
fair elections is a climate action. Combatting extreme wealth inequality is a
climate action. Shutting down the hate machines on social media is a climate
action. Instituting humane immigration policy, advocating for racial and gender
equality, promoting respect for laws and their enforcement, supporting a free
and independent press, ridding the country of assault weapons — these are all
meaningful climate actions. To survive rising temperatures, every system,
whether of the natural world or of the human world, will need to be as strong
and healthy as we can make it.
And yet,
virtually every climate group that’s currently agitating for rapid
decarbonization also supports investments in adaptation and resilience.
Meanwhile, Franzen’s suggestion that supporters of a Green New Deal believe
climate must be “everyone’s overriding priority” — such that no one is allowed
to focus on combating wealth or racial inequality — would be news to both
Ocasio-Cortez and her critics.
Some men
just want to watch the world bird.
Franzen and
climate activists do not disagree on the importance of fair elections and
humane immigration policy. The author builds up the straw man of a green
movement that disdains Black Lives Matter (for failing to focus on the one true
crisis) to build a broader coalition behind his true, idiosyncratic complaint:
that “renewable energy projects” are defacing his favorite bird preserves:
Every
renewable-energy mega-project that destroys a living ecosystem — the “green”
energy development now occurring in Kenya’s national parks, the giant
hydroelectric projects in Brazil, the construction of solar farms in open
spaces, rather than in settled areas — erodes the resilience of a natural world
already fighting for its life. Soil and water depletion, overuse of pesticides,
the devastation of world fisheries — collective will is needed for these
problems, too, and, unlike the problem of carbon, they’re within our power to
solve.
Franzen
articulated this grievance more clearly in his previous, widely panned New
Yorker essay on climate change, in which he voiced frustration at the Audubon
Society’s misguided obsession with climate, and the ostensible willingness of
some so-called environmentalists to “blight every landscape with biofuel
agriculture, solar farms, and wind turbines.” At bottom, his new piece is just
an elaborately elliptical rendering of the same objection. Like President
Trump, Franzen has a visceral distaste for wind turbines and is willing to
distort climate science to rationalize his opposition to massive investments in
renewable energy.
In reality,
stipulating that it is too late to avoid two degrees Celsius warming actually
strengthens the case for prioritizing “renewable-energy mega-projects” over
conservation; since there is no “point of no return” on climate (or at least,
none that we can know in advance), the bleaker one’s assessment of the
prospects for rapid decarbonization, the more committed one should be to
reducing emissions by all practical means.
We don’t
have 12 years to save the world. But we do have the rest of our lives to save
as many of each other as we can. Franzen’s doomerism is for the birds.
What If We
Stopped Pretending?
The climate
apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent
it.
By Jonathan
Franzen
September
8, 2019
Illustration
by Leonardo Santamaria
“There is
infinite hope,” Kafka tells us, “only not for us.” This is a fittingly mystical
epigram from a writer whose characters strive for ostensibly reachable goals
and, tragically or amusingly, never manage to get any closer to them. But it
seems to me, in our rapidly darkening world, that the converse of Kafka’s quip
is equally true: There is no hope, except for us.
I’m
talking, of course, about climate change. The struggle to rein in global carbon
emissions and keep the planet from melting down has the feel of Kafka’s
fiction. The goal has been clear for thirty years, and despite earnest efforts
we’ve made essentially no progress toward reaching it. Today, the scientific
evidence verges on irrefutable. If you’re younger than sixty, you have a good
chance of witnessing the radical destabilization of life on earth—massive crop
failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of
millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or
permanent drought. If you’re under thirty, you’re all but guaranteed to witness
it.
If you care
about the planet, and about the people and animals who live on it, there are
two ways to think about this. You can keep on hoping that catastrophe is
preventable, and feel ever more frustrated or enraged by the world’s inaction.
Or you can accept that disaster is coming, and begin to rethink what it means
to have hope.
Even at
this late date, expressions of unrealistic hope continue to abound. Hardly a
day seems to pass without my reading that it’s time to “roll up our sleeves”
and “save the planet”; that the problem of climate change can be “solved” if we
summon the collective will. Although this message was probably still true in
1988, when the science became fully clear, we’ve emitted as much atmospheric
carbon in the past thirty years as we did in the previous two centuries of
industrialization. The facts have changed, but somehow the message stays the
same.
Psychologically,
this denial makes sense. Despite the outrageous fact that I’ll soon be dead
forever, I live in the present, not the future. Given a choice between an
alarming abstraction (death) and the reassuring evidence of my senses
(breakfast!), my mind prefers to focus on the latter. The planet, too, is still
marvelously intact, still basically normal—seasons changing, another election
year coming, new comedies on Netflix—and its impending collapse is even harder
to wrap my mind around than death. Other kinds of apocalypse, whether religious
or thermonuclear or asteroidal, at least have the binary neatness of dying: one
moment the world is there, the next moment it’s gone forever. Climate
apocalypse, by contrast, is messy. It will take the form of increasingly severe
crises compounding chaotically until civilization begins to fray. Things will
get very bad, but maybe not too soon, and maybe not for everyone. Maybe not for
me.
