I live in Louisiana and we have a Democrat for a Governor. Recently, he has been championing the approval of the Lake Maurapas Class VI CO2 well announcement (and Direct Air Capture hub grant announcement) as "good for the economy and climate". Meanwhile our recent PSC, who is a younger Progressive, got elected in a Democrat v. Democrat race by running antagostically against the incumbent as beholden to the local energy company...was taking shots at him for this since sequestration is a "giveaway to Oil Companies".
The aforementioned local energy company is the lone lobbyist in the State pushing grid level solar power...which is largely tied up in NIMBYist delays across the State...with almost support from activist, who are actively opposed to grid level solar because they only want roof top solar. Just today I saw our PSC lamenting the lack of rooftop solar on homes in New Orleans and all i could think is i find it odd that MOST of the solar on houses in Louisiana is installed in deep red rural areas (not suburban or urban areas) and that i feel.
I've long felt so much of the messaging on "good for climate" agenda items could be tweaked to foregrounx everything but Climate and we would increase uptake...but alas, all folks want to do is loudly preach to their friends and seek their high fives 😣
Reasonable enough, but why should compromise by environmentalists stop at climate-related issues? Could climate activists get more votes in Congress by supporting some constraints on abortion? On transgender issues? On affirmative action? On tax policy? Put another way, is some cynical horse trading acceptable in the face of an existential risk?
Coalition-building is a slippery idea that confuses people. I suspect that this Slow Boring post was intended to rebut Freddie’s latest anti-Yggy anti-YIMBY rant, without giving him the attention he craves. I think the root of your disagreement is simply that people mean different things when they invoke coalition-building. From this post, I gather that MY is referring to assembling a legislative coalition. I agree that this version of coalition-building is the most helpful. But other people use coalition-building in other ways.
First, some people mean coalition-building in the sense of building a movement, something of like building a post-Protestant congregation or denomination. This coalition is something that normal people to volunteer activists to professional activists can belong to or identify with. The idea is to create from the ground up an organic counterweight to say, Southern Baptists or post-Baptist evangelicalism, or something with the supposed moral and popular authority of the Black AME. Personally, I think this strategy is dumb and the analogy to Protestant denominations is unhelpful.
Churches have several features progressives are unlikely to adopt but that also make them effective political institutions. They have rituals and symbols to bind their congregations and confer a shared sense of the sacred. They have norms demanding self-sacrifice (tithing) or scarification (literally, like circumcision, or figurative, like publicly swearing by a creed, the more ridiculous the better). Usually, churches belong to an ethnic group, even particular Catholic parishes, so they borrow from and contribute to solidarity along that dimension, too.
Churches are most politically effective when the congregation’s group, ethnic and creedal interests all align. Smaller denominations tend to take cues from larger, more organized ones as for their creedal interests.
With progressive movement building, you basically don’t have rituals, symbols or creeds. Land acknowledgments and George Floyd/ Breonna Taylor come closest, and coincidentally fit neatly into a post-Christian narrative. Hence, black identity politics is white-hot core of movement progressivism, what actuality gets people in the streets. But, without further creedal refinement and group demarcation and bonding, no particular policy demand can be mapped to the movement. No one can tell whether anyone else is promoting policy that is truly emergent from the progressive movement or is merely trying to brand their pet issue as progressive (TM). Even blacktivists have to settle for ordinary& boring legislative coalitionism. Ironically, the NYT comes closest to setting official progressivism by the size of its audience.
Second, and relatedly, professional activists and media types have their own kind of coalition-building. They agree (implicitly or explicitly) to leverage things like platforms, mailing lists or sign-ons to partner organizations. Indeed, this is what they spend most of their time doing! They read the room, as it were, support each other’s priorities. Professional orgs are supposed to fall in line with the predominant coalition of groups in professional progressivism.
California and SF and LA are about the only polities where these kind of vanguardist coalitions have captured state institutions. You have to be pretty solidly leftwing for this behavior to take hold. This limitation follows because professional progressives are under cutthroat competition to adopt the most insane positions to show that they are the most pure and, by coming up with a plausible explanation, the smartest.
Anyway, I think you and Freddie are talking past each other. He’s admittedly literally insane. But also, he’s just trying to do something else. He will never be motivated by or interested in incremental legislative goals. To him, that’s boring! Also, hint hint, his new book is about how managerial elites highjacked the progressive movement thru its black-identitarian core. Rest assured, he will not divert progressivism in his desired direction. As I explained above, (1) progressivism lacks the structures (ritual, creed, co-ethnicity) that make Protestant movements effective and (2) the structures it does have are inexorably drawn to substance -light black identity politics.
I want to quibble with "the stingy nature of our safety net for children". Is that really true, or are there just not that many benefits for middle and upper income families with children.
For low-income children, there are direct income supports (EITC), free childcare (Headstart), free healthcare (Medicaid, CHIP), food supports (WIC, food stamps, reduced/free school lunch). Then for all children there is free public education with transportation included ($15k per student per year)!
You could certainly argue for more, but this doesn't really seem "stingy" to me.
