There are two types of climate denialism. The first type, practised by Liberals and Republicans and Murdoch hacks, is to deny the science, to deny that humans have been and are continuing to heat the planet in an unsustainable manner. The second type, practised by pretty much everyone else, is to deny the politics and the psychology, to deny that human society appears incapable of altering its behaviour sufficiently to deal with scientific reality.
The New Yorker has just published an essay by Jonathan Franzen on this second type of denialism, on the refusal to confront our current and impending death. Franzen’s essay is gentle, heartfelt, pleading and depressing. The essay, along with its author, has also been condemned far and wide.
Franzen’s essay has not convinced me that we are doomed. Much more convincing has been the vicious and fundamentally empty response, which does nothing so much as to prove Franzen’s point.