Some of the
denial, however, is more willful. The evil of the Republican Party’s position
on climate science is well known, but denial is entrenched in progressive
politics, too, or at least in its rhetoric. The Green New Deal, the blueprint
for some of the most substantial proposals put forth on the issue, is still
framed as our last chance to avert catastrophe and save the planet, by way of
gargantuan renewable-energy projects. Many of the groups that support those
proposals deploy the language of “stopping” climate change, or imply that
there’s still time to prevent it. Unlike the political right, the left prides
itself on listening to climate scientists, who do indeed allow that catastrophe
is theoretically avertable. But not everyone seems to be listening carefully.
The stress falls on the word theoretically.
Our
atmosphere and oceans can absorb only so much heat before climate change,
intensified by various feedback loops, spins completely out of control. The
consensus among scientists and policy-makers is that we’ll pass this point of
no return if the global mean temperature rises by more than two degrees Celsius
(maybe a little more, but also maybe a little less). The I.P.C.C.—the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—tells us that, to limit the rise to
less than two degrees, we not only need to reverse the trend of the past three
decades. We need to approach zero net emissions, globally, in the next three
decades.
This is, to
say the least, a tall order. It also assumes that you trust the I.P.C.C.’s
calculations. New research, described last month in Scientific American, demonstrates
that climate scientists, far from exaggerating the threat of climate change,
have underestimated its pace and severity. To project the rise in the global
mean temperature, scientists rely on complicated atmospheric modelling. They
take a host of variables and run them through supercomputers to generate, say,
ten thousand different simulations for the coming century, in order to make a
“best” prediction of the rise in temperature. When a scientist predicts a rise
of two degrees Celsius, she’s merely naming a number about which she’s very
confident: the rise will be at least two degrees. The rise might, in fact, be
far higher.
As a
non-scientist, I do my own kind of modelling. 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.
The first
condition is that every one of the world’s major polluting countries institute
draconian conservation measures, shut down much of its energy and
transportation infrastructure, and completely retool its economy. According to
a recent paper in Nature, the carbon emissions from existing global
infrastructure, if operated through its normal lifetime, will exceed our entire
emissions “allowance”—the further gigatons of carbon that can be released
without crossing the threshold of catastrophe. (This estimate does not include
the thousands of new energy and transportation projects already planned or
under construction.) To stay within that allowance, a top-down intervention
needs to happen not only in every country but throughout every country. Making
New York City a green utopia will not avail if Texans keep pumping oil and
driving pickup trucks.
The actions
taken by these countries must also be the right ones. Vast sums of government
money must be spent without wasting it and without lining the wrong pockets.
Here it’s useful to recall the Kafkaesque joke of the European Union’s biofuel
mandate, which served to accelerate the deforestation of Indonesia for palm-oil
plantations, and the American subsidy of ethanol fuel, which turned out to
benefit no one but corn farmers.
Finally,
overwhelming numbers of human beings, including millions of government-hating
Americans, need to accept high taxes and severe curtailment of their familiar
life styles without revolting. They must accept the reality of climate change
and have faith in the extreme measures taken to combat it. They can’t dismiss
news they dislike as fake. They have to set aside nationalism and class and
racial resentments. They have to make sacrifices for distant threatened nations
and distant future generations. They have to be permanently terrified by hotter
summers and more frequent natural disasters, rather than just getting used to
them. Every day, instead of thinking about breakfast, they have to think about
death.
Call me a
pessimist or call me a humanist, but I don’t see human nature fundamentally
changing anytime soon. I can run ten thousand scenarios through my model, and
in not one of them do I see the two-degree target being met.
To judge
from recent opinion polls, which show that a majority of Americans (many of
them Republican) are pessimistic about the planet’s future, and from the
success of a book like David Wallace-Wells’s harrowing “The Uninhabitable
Earth,” which was released this year, I’m not alone in having reached this
conclusion. But there continues to be a reluctance to broadcast it. Some
climate activists argue that if we publicly admit that the problem can’t be
solved, it will discourage people from taking any ameliorative action at all.
This seems to me not only a patronizing calculation but an ineffectual one,
given how little progress we have to show for it to date. The activists who
make it remind me of the religious leaders who fear that, without the promise
of eternal salvation, people won’t bother to behave well. In my experience,
nonbelievers are no less loving of their neighbors than believers. And so I
wonder what might happen if, instead of denying reality, we told ourselves the
truth.
First of
all, even if we can no longer hope to be saved from two degrees of warming,
there’s still a strong practical and ethical case for reducing carbon
emissions. In the long run, it probably makes no difference how badly we
overshoot two degrees; once the point of no return is passed, the world will
become self-transforming. In the shorter term, however, half measures are
better than no measures. Halfway cutting our emissions would make the immediate
effects of warming somewhat less severe, and it would somewhat postpone the
point of no return. The most terrifying thing about climate change is the speed
at which it’s advancing, the almost monthly shattering of temperature records.
If collective action resulted in just one fewer devastating hurricane, just a
few extra years of relative stability, it would be a goal worth pursuing.
