New Misguided Opponent of Renewables: Famous Novelist Jonathan Franzen

In a lapse of fact checking and logic, the normally rigorous New Yorker magazine published a lengthy essay by noted novelist and bird watcher Jonathan Franzen that, among other things, called wind and solar power “blights on the landscape” that should be abandoned in favor of bird sanctuaries because “drastic planetary overheating is a done deal.”

The crux of Franzen’s argument is summed up about halfway through his piece: “The Earth as we now know it resembles a patient whose terminal cancer we can choose to treat either with disfiguring aggression or with palliation and sympathy. We can dam every river and blight every landscape with biofuel agriculture, solar farms, and wind turbines, to buy some extra years of moderated warming. Or we can settle for a shorter life of higher quality, protecting the areas where wild animals and plants are hanging on, at the cost of slightly hastening the human catastrophe.”

As was immediately pointed out in several incredulous critiques of Franzen’s article, he mistakenly thinks that renewable energy and other strategies for fighting climate change preclude conservation of current animals and ecosystems.

In particular, Franzen lashed out at Audubon based on his belief that the organization has lost its way by preferencing the the fight against climate change over protecting birds. Audubon CEO David Yarnold’s excellent response is nicely encapsulated by his line that “our members can walk and chew gum at the same time.”

Franzen also wants to give up on climate change because the problem is too big for any one person’s actions to have any effect: “The scale of greenhouse-gas emissions is so vast, the mechanisms by which these emissions affect the climate so nonlinear, and the effects so widely dispersed in time and space that no specific instance of harm could ever be traced back to my 0.0000001-per-cent contribution to emissions.”

He probably thinks voting is a waste of time too.

For more thoughtful and hilarious takedowns of Franzen’s “thinkpiece,” read Climate Progress and Get Energy Smart Now.