Lots of excellent points in your column, but I want to look at the other side of the coin. You say, most people don't care about climate change, so politicians can't demand that people sacrifice their self-interest for its sake. I say, what can we do to *convince* more people to care, so that they will be willing to make some sacrifices?
To be absolutely crystal clear: I am NOT one of those "humans are a CaNcEr on the pLaNeT" extremists, nor am I a wide-eyed believer in the inherent goodness of living in harmony in nature in a hunter-gatherer band that had no electricity or modern medicine and had a life expectancy in the thirties. I love modern civilization! I'm grateful for abundant energy!
What I'm talking about is, can we convince people to give up *some* aspects of their energy-rich lifestyles for the sake of averting the worst effects of climate change? I'm thinking of:
-More people living in urban, walkable areas, where most day-to-day commuting can be done by walking and/or public transit, not driving everywhere
-Change our cultural norms so that meat becomes an occasional treat, and eating more plant-based meals is the norm
-Less household stuff (I was a child in socialist Poland, and the difference in the amount of household goods we had then and what a middle-class American has now is astonishing. I'm not saying we should wind back the clock to Poland in the 80s, but could we aim for something halfway between then and now?)
-stop air conditioning buildings to below 70 F in the summer, for crying out loud. Nothing wrong with a nice healthy 75 F indoor temperature in the summer!
-Do all this alongside a massive push for no-CO2 electricity, and yes, that includes nuclear as well as solar and wind, and it also includes giving the middle finger to those complaining about "but I don't want to see a wind farm from my summer house."
This would result in a pleasant, modern lifestyle, not some kind of ascetic deprivation, while saving tons of CO2 emissions. Can it be done?
I have absolutely no desire to live in a city and I will do these things over my dead body.
I'm actually quite a pastoralist myself, but that doesn't mean I want to force or even nudge people into a second-world standard of living. What it means is I want to preserve wilderness and get rid of the absolute worst of the abominations such as the Hetch Hetchy Dam, as well as having a strong personal preference for rurality over urbanity.
It's also why I'm so strongly pro-nuclear. The more nuclear we have, the less habitat we need to destroy for massive solar farms. I'm lukewarm at best on solar for this reason, aside from rooftop. I'd rather focus on nuclear and to a lesser extent wind and natural gas.
I don’t want to force people into a “second world standard of living.” Living in a nice walkable city is common in Europe, which is first world. Cutting back on meat consumption would probably be the most jarring change for most Americans.
Look, sorry to be a scold, but the whole point of climate change is that it’s a HUGE problem and solving it will take some effort and inconvenience and inability to follow all your desires (for a big single family house, steak for dinner every night, etc.) I wish we could magically wave a magic wand and create an unlimited source of CO2-free energy, but we can’t, so here we are.
I emphasize that even with my proposed changes, we (middle class Americans) would still be materially better off than ~80% of humanity. I’m not advocating living in squalor to fight climate change.
Look, you can scold me all you want but you're never going to change my preferences. I will never live in a dense city; I'm a country boy at heart. I will not stop eating meat, or significantly reduce my consumption. I will not go without a car. I am not going to cut back on my 'stuff'. All of this scolding will go in one ear and out the other
The whole point of growth, abundance and technological progress is it allows us to have these things. Not so some billionaire jetsetters can command us all to live in pods while they luxuriate in their Elysium and feel smug about it.
That’s a big “if” you’ve got there. We are nowhere near generating all the CO2-free electricity needed to power all the new EVs that are supposed to replace ICE vehicles.
But that should be the goal, right? Abundant and cheap carbon free energy so that people can keep their giant homes at 60 degrees and drive the biggest SUV they can find.
The elephant in the room is China, India and the rest of the developing world. If the US could zero carbon emissions tomorrow, those countries will have replaced those emissions in a few years.
This is the problem that climate change activists don’t take seriously enough and I can’t really blame them because it’s a very difficult problem.
I don't understand who Matt wants "environmentalists" to compromise with by giving up non-CO2 and methane reducing policies. I just want environmentalists to be good environmentalists. OK maybe they have to compromise by accepting a lower tax on net CO@ emissions that the best models yield or a lower cost of carbon parameter to be applied to USG decisions that affect CO2 emissions if that's the cost of getting something at all. But Why is it necessary to compromise with unions? They'll tell their members to sit out the next election if the carbon tax rate is too high?
What year do you think the first articles about the EV regulatory boondoggle that no one saw coming is going to be published? We already know that these incredibly heavy and torquey electric cars are eating tires at a fantastic rates, Rivians apparently have been needing tires after 6000 miles. And apparently tire particulates are one of those things no one takes into account, like deaths from coal power plant pollution that nuclear power would have saved.
I'm just waiting for amazingly unforeseen raw material issues or an article 5 years too late about how Toyota's desire to hybridize the entire fleet would have actually been the correct move rather than choosing EVs as the winner.
Ah yea the peak tire argument. No further development in tire technology can or will be made based on changing market conditions.
