Farting in the wind

**My friend, Stu Forman, runs climatchangegazette.com where he regularly posts thought-provoking articles. His latest is about AOC, Cows, and the Green New Deal where he cites the contribution cows make to global warming from their "enteric fermentation." I wrote the following in response, though the links and formatting might not carry over, owing to the comment tool on his site,

People tend not to believe scientists as readily as they believe novelists. Scientists thrill to facts. People thrill to stories. That's just the way we are. But that doesn't mean people can't be reached by facts. Of course, novelists have been writing on the subject of climate catastrophe since before it became fashionable as a topic of conversation, sermons, and political platforms. You've mentioned a few in this space. I recently finished "New York 2140" by Kim Stanley Robinson, and I heartily recommend it, not only for its riveting writing but for how it makes climate issues real.

Today I came on a piece by the novelist Jonathan Franzen, but it isn't a novel. It's an article in the New Yorker, that expresses the opinion that I, a novelist, have quietly held for a long time:

What If We Stopped Pretending?The climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent it.

Though Franzen lauds efforts to fight climate change, he does so for reasons other than their effectiveness.

If you’re younger than sixty, you have a good chance of witnessing the radical destabilization of life on earth—massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought. If you’re under thirty, you’re all but guaranteed to witness it.

For those of us in neither category—face it, we're invisible—it's sad and scary. Sad for what our kids and grandkids will have to go through. And scary because we're so old we'll only foresee it and not have to live through it. Or much of anything.

So yay for AOC and the GND and all the greening going on. But the salvation train left the station a long, long time ago. There's something to be said for the preppers who at least recognize the futility of stopping the ignition of our earth-size furnace, though I wonder to what extent even they can survive it.