Monday, September 9, 2019

Jonathan Franzen's Only Real Mistake Was Taking The Left's Word For It On Catastrophic Global Warming

Jonathan Franzen is a very smart and occasionally insightful writer with a fairly dumb article out at the New Yorker. The novelist took a stab at his own think piece about climate change, and the results were about what you'd expect from a thoughtful essayist with no background in environmental science or public policy.
The Pulitzer Prize winner has long expressed pessimism over humanity's ability to reduce greenhouse gas emissions enough to curb the more dire consequences of climate change, but in the New Yorkerhe welcomes his perception of reality more willingly: "What if we stopped pretending?"

Image result for al gore global warming meme
"As a non-scientist, I do my own kind of modelling," Franzen writes. "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."
Said conditions include the requirement that every nation on earth, including the most culpable China, crack down with forced conservation, that said crackdown is actually effective, and that humanity accept severe taxation and regulation of their daily life. Call me a pessimist or call me a humanist, but I don’t see human nature fundamentally changing anytime soon," Franzen writes. "I can run ten thousand scenarios through my model, and in not one of them do I see the two-degree target being met."
Franzen, who excoriates Republicans in the piece, wrongly ignores the proven efficacyof nuclear power's ability to replace unclean energy sources, as well as the potential for America to levy trade powers against nations like China and India to convince and coerce them into lowering emissions. But he is correct that humanity, to some degree, will have to accept some ramifications of climate change and invest in the technology to counteract them.https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/jonathan-franzens-only-real-mistake-was-taking-the-lefts-word-for-it-on-catastrophic-climate-change

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