Peak lithium is also the new peak oil argument. No new sources of lithium will be discovered and no advances will be made in our ability to mine lithium.
Yes, all these years big tire has been holding back these magical advances the same way big oil stopped battery development. I'm sure there is going to be a magical tire solution that doesn't involve making a hard ass tire that doesn't grip the road at all. Science!!
Big tire holding back like the oil industry held back on horizontal drilling and fracking. Or maybe new shit gets invented that didn’t exist before. You know, progress.
And if EV are a special case, Musk is an even more special case. Seems we can just put aside that he is running ex-Twitter (personally I could not care less) thank him for the logistical support of Starlink to the Ukraine military and treat his car company like any other. I’d have invited him to the WH and teased him about his support for DeSantis’s merit based immigration policy and soft pedaling his opposition to Xi.
This is an interesting and wide-reaching article about how society could be organized to accomplish effective climate control. Perhaps it's this wide perspective that has me thinking even wider about the huge global infrastructures that are beyond comprehension (to me, at any rate.) They're what's really making the earth uninhabitable.
My local REI no longer has any paper bags* but all the products inside are encased in layers of plastic; powered by non-recyclable lithium batteries; and/or made from petroleum-based wonder-fabrics and materials. (Luckily the tents, luggage and sleeping bags end up getting reused by the homeless to the point of falling apart.)
U.S. buildings are better insulated, but the sun still shines in and heats up interiors when it's hot. Some parts of the world have been building for "coolth" for thousands of years. "Green" seems to be plants on the roof and up the walls (oops, the irrigation is leaking into the elevator shaft, true story) rather than figuring out how to really live without air conditioning.
As for global agriculture: Maybe if organic is actually "true" we'll get some insects and birds back, but frankly, I don't believe the labels - who goes down to Mexico every week and looks for evidence of pesticides? The monetizing of concepts like "Eco," "green," "fair trade," "safe catch" is pretty ridiculous: the public sincerely wants these things, but what we actually get is fancy labels and no confirming data sources. Ideally we would gradually become used to less-than-perfect, smaller, and more local/seasonal fruits and vegetables. We'd have to become less afraid of insects in our own gardens and let spiders do their jobs inside. (There are still some places in the world where your winter vitamin-C has to come from cabbage, cabbage and more cabbage. When summer comes, you'd better open up that apricot and check for the resident earwig before you bite into it.)
I wouldn't mind being a frog in a pot noticing changes in packaging, products and general convenience gradually reverting to how things were a century ago, because global manufacturing infrastructure somehow got forced to change. Ideally this would happen by human agency, but human catastrophe is more likely. In the meantime, I'm tired of being guilt-tripped about things consumers have no control over.
Carbon-capture strategies and nuclear power plants certainly address some global manufacturing issues, but I have no idea to what extent. Does private industry pretty much get a free pass? Maybe our global infrastructures are too massive to influence and thus not worth even thinking about. Or perhaps impactful things are happening that the media doesn't consider clickable enough to tell us about. Whatever the case, my peculiar personal ethic won't allow me to ignore the broadest possible scope of what's going on with the planet and all its creatures.
*Of course everyone drives to the Portland downtown REI in their SUVs right? Too bad if you wander in on foot and decide to buy a few things: "we have no paper bags on site" is what the checkout clerk told me. (This despite the Portlandia episode that captured the whole thing perfectly TEN years ago.) My plan is to leave everything at the check stand, walk a few blocks to Safeway to buy a reusable, recyclable paper bag for a nickel, come back, bag my stuff and take the bus home if my purchases are too heavy.
This is a great column on a critical political problem. It reminds me again of why it's great that Biden is President and why it's so important to support him in 2024: he understands coalitional politics in a way no President has for decades.
Along the same lines of how to coordinate union wishes and other policy goals, I recommend Noah Smith's recent post on how unions are opposing the (temporary) immigration of Taiwanese experts for the purpose of training American workers in the construction and operation of the new TSCM fab in Arizona: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/can-unions-and-industrial-policy
But my real point is to raise a question about the claim that funding more mass transit is important for fighting climate change. Is it? In LA, we've poured billions into our expanding light rail network. It's taken almost no one off the roads (Angelenos love their cars) and the building of this network has had a huge carbon footprint by itself. Add to that that mass transit really only works in certain situations and could only (theoretically) benefit a relatively small part of the US population. And, finally, how important is it from a climate change perspective to take cars off the road if we're rapidly heading toward an all-EV fleet? Yes, those cars have to be built, and that has a carbon impact, but we're going to replace the fleet at some point anyway.
Mass transit is great for reducing congestion (in theory) and makes for a better urban experience, but I don't buy the carbon reduction argument.
Wonderful work. Appreciate Matt digging deep on this one. One small suggestion: I'd encourage him to be a bit more precise about the distinction between climate hawks and traditional environmentalists.
"But who actually comes to a “young voters’ summit” and what is that anyway?"
