Climate change will set the parameters of our post-Princeton lives. The fires that devastated the Palisades earlier this month were, as our nation’s exasperated and exhausted climate scientists continue to remind us, only harbingers of the floods, tornados, and heatwaves to come. Global warming is surpassing the climate models that scientists built in the 2010s and early 2020s that already forecasted a borderline-apocalyptic future. Undoubtedly, by the time current Princeton students reach middle age, they will have witnessed a slew of societal structures sag — or collapse entirely — under the weight of extreme weather events and ever-worsening ecological decline.
It seems to me that on a logical level, most Princeton students understand some vague version of this argument. From the Palisades to the Big Bend, where Hurricane Helene caused devastation this September, we have seen countless images of the world we will inherit. But for an ambitious young adult attending a college that promises paths toward any number of dazzling futures, the ramifications of those images can be unbearable — and, therefore, all too easy to ignore. On an emotional level, most of us refuse to truly reckon how a widespread climate catastrophe will shape our futures.
I would argue that not only must every Princeton student think about how to build their lives in an ever-warming world, but also that the climate activists on campus who intend to spur this thinking often end up discouraging it. Two messaging errors, in particular, allow the average Princeton student to continue imagining climate change as a hazy problem relegated to the headlines rather than as a wide-ranging threat that, for their future selves, will become unavoidable.
The first of these failures involves projecting the sort of “unrealistic hope” that the author Jonathan Franzen warned against in 2019. Franzen, writing for the New Yorker, argued that “denial” of an all-but-inevitable climate disaster was “entrenched” not just in Republican circles but in “progressive politics, too.”
Franzen’s critique applies to Princeton’s climate activist organizations. On its Instagram account, Sunrise Princeton describes itself as a “movement of young people fighting to stop the climate crisis.” However, almost every piece of climate news — 2024 being the hottest year on record, the extinction rate accelerating as a “domino effect” takes hold, Trump pulling out of the Paris Climate Accords on his first day back in office — suggests that destruction and destabilization at a civilizational level is assured long before the climate crisis is “stopped.”
Princeton’s communication of its own climate commitments further absolves us of any responsibility. The largest problem with the University’s plan to reach net zero emissions by 2046 — besides reasonable concerns that this adjustment is too slow — is that it doesn't ask anything of Princeton’s student body. Implicitly, we are asked to believe that the climate crisis is being calmed behind the scenes without us.
The second messaging failure is epitomized by one paragraph in the otherwise excellent column by Eleanor Clemans-Cope about Princeton’s “complacency” in the face of the climate crisis. Clemans-Cope is a managing editor for The Daily Princetonian. Citing the “dismal theory” of climate change, which suggests that the uncertainty inherent in our climate modeling allows for “fat-tails” where “the probability of extreme events is significant,” Clemans-Cope warns of “catastrophic warming scenarios that could lead to human extinction.”
Citing extinction in this way breeds inaction — a single Princeton student might reasonably conclude that they won’t be able to change humanity’s fate — but it also relies on fallacious premises. In her article on the “fat-tailed distribution,” Martin Weitzman — the scholar Clemans-Cope cites — warns of a climate catastrophe that “threaten[s] to drive… planetary welfare to dangerously low levels” — but his article doesn't include the word “extinction.”
Still, Weitzman’s model allows for “infinite” harm, and it’s hard to interpret “infinite harm” in a way that excludes extinction. Thankfully, recent research suggests that this “infinite harm” is exceedingly unlikely. When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body composed of hundreds of climate scientists, released a report in 2023 about the risks of global warming, they didn’t mention human extinction once.
Of course, the plunge in “planetary welfare” that Weitzman cites remains likely. And insofar as we humans won’t go extinct before this widespread disaster hits — not from climate change, at least — we need to be planning for it.
This is not an argument for the impossible. I’m not saying that we should all become climate scientists or activists — although we should aim to take up careers that don’t needlessly exploit an increasingly fragile earth. What I am saying is that by accepting that neither a magical cure nor an all-out apocalypse is on the horizon, we can regain a sense of agency.
Most of us have heard that large corporations cause the majority of global warming and that, as individuals, we cannot hope to assuage the crisis on a global scale, no matter how many sustainable practices we take up. This is true. But for the students who are not helping to build the green grid, or spending every weekend protesting against oil and gas companies, thinking of climate change as a global problem is somewhat unhelpful. When we imagine our futures, we must start by thinking of climate change on the local level.
As Franzen argues, “when… systems of industrial agriculture and global trade break down,” building strong communities and bolstering sustainable practices at a local scale will become pivotal. In this light, anybody willing to accept the urgency of the climate crisis but resistant to devote their entire life to the struggle can still choose to help in a great number of ways — volunteering in local elections, learning to grow food, and attending community events. The interpersonal lessons we absorb both in and out of the classroom can help us form bulwarks against the most destabilizing effects of global warming.
Embracing sustainability is fundamentally an act of hope. Yes, we will have to plan for our futures with a climate catastrophe in mind. But if we do it right — if we do it now — those futures will still sparkle by the time we meet them.
Alexander Margulis is a first-year from Princeton, N.J. He is interested in English and philosophy. Send your (probably justified) complaints about Johnathan Frazen to amargulis[at]princeton.edu.
Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.
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