Published on
Wednesday, September 11, 2019
The technology is very largely
there. All that is missing is the energy, commitment, and INTERNATIONAL
COOPERATION [this last is the difficult part].
Ponder the onrushing disaster
of climate change, and the towering task of getting greenhouse gas emissions
down in time to avoid existential calamity, and one can be led very easily to
an enervating political despair. The battle is basically lost, or so says the
famed novelist Jonathan Franzen in a New
Yorker essay this week. While we should try to reduce emissions,
he writes, "All-out war on climate change made sense only as long as it
was winnable."
Just like his similar
effort from four years ago, Franzen's argument is sloppy, muddled, and
premised on elementary factual errors. But it makes a good reason to consider
some historical occasions in which human societies have faced and overcome
similarly-long odds in the past—like the French Revolution, when ordinary
people, pulsing with furious revolutionary energy, flung themselves at
seemingly-invulnerable adversaries and won.
First, let's examine Franzen's
case. He says that "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" which we will almost certainly blow past, and
hence the game is basically up. He then reasons that climate policy should not
now be too aggressive, because there is often an inherent trade-off between
green developments and environmental preservation. "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," he writes, saying some should be saved for humanitarian aid and
that renewable mega-projects that threaten ecosystems should not be built.
There is just one problem:
Neither premise is true. The science on tipping points is very unsettled, but
as the University of Exeter's Timothy Lenton (perhaps the top climate
researcher on this particular point) explains in a Climatic
Change paper, there are lots of potential tipping points, some are a
lot more sinister than others, they will be reached at different temperatures,
and, while we can't rule out tripping some at under 2 degrees, the likeliest
early tripwire is between 2-4 degrees. Now, that is not at all comforting, but
it means there is no certain climate doomsday point—every tenth of a degree of
warming means worse direct impacts and a greater likelihood of extreme
disaster.
Second, it is simply false to
say there is a trade-off between climate policy and environmental preservation,
because unchecked climate change will obliterate the biosphere. One should
avoid wrecking key ecosystems, but if the energy payoff is sufficiently high,
it still might be worth doing, because if climate change is not stopped the
ecosystem will be wrecked anyway. High levels of warming will do orders of
magnitude more damage to Franzen's beloved bird population than all the
windmills in the world. Climate writer David Roberts carefully
explained this to Franzen back in 2015, but apparently it didn't sink
in. Under the onrushing disaster of climate change, and the towering task of
getting greenhouse gas emissions down in time to avoid existential calamity,
and one can be led very easily to an enervating political despair. The battle
is basically lost, or so says the famed novelist Jonathan Franzen in a New
Yorker essay this week. While we should try to reduce emissions,
he writes, "All-out war on climate change made sense only as long as it
was winnable."
Read full article here.
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