What If We Stopped Pretending?
âThere is infinite hope,â Kafka tells us, âonly not for us.â 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 Kafkaâs quip is equally true: There is no hope, except for us.
Iâm 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 Kafkaâs fiction. The goal has been clear for thirty years, and despite earnest efforts weâve made essentially no progress toward reaching it. Today, the scientific evidence verges on irrefutable. If youâre younger than sixty, you have a good chance of witnessing the radical destabilization of life on earthâmassive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought. If youâre under thirty, youâre 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 worldâs 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 itâs time to âroll up our sleevesâ and âsave the planetâ; that the problem of climate change can be âsolvedâ if we summon the collective will. Although this message was probably still true in 1988, when the science became fully clear, weâve 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 Iâll 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 normalâseasons changing, another election year coming, new comedies on Netflixâand its impending collapse is even harder to wrap my mind around than death. Other kinds of apocalypse, whether religious or thermo-nuclear or asteroidal, at least have the binary neatness of dying: one moment the world is there, the next moment itâs 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 Partyâs 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 âstoppingâ climate change, or imply that thereâs 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. Many scientists and policy-makers fear that weâre in danger of passing this point of no return if the global mean temperature rises by more than two degrees Celsius (maybe more, but also maybe less). The I.P.C.C.âthe Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changeâtells 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 ...