“It’s hard to imagine major outlets publishing essays declaring efforts to reduce poverty hopeless. But the story spread anyway. The author starts from the premise that if we let Earth warm by two degrees Celsius, the climate will spin completely out of control and there’ll be no coming back from it. Here’s a Vox video that explains this in greater detail: Franzen seems to presume that we human beings can’t hold more than one idea in our minds at the same time. Franzen used her travails, and those of a predictably sprawling cast of supporting characters, to muster a biting critique of consumerism, digital culture, and human solipsism. Sign up for the 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). “Our resources aren’t infinite. Following the deaths of his parents and the dissolution of his marriage, Franzen contributed a series of essays to The New Yorker magazine that were later compiled into his fourth book, How to Be Alone (2002). 1. These four complaints are significant because, as much as they’re about Franzen — a man whose comments have been bothering more and more people over the years — they’re about a lot more than just Franzen. They’re not actually connected. But as critics pointed out, Franzen didn’t seem to have a firm grasp of the details of the Green New Deal, and failed to offer a full and fair characterization of the plan. Franzen returned to fiction with the novel Freedom (2010), which takes a contemporary family of the American Midwest as its focus and probes its members’ relationships with each other and with those around them. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. • The critics’ anger seemed to coalesce around four main complaints, three of them empirical in nature: Franzen is wrong on the science, on the politics, and on the psychology of human behavior as it pertains to climate change. Sign up for the Future Perfect newsletter. It sets out a series of goals for heading off the first crisis (like achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions) and, in the process, seeks to tackle the second crisis by designing our transition to a greener economy in a way that creates jobs for people. • Who is Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court? Two degrees of warming is not meant to be treated as a scientific threshold, a “point of no return.” As sustainable business expert Andrew Winston wrote, Franzen focuses with a strange insistence on “two degrees” as if it’s a magic number beyond which everything instantly turns to hell. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. His latest is an opinion essay for the New Yorker titled, “What If We Stopped Pretending?” The subtitle sums up his argument: “The climate apocalypse is coming. https://t.co/ejGYg95diw, Meanwhile, Leah Stokes asked why our most prominent outlets “continue to publish these bad takes, which invariably come from privileged, western, white men? After earning a B.A. If the New Yorker wants to publish Franzen, that’s its prerogative, but, some people asked, why not hear from a climate scientist? Immediately after the essay went live Sunday, people began to express their ire online. Climate change is dubious and irrelevant --> no point cutting emissions2. According to Franzen, the problem with this framing is that we’re too late to save the planet — and even if we’re not actually too late, we’re certainly too stubborn to accept the massive changes to our lifestyles that saving the planet would require. Franzen is most famous for authoring novels like The Corrections and Freedom, but he’s also developed a pattern of writing controversial takes on the environment. The novel was also a finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award, and the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (won by Richard Russo for Empire Falls).