I posted this to the FUSN list on March 3rd of this year.
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I have been worried about climate change for quite some time. But it seemed
that thirty years ago we were told that if we took decisive action now we could
put off the worst of it, but the years pass and the message doesn’t change. I
know that carbon emissions have not dropped very much if at all. What’s actually
going on?
I found an essay by Jonathan Franzen that addressed this issue (from “The
end of the end of the earth”, 2018, pp14-22). He argues that the insistence by
the center and left that we can still stop it is understandable – but now a lie.
I couldn’t immediately find anywhere where this discussion was happening
online.
Franzen: “Three years ago, I was in a state of rage about climate change.
The Republican Party was continuing to lie about the absence of a scientific
consensus on climate... but I wasn’t much less angry at the left. I’d read a new
book by Naomi Klein, “This Changes Everything”, in which she assured the reader
that, although “time is tight,” we still have ten years to radically remake the
global economy and prevent global temperatures from rising by more than two
degrees Celsius by the end of the century. Klein’s optimism was touching, but
it, too, was a kind of denialism. Even before the election of Donald Trump,
there was no evidence to suggest that humanity is capable – politically,
psychologically, ethically, economically – of slashing carbon emissions quickly
and deeply enough to change everything. Even the European Union, which had taken
the early lead on climate, and was fond of lecturing other regions on their
irresponsibility, needed only a recession in 2009 to shift its focus to economic
growth. Barring a worldwide revolt against free-market capitalism in the next
ten years – the scenario that Klein contended could still save us – the most
LIKELY rise in temperature this century is on the order of six degrees. We’ll be
lucky to avoid a two-degree rise before the year 2030.
“In a polity ever more starkly divided, the truth about global warming was
even less convenient to the left than to the right. The right’s denials were
odious lies, but at least they were consistent with a certain cold-eyed
political realism. The left, having excoriated the right for its intellectual
dishonesty and turned climate denialism into a political rallying cry, was now
in an impossible position. It had to keep insisting on the truth of climate
science while persisting in the fiction that collective world action could stave
off the worst of it: that universal acceptance of the facts, which really might
have changed everything in 1995, could still change everything. Otherwise, what
difference did it make if the Republicans quibbled with the science?
“Because my sympathies were with the left – reducing carbon emissions is
vastly better than doing nothing; every half degree helps – I also held it to a
higher standard. Denying the dark reality, pretending that the Paris Accord
could avert catastrophe, was understandable as a tactic to keep people motivated
to reduce emissions; to keep hope alive. As a strategy, though, it did more harm
than good. It ceded the ethical high ground, insulted the intelligence of
unpersuaded voters (“Really? We still have ten years?”), and precluded frank
discussion of how the global community should prepare for drastic
changes...
[Franzen wrote an essay, his editor] “nudged me toward framing the essay
not as a denunciation but as a question: How do we find meaning in our actions
when the world seems to be coming to an end? Much of the final draft was devoted
to a pair of well-conceived regional conservation projects, in Peru and Costa
Rica...” [The essay was heavily criticized by the left.]
Critics “made it sound as if I’d proposed that we abandon the effort to
reduce carbon emissions, which was the position of the Republican Party, which,
by the polarizing logic of online discourse, made me a climate-change denier. In
fact, I’m such a climate-science accepter that I don’t even bother having hope
for the ice caps. All I’d denied was that a right-minded international elite,
meeting in nice hotels around the world, could stop them from melting. This was
my crime against orthodoxy. Climate now has such a lock on the liberal
imagination that any attempt to change the conversation ... amounts to an
offense against religion.”
“... drastic global warming is already a done deal, and ... it seems
unlikely that humanity is going to leave any carbon in the ground, given that,
even now, not one country in the world has pledged to do it.”
“global warming is THE issue of our time, perhaps the biggest issue in all
of human history. Every one of us is now in the position of the indigenous
Americans when the Europeans arrived with guns and smallpox: our world is poised
to change vastly, unpredictably, and mostly for the worse. I don’t have any hope
that we can stop the change from coming. My only hope is that we can accept the
reality in time to prepare for it humanely, and my only faith is that facing it
honestly, however painful this may be, is better than denying it.”
The analogy of being Native Americans just as the Europeans arrive moves me
a great deal. It is a very unpleasant topic, and I cringe a bit raising it in
this community – but seeking truth is part of what we are committed to. I
welcome other thoughts and perspectives.