This is a super important point that's often overlooked. There are young people who are politically active and there are politically active young people. The difference is, the latter group views "young people" as basically an identity group with its own set of specific interests, and this specific group is likely comprised of people who specifically care about climate change and student loans as issues that (in their view) disproportionately affect young people. So it's no surprise that they would have a warped set of issue importance compared to the broader group of young people.
A similar argument could be made on bank climate regulation. The exercise is set up as surviving climate change and take less risk especially in energy and adjacent industries. Alternatively we could promote more risk taking in climate solutions. Capitalism is most effective when it's striving for solutions, not attaching to contain bad actors.
There is something about the topic of this article and a decent amount of other writing by Yglesias recently, which is just that Democrats and Democrat aligned activists need to do a much better job of figuring out how to make useful progress on not just causing specific policy change in the government but actually achieving useful change in the economy and society. And it's not as if this is advanced stuff in most cases - it's actually really basic and really obvious why a lot of what activists are trying to do will be both practically and politically counter productive towards the change they are trying to realize.
So I am wondering, has it always been this way? I don't remember this being such a huge issue 20 years ago. Maybe the difference is that it is only fairly recently that the progressive coalition that wants to make pretty substantial changes to the US economy grew large enough to have a real impact on Democratic policy. If various activists groups are interested more in just marginal changes you don't have to think nearly as much about big strategic issues. What do other people think about this?
This issue is also much worse on the right currently, but I think it is more clear why that is the case. Basically the entire right has been taken over by people using grievance based politics to make money for themselves in a variety of different ways with Trump as the prime example. It's a more depressing but easier to understand situation. Is that also what's going on with the left, just to a lesser degree?
Progressives are much more ambitious than 20 years ago. They were mostly fighting a rearguard action trying to prevent Republicans and centrist Democrats from further stripping the welfare state and leftover scraps of political economy from the 1960s. Today, they are trying, and in some cases succeeding, in building up green energy projects, industrial policy, and an expanded welfare state that would've been derided as "pipe-dream socialism" by, not only conservatives, but solid voting majorities in 2003. People rag on these groups, but looking at what Democrats in Washington have or came close to doing in the last 2.5 years tells me that the "groups" are doing ok in terms of welding influence and getting actual policy through.
Well, this is what I was speculating as well. It is definitely a more powerful coalition now. Hopefully they can improve their policy making priorities. It's not that people rag on these groups for lacking influence these days, but they get criticized for having bad priorities and doing counter-productive stuff.
Sure, but when you actually sit down and look at what they've accomplished compared to a generation ago, the recent failures aren't the first thing that stick out imo. They seem to be getting more adept at wielding power, not less. Thatll obviously lead to growing pains. Most proposed policy changes go nowhere. Status quo bias is powerful. Setting aside normative differences that you or I may have with these people, they seem pretty good at setting the agenda and doing the successful coalition building. The excesses of the DEI fringe or degrowther crap certainly exist, and I'm all for pushing against that. However, progressives as a movement, seem to be doing just fine. A large scale political movement is going to make mistakes and pursue things that people think are odd or counterproductive. The Progressive movement is no exception. I struggle to see how things are worse than 20 years ago, though.
This just requires a more detailed look at what is going on. Certainly there has been a lot of positive policy progress under Biden, but what really is the cause of that? It could be activists doing a really good job of coalition building and getting highly effective and efficient policy passed. Or it could be that the country has gotten more liberal over the past 20 years (they don't self identify as more liberal but average attitudes towards gays, immigrants, etc are much more liberal than they used to be) and we have more genuinely liberal politicians in Congress. Keep in mind that all this positive policy stuff has happened under moderates like Biden who the activists love to hate on.
The stuff I see activists orgs doing is actively bad. Blocking the keystone pipeline has made Dems reputation on energy and the economy in general worse and accomplished nothing of value. There are many other example which Yglesias has highlighted. Defund the police was a policy and politics disaster. So my take is that positive policy has been happening in spite of the efforts of activists groups and due to general changes in public opinion. You may disagree. I do acknowledge that due to Dem politician beliefs, there has been more progress on climate than you would expect based on views of the general public. Maybe the climate groups deserve some credit there, but there is a climate persuasion group which is much larger, broader and more moderate than the set of people putting on sit-ins and such and I think that story is mostly about elite persuasion.
I think two reasons: political polarization and the professionalization of activists (which itself is probably at least partially due to polarization). Both parties now have to negotiate exclusively with the folks inside them. When both parties included a broader spectrum of opinions you could coalition build closer to the center, and everyone knew that, so the further you were from the center you recognized you had some less power.
Both sides have also professionalized their activists, and with polarization plus probably some help from the diffusion of media, activists can rabble rouse within each party more efficiently.
Too many activist types want to circumvent the hard work of getting votes and go straight for the policy change. Usually you cannot shortcut the hard work though, and then some folks get angry at that reality.
I don't think it's a coincidence that this trend coincides with the rise of filibuster abuse. When all the hard work stops reliably paying off, the shortcuts are all that's left.
