Climate Hysteria: Jonathan Franzen Edition

This is uninformed--or, rather: misinformed--hysterical bullshit. 

But here's something that can be said in its favor: it does a great job capturing progressive climate hysteria and pushing it a bit further toward its logical (in an attenuated sense of 'logical') end. And it does so while maintaining the tell that so clearly shows that that the whole thing is a combination put-on and delusion:

All-out war on climate change made sense only as long as it was winnable. Once you accept that we’ve lost it, other kinds of action take on greater meaning. Preparing for fires and floods and refugees is a directly pertinent example. But the impending catastrophe heightens the urgency of almost any world-improving action. In times of increasing chaos, people seek protection in tribalism and armed force, rather than in the rule of law, and our best defense against this kind of dystopia is to maintain functioning democracies, functioning legal systems, functioning communities. In this respect, any movement toward a more just and civil society can now be considered a meaningful climate action. Securing fair elections is a climate action. Combatting extreme wealth inequality is a climate action. Shutting down the hate machines on social media is a climate action. Instituting humane immigration policy, advocating for racial and gender equality, promoting respect for laws and their enforcement, supporting a free and independent press, ridding the country of assault weapons—these are all meaningful climate actions. To survive rising temperatures, every system, whether of the natural world or of the human world, will need to be as strong and healthy as we can make it.

This is the depressingly ridiculous inconsistency that pervades leftist thinking (in an attenuated sense of 'thinking') on climate-change: we're all going to die if we don't focus exclusively on the climate...but focusing exclusively on the climate miraculously means not giving up any progressive goals--free school lunches, open borders, confiscation of "assault weapons," head start, transgender bathrooms, anti-"hate-speech" laws, a $15 minimum wage, 4th-trimester abortions, mandatory Title IX training for all faculty, grad students, secretaries, janitors, groundskeepers....drag queen story hour in every library 24 hours/day...every jot and tittle of the progressive agenda turns out to be focusing exclusively on the climate! What are the odds of that???

   IMO we do face a catastrophe, and it's the stupefaction of liberals into misologistic progressives. There's little way to believe the progressive climate hoax without basically refusing to actually investigate it. It's a giant load of horseshit, maintained by the general progressive prohibition against criticizing progressivism. But: it's at least possible to make an honest mistake and believe the hysteria. What's not possible is to rationally, honestly believe that confiscating assault weapons and the rest are going to cool the Earth. (Of course: cooling the Earth isn't actually enough: you'd have to believe that each one is the most efficient use of the relevant resources as a means to cooling the Earth. No even minimally rational, informed and reflective person could believe that.) To just take one ludicrous example from the Franzen screed: of course what he means by "humane" immigration policy is: open or quasi-open borders. And of course that's just about the worst thing we could do on that front, since when a person moves from the third to the first world, his carbon footprint increases by like an order of magnitude or something. If we really thought carbon was going to destroy the world, we'd stop all immigration from less-developed to more-developed countries. And we'd deport people like crazy. But since no one believes the hysteria enough to alter any of their political preferences, of course that's not going to happen.