Quakers, social justice and revolution

There has been a lot of criticism of Jonathan Franzen’s recent article in the New Yorker, “What if We Stopped Pretending the Climate Apocalypse Can Be Stopped? The climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent it”. Some of that criticism relates to choosing, specifically, a 2 degree Centigrade rise in atmospheric temperature as a limit we should not cross if runaway heating of the planet is to be avoided. No one seems to argue, though, that there is a threshold of warming beyond which runaway heating will occur.

Another interesting criticism relates to Franzen being an old white male, who is privileged to have his work published when people of color and/or women’s writings are not selected.

Then there is the criticism that he is not a scientist.

Not everyone thought Frazen’s arguments were completely off base. In an article published Monday by Mother Jones, Kevin Drum points out that while the use of renewable energy sources is on the rise — up from 19 to 22 percent of the world’s energy capacity since 1990 — so is our dependence on fossil fuels.

“All told, our reliance on fossil fuels has increased from 62 percent to 65 percent,” Drum wrote. “We haven’t even managed to stabilize carbon emissions, let alone reduce them.”

But, Drum continues:
Franzen’s prescription is wrong: we shouldn’t give up hope. Success is still possible, even if it’s hardly certain. However, his assessment of human nature is something to be taken seriously and it should illuminate the way we approach climate change. Working with human nature is far more likely to produce results than fighting it, and that means finding new ways to make green energy cheap and plentiful instead of fruitlessly pleading with people to use less of it.

Jonathan Franzen Says It’s Too Late For Us on Climate Change. Scientists Immediately Push Back, Peter Arcuni, KQED Science, Sep 10, 2019

I used to think that top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that thirty years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.

~ Gus Speth

It should be noted that Gus Speth is considered by many to have fairly extreme views on climate change. What he says above, though, might be the reason Franzen’s article is labeled Cultural Comment.

There are a lot of reasons I think we are past the point of no return. Global use of fossil fuels has continued to increase, not decrease dramatically, which would have to happen to prevent runaway global heating of the air and oceans. Ice at the North and South poles is rapidly melting and not significantly regenerating. Little ice is left on mountains. Air temperature records are routinely broken around the world. Permafrost is melting (no longer permanent), releasing carbon dioxide, methane, and fueling significant fires. Coral reefs and fish are dying because of the increased temperature and acidity of the oceans. Sea levels are rising. We routinely see increasingly powerful thunderstorms, tornados and hurricanes. I still can’t believe the utter devastation of the Bahamas from Hurricane Dorian.

My dim view of human nature changing comes from 40 years of trying to get people to give up personal automobiles, with no success at all. But I’m still a person of faith and can’t say a spiritual revolution won’t happen.

I continue to believe we should do all we can to decrease our carbon footprint and other environmental damages.

But I do believe it is too late to prevent environmental catastrophe. So I agree with Franzen. “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.” Today we see, for example, the cruel policies toward climate refugees from the Bahamas and Central America. Changing that is important.

A growing number of us believe we have done so much damage to Mother Earth that recovery of life as we know it is no longer possible.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to deny the evolving environmental chaos.

Except when the impacts hit us, personally — or threaten to. By that perverse logic, the news is cooperating — as is the climate, unleashing unprecedented punishments, seemingly each week. Which may be why one recent survey, conducted in the immediate aftermath of the IPCC’s doomsday report, showed that 72 percent of Americans believe climate change should be a higher political priority. Sometimes, as unhappy as it is to look in the face of disaster, those disasters are overwhelming enough that they simply cannot be ignored anymore. Unfortunately, for all the talk on the environmental-left about denial, simple belief in climate change is not enough to move the needle. Already, Yale says, 70 percent of Americans believe “environmental protection is more important than economic growth.” Nudging that number up to 75 percent isn’t the important thing; what’s important is getting those 70 percent to feel their conviction fiercely, to elevate action on climate change to a first-order political priority by speaking loudly about it and to disempower, however we can, those forces conspiring to silence us. Even the ones in our own heads.

You, Too, Are in Denial of Climate Change
Most Americans believe, abstractly, in climate change. That’s not enough. New York Magazine. Dec 14, 2018

The total destruction by hurricane Dorian in the Bahamas is hard to believe and the reasons for it hard to deny.

Believing we are in spiral of increasing chaos, do we just give up and enjoy life now as best we can? No, I believe we continue to have a moral responsibility to do what we can to stop the abuse of Mother Earth, to at least slow down the rate of the worsening consequences. To live faith guided lives and help those in need. With millions of climate refugees now and millions more in the future, this will become increasingly important.

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.

What if We Stopped Pretending the Climate Apocalypse Can Be Stopped? by Jonathan Franzen

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.

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.

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.

Finally, overwhelming numbers of human beings, including millions of government-hating Americans, need to accept high taxes and severe curtailment of their familiar life styles 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.

What if We Stopped Pretending the Climate Apocalypse Can Be Stopped? by Jonathan Franzen

I apologize for the extended quotations. I’m glad to find a clear articulation of things I have been thinking about. I intend to discuss the rest of the article in the next post.