I live in Louisiana and we have a Democrat for a Governor. Recently, he has been championing the approval of the Lake Maurapas Class VI CO2 well announcement (and Direct Air Capture hub grant announcement) as "good for the economy and climate". Meanwhile our recent PSC, who is a younger Progressive, got elected in a Democrat v. Democrat race by running antagostically against the incumbent as beholden to the local energy company...was taking shots at him for this since sequestration is a "giveaway to Oil Companies".
The aforementioned local energy company is the lone lobbyist in the State pushing grid level solar power...which is largely tied up in NIMBYist delays across the State...with almost support from activist, who are actively opposed to grid level solar because they only want roof top solar. Just today I saw our PSC lamenting the lack of rooftop solar on homes in New Orleans and all i could think is i find it odd that MOST of the solar on houses in Louisiana is installed in deep red rural areas (not suburban or urban areas) and that i feel.
I've long felt so much of the messaging on "good for climate" agenda items could be tweaked to foregrounx everything but Climate and we would increase uptake...but alas, all folks want to do is loudly preach to their friends and seek their high fives 😣
Reasonable enough, but why should compromise by environmentalists stop at climate-related issues? Could climate activists get more votes in Congress by supporting some constraints on abortion? On transgender issues? On affirmative action? On tax policy? Put another way, is some cynical horse trading acceptable in the face of an existential risk?
Climate is not an existential risk. The big x-risk is AI.
Coalition-building is a slippery idea that confuses people. I suspect that this Slow Boring post was intended to rebut Freddie’s latest anti-Yggy anti-YIMBY rant, without giving him the attention he craves. I think the root of your disagreement is simply that people mean different things when they invoke coalition-building. From this post, I gather that MY is referring to assembling a legislative coalition. I agree that this version of coalition-building is the most helpful. But other people use coalition-building in other ways.
First, some people mean coalition-building in the sense of building a movement, something of like building a post-Protestant congregation or denomination. This coalition is something that normal people to volunteer activists to professional activists can belong to or identify with. The idea is to create from the ground up an organic counterweight to say, Southern Baptists or post-Baptist evangelicalism, or something with the supposed moral and popular authority of the Black AME. Personally, I think this strategy is dumb and the analogy to Protestant denominations is unhelpful.
Churches have several features progressives are unlikely to adopt but that also make them effective political institutions. They have rituals and symbols to bind their congregations and confer a shared sense of the sacred. They have norms demanding self-sacrifice (tithing) or scarification (literally, like circumcision, or figurative, like publicly swearing by a creed, the more ridiculous the better). Usually, churches belong to an ethnic group, even particular Catholic parishes, so they borrow from and contribute to solidarity along that dimension, too.
Churches are most politically effective when the congregation’s group, ethnic and creedal interests all align. Smaller denominations tend to take cues from larger, more organized ones as for their creedal interests.
With progressive movement building, you basically don’t have rituals, symbols or creeds. Land acknowledgments and George Floyd/ Breonna Taylor come closest, and coincidentally fit neatly into a post-Christian narrative. Hence, black identity politics is white-hot core of movement progressivism, what actuality gets people in the streets. But, without further creedal refinement and group demarcation and bonding, no particular policy demand can be mapped to the movement. No one can tell whether anyone else is promoting policy that is truly emergent from the progressive movement or is merely trying to brand their pet issue as progressive (TM). Even blacktivists have to settle for ordinary& boring legislative coalitionism. Ironically, the NYT comes closest to setting official progressivism by the size of its audience.
Second, and relatedly, professional activists and media types have their own kind of coalition-building. They agree (implicitly or explicitly) to leverage things like platforms, mailing lists or sign-ons to partner organizations. Indeed, this is what they spend most of their time doing! They read the room, as it were, support each other’s priorities. Professional orgs are supposed to fall in line with the predominant coalition of groups in professional progressivism.
California and SF and LA are about the only polities where these kind of vanguardist coalitions have captured state institutions. You have to be pretty solidly leftwing for this behavior to take hold. This limitation follows because professional progressives are under cutthroat competition to adopt the most insane positions to show that they are the most pure and, by coming up with a plausible explanation, the smartest.
Anyway, I think you and Freddie are talking past each other. He’s admittedly literally insane. But also, he’s just trying to do something else. He will never be motivated by or interested in incremental legislative goals. To him, that’s boring! Also, hint hint, his new book is about how managerial elites highjacked the progressive movement thru its black-identitarian core. Rest assured, he will not divert progressivism in his desired direction. As I explained above, (1) progressivism lacks the structures (ritual, creed, co-ethnicity) that make Protestant movements effective and (2) the structures it does have are inexorably drawn to substance -light black identity politics.
I want to quibble with "the stingy nature of our safety net for children". Is that really true, or are there just not that many benefits for middle and upper income families with children.
For low-income children, there are direct income supports (EITC), free childcare (Headstart), free healthcare (Medicaid, CHIP), food supports (WIC, food stamps, reduced/free school lunch). Then for all children there is free public education with transportation included ($15k per student per year)!
You could certainly argue for more, but this doesn't really seem "stingy" to me.
