[D66] What if We Stopped Pretending the Climate Apocalypse Can Be Stopped?

[A.OUT]

What if We Stopped Pretending the Climate Apocalypse Can Be Stopped?
By
Jonathan Franzen
newyorker.com
12 min
View Original

“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 lifestyles 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.