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

“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...(continues)
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Readers respond:

Can We Stop Climate Change?

Jonathan Franzen argues that it is delusional to think we can still save the planet from climate change, because rising temperatures will inevitably cause global catastrophe (“What If We Stopped Pretending?,” September 8th, newyorker.com/franzen). He says that we should resign ourselves to the destruction to come. This argument promotes complacency and hopelessness, and it gives an easy out to people who might otherwise advocate for the political action we need. I trust the climate scientists and activists who believe we have the resources to create a hopeful future. Franzen does not offer reality—he offers defeat.

Judy Schneier
Brooklyn, N.Y.

If environmentalists resent Franzen’s piece, it is only because it presents the state of human inaction on climate in a well-reasoned, clear-sighted, and complex way. We cannot prevent cataclysmic temperatures and extreme weather. Wouldn’t we all feel better if we acknowledged that fact and acted accordingly?

Linda J. Drake
Denver, Colo.

The most exemplary of the new books on climate change—David Wallace-Wells’s “The Uninhabitable Earth” and Bill McKibben’s “Falter”—struggle for an honesty that does not counsel despair. Franzen’s argument, which suggests that attempts to mobilize are at odds with conservation and even with moral clarity, is an unhelpful distortion of the truth. We have the money and the technology to save ourselves. The tragedy, if it comes to that, will be that we don’t do so, even though we can.

Tom Athanasiou
Albany, Calif.

I quibble with Franzen’s assertion that one of our best defenses against global chaos is to maintain functioning democracies and civil society. Franzen must see how poorly democracies have fared in the past few decades—just ask Francis Fukuyama or George Soros. If we want to confront the coming climate apocalypse, we must, as Franzen says, “institute draconian conservation measures.” Left to our own devices, most of us will keep destroying the planet, one Amazon Prime order at a time, and we’ll keep voting for whichever Drumpf or Bolsonaro lets us do it. Democracy may well be the worst answer to the question of climate change.

Emily Otto Kaplan
St. Louis, Mo.

My only complaint about Franzen’s piece is that it should have been published in 1970, when we still had a chance.

Walter Haugen
Fougax-et-Barrineuf, France

Franzen’s essay is a welcome discussion of reality. At our current rate of progress, we cannot stop global warming. But Franzen says he is not a scientist, and it shows. In the last few decades, science has enabled us to manipulate molecules of DNA as easily as a carpenter builds a table. Technologically speaking, developing safe and controllable methods to combat rising temperatures is a much easier task. Franzen deserves credit for advancing the discussion, but he should recognize that what we need is a large government-funded research program—one that gives science the chance to stop global warming.

Robert Eisenberg
Chicago, Ill.

Yes, the climate reality is desperate. But caving like this? Pathetic. I could never explain to my classroom of fourth graders this kind of moral surrender.

Siri Bardarson
Freeland, Wash.This article appears in the print edition of the September 30, 2019, issue.