Hi Matt Y,
Lots of excellent points in your column, but I want to look at the other side of the coin. You say, most people don't care about climate change, so politicians can't demand that people sacrifice their self-interest for its sake. I say, what can we do to *convince* more people to care, so that they will be willing to make some sacrifices?
To be absolutely crystal clear: I am NOT one of those "humans are a CaNcEr on the pLaNeT" extremists, nor am I a wide-eyed believer in the inherent goodness of living in harmony in nature in a hunter-gatherer band that had no electricity or modern medicine and had a life expectancy in the thirties. I love modern civilization! I'm grateful for abundant energy!
What I'm talking about is, can we convince people to give up *some* aspects of their energy-rich lifestyles for the sake of averting the worst effects of climate change? I'm thinking of:
-More people living in urban, walkable areas, where most day-to-day commuting can be done by walking and/or public transit, not driving everywhere
-Change our cultural norms so that meat becomes an occasional treat, and eating more plant-based meals is the norm
-Less household stuff (I was a child in socialist Poland, and the difference in the amount of household goods we had then and what a middle-class American has now is astonishing. I'm not saying we should wind back the clock to Poland in the 80s, but could we aim for something halfway between then and now?)
-stop air conditioning buildings to below 70 F in the summer, for crying out loud. Nothing wrong with a nice healthy 75 F indoor temperature in the summer!
-Do all this alongside a massive push for no-CO2 electricity, and yes, that includes nuclear as well as solar and wind, and it also includes giving the middle finger to those complaining about "but I don't want to see a wind farm from my summer house."
This would result in a pleasant, modern lifestyle, not some kind of ascetic deprivation, while saving tons of CO2 emissions. Can it be done?
I have absolutely no desire to live in a city and I will do these things over my dead body.
I'm actually quite a pastoralist myself, but that doesn't mean I want to force or even nudge people into a second-world standard of living. What it means is I want to preserve wilderness and get rid of the absolute worst of the abominations such as the Hetch Hetchy Dam, as well as having a strong personal preference for rurality over urbanity.
It's also why I'm so strongly pro-nuclear. The more nuclear we have, the less habitat we need to destroy for massive solar farms. I'm lukewarm at best on solar for this reason, aside from rooftop. I'd rather focus on nuclear and to a lesser extent wind and natural gas.
I don’t want to force people into a “second world standard of living.” Living in a nice walkable city is common in Europe, which is first world. Cutting back on meat consumption would probably be the most jarring change for most Americans.
Look, sorry to be a scold, but the whole point of climate change is that it’s a HUGE problem and solving it will take some effort and inconvenience and inability to follow all your desires (for a big single family house, steak for dinner every night, etc.) I wish we could magically wave a magic wand and create an unlimited source of CO2-free energy, but we can’t, so here we are.
I emphasize that even with my proposed changes, we (middle class Americans) would still be materially better off than ~80% of humanity. I’m not advocating living in squalor to fight climate change.
Look, you can scold me all you want but you're never going to change my preferences. I will never live in a dense city; I'm a country boy at heart. I will not stop eating meat, or significantly reduce my consumption. I will not go without a car. I am not going to cut back on my 'stuff'. All of this scolding will go in one ear and out the other
The whole point of growth, abundance and technological progress is it allows us to have these things. Not so some billionaire jetsetters can command us all to live in pods while they luxuriate in their Elysium and feel smug about it.
If the energy is produced without adding carbon to the atmosphere then why not keep the AC and 60 and drive one of the new electric Escalades?
It seems like esthetic preferences get brought in when they really shouldn’t especially when they are unpopular.
That’s a big “if” you’ve got there. We are nowhere near generating all the CO2-free electricity needed to power all the new EVs that are supposed to replace ICE vehicles.
But that should be the goal, right? Abundant and cheap carbon free energy so that people can keep their giant homes at 60 degrees and drive the biggest SUV they can find.
The elephant in the room is China, India and the rest of the developing world. If the US could zero carbon emissions tomorrow, those countries will have replaced those emissions in a few years.
This is the problem that climate change activists don’t take seriously enough and I can’t really blame them because it’s a very difficult problem.
I don't understand who Matt wants "environmentalists" to compromise with by giving up non-CO2 and methane reducing policies. I just want environmentalists to be good environmentalists. OK maybe they have to compromise by accepting a lower tax on net CO@ emissions that the best models yield or a lower cost of carbon parameter to be applied to USG decisions that affect CO2 emissions if that's the cost of getting something at all. But Why is it necessary to compromise with unions? They'll tell their members to sit out the next election if the carbon tax rate is too high?
What year do you think the first articles about the EV regulatory boondoggle that no one saw coming is going to be published? We already know that these incredibly heavy and torquey electric cars are eating tires at a fantastic rates, Rivians apparently have been needing tires after 6000 miles. And apparently tire particulates are one of those things no one takes into account, like deaths from coal power plant pollution that nuclear power would have saved.
I'm just waiting for amazingly unforeseen raw material issues or an article 5 years too late about how Toyota's desire to hybridize the entire fleet would have actually been the correct move rather than choosing EVs as the winner.
