Naomi Klein, reply by Elizabeth Kolbert
January 8, 2015 Issue
Andrew Quilty A house swept into a lake by the storm surge of Hurricane Sandy, Mantoloking, New Jersey, October 2012; photograph by Andrew Quilty from #Sandy: Seen Through the iPhones of Acclaimed Photographers, just published by Daylight
To the Editors:
According to Elizabeth Kolbert’s review of my book This Changes Everything [NYR, December 4, 2014] humans are too selfish to respond effectively to the climate crisis. “Here’s my inconvenient truth,” she writes, “when you tell people what it would actually take to radically reduce carbon emissions, they turn away. They don’t want to give up air travel or air conditioning or HDTV or trips to the mall or the family car.”
Kolbert’s only proof for this sweeping judgment is her partial account of a single Swiss research project that began in 1998. The researchers behind the 2,000-Watt Society, as the project is known, determined that if humans are to live within ecological limits, then every person on earth will need to keep their energy consumption below 2,000 watts. They created several fictional characters representing different lifestyles to illustrate what that would entail and, according to Kolbert, “Only ‘Alice,’ a resident of a retirement home who had no TV or personal computer and occasionally took the train to visit her children, met the target.”
…(read more).
Global Climate Change
Environment Ethics
Environment Justice
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