Sally Rooney is talking nonsense about climate change

Two years ago, Time magazine named novelist Sally Rooney as one of its 100 most influential people in the world. In that case, the world will presumably be moving very quickly to abolish capitalism, because Rooney has declared it – not entirely originally – to be the root cause of climate change.

Rooney really does seem to be asserting that it is a bad thing that agricultural yields increased beyond their medieval levels

Carbon emissions, according to her, are leading us rapidly to ‘apocalyptic civilizational collapse’. Not that this is an especially profound observation in Rooney’s mind because ‘there is no longer much serious disagreement of this claim.’ But presumably she does still think the case for finishing off capitalism still needs to be made because she has devoted a rather large piece in the Irish Times to making that point.

What’s killing the planet, she observes, is a ‘special kind of greed’ which emerged ‘puzzlingly late in the history of our species’.