Ah yea the peak tire argument. No further development in tire technology can or will be made based on changing market conditions.
Peak lithium is also the new peak oil argument. No new sources of lithium will be discovered and no advances will be made in our ability to mine lithium.
Yes, all these years big tire has been holding back these magical advances the same way big oil stopped battery development. I'm sure there is going to be a magical tire solution that doesn't involve making a hard ass tire that doesn't grip the road at all. Science!!
Big tire holding back like the oil industry held back on horizontal drilling and fracking. Or maybe new shit gets invented that didn’t exist before. You know, progress.
And if EV are a special case, Musk is an even more special case. Seems we can just put aside that he is running ex-Twitter (personally I could not care less) thank him for the logistical support of Starlink to the Ukraine military and treat his car company like any other. I’d have invited him to the WH and teased him about his support for DeSantis’s merit based immigration policy and soft pedaling his opposition to Xi.
This is an interesting and wide-reaching article about how society could be organized to accomplish effective climate control. Perhaps it's this wide perspective that has me thinking even wider about the huge global infrastructures that are beyond comprehension (to me, at any rate.) They're what's really making the earth uninhabitable.
My local REI no longer has any paper bags* but all the products inside are encased in layers of plastic; powered by non-recyclable lithium batteries; and/or made from petroleum-based wonder-fabrics and materials. (Luckily the tents, luggage and sleeping bags end up getting reused by the homeless to the point of falling apart.)
U.S. buildings are better insulated, but the sun still shines in and heats up interiors when it's hot. Some parts of the world have been building for "coolth" for thousands of years. "Green" seems to be plants on the roof and up the walls (oops, the irrigation is leaking into the elevator shaft, true story) rather than figuring out how to really live without air conditioning.
As for global agriculture: Maybe if organic is actually "true" we'll get some insects and birds back, but frankly, I don't believe the labels - who goes down to Mexico every week and looks for evidence of pesticides? The monetizing of concepts like "Eco," "green," "fair trade," "safe catch" is pretty ridiculous: the public sincerely wants these things, but what we actually get is fancy labels and no confirming data sources. Ideally we would gradually become used to less-than-perfect, smaller, and more local/seasonal fruits and vegetables. We'd have to become less afraid of insects in our own gardens and let spiders do their jobs inside. (There are still some places in the world where your winter vitamin-C has to come from cabbage, cabbage and more cabbage. When summer comes, you'd better open up that apricot and check for the resident earwig before you bite into it.)
I wouldn't mind being a frog in a pot noticing changes in packaging, products and general convenience gradually reverting to how things were a century ago, because global manufacturing infrastructure somehow got forced to change. Ideally this would happen by human agency, but human catastrophe is more likely. In the meantime, I'm tired of being guilt-tripped about things consumers have no control over.
Carbon-capture strategies and nuclear power plants certainly address some global manufacturing issues, but I have no idea to what extent. Does private industry pretty much get a free pass? Maybe our global infrastructures are too massive to influence and thus not worth even thinking about. Or perhaps impactful things are happening that the media doesn't consider clickable enough to tell us about. Whatever the case, my peculiar personal ethic won't allow me to ignore the broadest possible scope of what's going on with the planet and all its creatures.
*Of course everyone drives to the Portland downtown REI in their SUVs right? Too bad if you wander in on foot and decide to buy a few things: "we have no paper bags on site" is what the checkout clerk told me. (This despite the Portlandia episode that captured the whole thing perfectly TEN years ago.) My plan is to leave everything at the check stand, walk a few blocks to Safeway to buy a reusable, recyclable paper bag for a nickel, come back, bag my stuff and take the bus home if my purchases are too heavy.
This is a great column on a critical political problem. It reminds me again of why it's great that Biden is President and why it's so important to support him in 2024: he understands coalitional politics in a way no President has for decades.
Along the same lines of how to coordinate union wishes and other policy goals, I recommend Noah Smith's recent post on how unions are opposing the (temporary) immigration of Taiwanese experts for the purpose of training American workers in the construction and operation of the new TSCM fab in Arizona: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/can-unions-and-industrial-policy
But my real point is to raise a question about the claim that funding more mass transit is important for fighting climate change. Is it? In LA, we've poured billions into our expanding light rail network. It's taken almost no one off the roads (Angelenos love their cars) and the building of this network has had a huge carbon footprint by itself. Add to that that mass transit really only works in certain situations and could only (theoretically) benefit a relatively small part of the US population. And, finally, how important is it from a climate change perspective to take cars off the road if we're rapidly heading toward an all-EV fleet? Yes, those cars have to be built, and that has a carbon impact, but we're going to replace the fleet at some point anyway.
Mass transit is great for reducing congestion (in theory) and makes for a better urban experience, but I don't buy the carbon reduction argument.
Wonderful work. Appreciate Matt digging deep on this one. One small suggestion: I'd encourage him to be a bit more precise about the distinction between climate hawks and traditional environmentalists.
"But who actually comes to a “young voters’ summit” and what is that anyway?"