In fact, it
would be worth pursuing even if it had no effect at all. To fail to conserve a
finite resource when conservation measures are available, to needlessly add
carbon to the atmosphere when we know very well what carbon is doing to it, is
simply wrong. Although the actions of one individual have zero effect on the
climate, this doesn’t mean that they’re meaningless. Each of us has an ethical
choice to make. During the Protestant Reformation, when “end times” was merely
an idea, not the horribly concrete thing it is today, a key doctrinal question
was whether you should perform good works because it will get you into Heaven,
or whether you should perform them simply because they’re good—because, while
Heaven is a question mark, you know that this world would be better if everyone
performed them. I can respect the planet, and care about the people with whom I
share it, without believing that it will save me.
More than
that, a false hope of salvation can be actively harmful. If you persist in
believing that catastrophe can be averted, you commit yourself to tackling a
problem so immense that it needs to be everyone’s overriding priority forever.
One result, weirdly, is a kind of complacency: by voting for green candidates,
riding a bicycle to work, avoiding air travel, you might feel that you’ve done
everything you can for the only thing worth doing. Whereas, if you accept the
reality that the planet will soon overheat to the point of threatening
civilization, there’s a whole lot more you should be doing.
Our
resources aren’t infinite. Even if we invest much of them in a longest-shot
gamble, reducing carbon emissions in the hope that it will save us, it’s unwise
to invest all of them. Every billion dollars spent on high-speed trains, which
may or may not be suitable for North America, is a billion not banked for
disaster preparedness, reparations to inundated countries, or future
humanitarian relief. Every renewable-energy mega-project that destroys a living
ecosystem—the “green” energy development now occurring in Kenya’s national
parks, the giant hydroelectric projects in Brazil, the construction of solar
farms in open spaces, rather than in settled areas—erodes the resilience of a
natural world already fighting for its life. Soil and water depletion, overuse
of pesticides, the devastation of world fisheries—collective will is needed for
these problems, too, and, unlike the problem of carbon, they’re within our
power to solve. As a bonus, many low-tech conservation actions (restoring
forests, preserving grasslands, eating less meat) can reduce our carbon
footprint as effectively as massive industrial changes.
All-out war
on climate change made sense only as long as it was winnable. Once you accept
that we’ve lost it, other kinds of action take on greater meaning. Preparing
for fires and floods and refugees is a directly pertinent example. But the
impending catastrophe heightens the urgency of almost any world-improving
action. In times of increasing chaos, people seek protection in tribalism and
armed force, rather than in the rule of law, and our best defense against this
kind of dystopia is to maintain functioning democracies, functioning legal
systems, functioning communities. In this respect, any movement toward a more
just and civil society can now be considered a meaningful climate action.
Securing fair elections is a climate action. Combatting extreme wealth
inequality is a climate action. Shutting down the hate machines on social media
is a climate action. Instituting humane immigration policy, advocating for
racial and gender equality, promoting respect for laws and their enforcement,
supporting a free and independent press, ridding the country of assault
weapons—these are all meaningful climate actions. To survive rising
temperatures, every system, whether of the natural world or of the human world,
will need to be as strong and healthy as we can make it.
And then
there’s the matter of hope. If your hope for the future depends on a wildly
optimistic scenario, what will you do ten years from now, when the scenario
becomes unworkable even in theory? Give up on the planet entirely? To borrow
from the advice of financial planners, I might suggest a more balanced
portfolio of hopes, some of them longer-term, most of them shorter. It’s fine
to struggle against the constraints of human nature, hoping to mitigate the
worst of what’s to come, but it’s just as important to fight smaller, more
local battles that you have some realistic hope of winning. Keep doing the
right thing for the planet, yes, but also keep trying to save what you love
specifically—a community, an institution, a wild place, a species that’s in trouble—and
take heart in your small successes. Any good thing you do now is arguably a
hedge against the hotter future, but the really meaningful thing is that it’s
good today. As long as you have something to love, you have something to hope
for.
In Santa
Cruz, where I live, there’s an organization called the Homeless Garden Project.
On a small working farm at the west end of town, it offers employment,
training, support, and a sense of community to members of the city’s homeless
population. It can’t “solve” the problem of homelessness, but it’s been
changing lives, one at a time, for nearly thirty years. Supporting itself in
part by selling organic produce, it contributes more broadly to a revolution in
how we think about people in need, the land we depend on, and the natural world
around us. In the summer, as a member of its C.S.A. program, I enjoy its kale
and strawberries, and in the fall, because the soil is alive and
uncontaminated, small migratory birds find sustenance in its furrows.
There may
come a time, sooner than any of us likes to think, when the systems of
industrial agriculture and global trade break down and homeless people
outnumber people with homes. At that point, traditional local farming and
strong communities will no longer just be liberal buzzwords. Kindness to
neighbors and respect for the land—nurturing healthy soil, wisely managing
water, caring for pollinators—will be essential in a crisis and in whatever
society survives it. A project like the Homeless Garden offers me the hope that
the future, while undoubtedly worse than the present, might also, in some ways,
be better. Most of all, though, it gives me hope for today.
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