This is a super important point that's often overlooked. There are young people who are politically active and there are politically active young people. The difference is, the latter group views "young people" as basically an identity group with its own set of specific interests, and this specific group is likely comprised of people who specifically care about climate change and student loans as issues that (in their view) disproportionately affect young people. So it's no surprise that they would have a warped set of issue importance compared to the broader group of young people.
A similar argument could be made on bank climate regulation. The exercise is set up as surviving climate change and take less risk especially in energy and adjacent industries. Alternatively we could promote more risk taking in climate solutions. Capitalism is most effective when it's striving for solutions, not attaching to contain bad actors.
There is something about the topic of this article and a decent amount of other writing by Yglesias recently, which is just that Democrats and Democrat aligned activists need to do a much better job of figuring out how to make useful progress on not just causing specific policy change in the government but actually achieving useful change in the economy and society. And it's not as if this is advanced stuff in most cases - it's actually really basic and really obvious why a lot of what activists are trying to do will be both practically and politically counter productive towards the change they are trying to realize.
So I am wondering, has it always been this way? I don't remember this being such a huge issue 20 years ago. Maybe the difference is that it is only fairly recently that the progressive coalition that wants to make pretty substantial changes to the US economy grew large enough to have a real impact on Democratic policy. If various activists groups are interested more in just marginal changes you don't have to think nearly as much about big strategic issues. What do other people think about this?
This issue is also much worse on the right currently, but I think it is more clear why that is the case. Basically the entire right has been taken over by people using grievance based politics to make money for themselves in a variety of different ways with Trump as the prime example. It's a more depressing but easier to understand situation. Is that also what's going on with the left, just to a lesser degree?
Progressives are much more ambitious than 20 years ago. They were mostly fighting a rearguard action trying to prevent Republicans and centrist Democrats from further stripping the welfare state and leftover scraps of political economy from the 1960s. Today, they are trying, and in some cases succeeding, in building up green energy projects, industrial policy, and an expanded welfare state that would've been derided as "pipe-dream socialism" by, not only conservatives, but solid voting majorities in 2003. People rag on these groups, but looking at what Democrats in Washington have or came close to doing in the last 2.5 years tells me that the "groups" are doing ok in terms of welding influence and getting actual policy through.
Well, this is what I was speculating as well. It is definitely a more powerful coalition now. Hopefully they can improve their policy making priorities. It's not that people rag on these groups for lacking influence these days, but they get criticized for having bad priorities and doing counter-productive stuff.
Sure, but when you actually sit down and look at what they've accomplished compared to a generation ago, the recent failures aren't the first thing that stick out imo. They seem to be getting more adept at wielding power, not less. Thatll obviously lead to growing pains. Most proposed policy changes go nowhere. Status quo bias is powerful. Setting aside normative differences that you or I may have with these people, they seem pretty good at setting the agenda and doing the successful coalition building. The excesses of the DEI fringe or degrowther crap certainly exist, and I'm all for pushing against that. However, progressives as a movement, seem to be doing just fine. A large scale political movement is going to make mistakes and pursue things that people think are odd or counterproductive. The Progressive movement is no exception. I struggle to see how things are worse than 20 years ago, though.
This just requires a more detailed look at what is going on. Certainly there has been a lot of positive policy progress under Biden, but what really is the cause of that? It could be activists doing a really good job of coalition building and getting highly effective and efficient policy passed. Or it could be that the country has gotten more liberal over the past 20 years (they don't self identify as more liberal but average attitudes towards gays, immigrants, etc are much more liberal than they used to be) and we have more genuinely liberal politicians in Congress. Keep in mind that all this positive policy stuff has happened under moderates like Biden who the activists love to hate on.
The stuff I see activists orgs doing is actively bad. Blocking the keystone pipeline has made Dems reputation on energy and the economy in general worse and accomplished nothing of value. There are many other example which Yglesias has highlighted. Defund the police was a policy and politics disaster. So my take is that positive policy has been happening in spite of the efforts of activists groups and due to general changes in public opinion. You may disagree. I do acknowledge that due to Dem politician beliefs, there has been more progress on climate than you would expect based on views of the general public. Maybe the climate groups deserve some credit there, but there is a climate persuasion group which is much larger, broader and more moderate than the set of people putting on sit-ins and such and I think that story is mostly about elite persuasion.
I think two reasons: political polarization and the professionalization of activists (which itself is probably at least partially due to polarization). Both parties now have to negotiate exclusively with the folks inside them. When both parties included a broader spectrum of opinions you could coalition build closer to the center, and everyone knew that, so the further you were from the center you recognized you had some less power.
Both sides have also professionalized their activists, and with polarization plus probably some help from the diffusion of media, activists can rabble rouse within each party more efficiently.
Too many activist types want to circumvent the hard work of getting votes and go straight for the policy change. Usually you cannot shortcut the hard work though, and then some folks get angry at that reality.
I don't think it's a coincidence that this trend coincides with the rise of filibuster abuse. When all the hard work stops reliably paying off, the shortcuts are all that's left.