There is a good deal here to agree with. But this fairly flippant take on climate change makes sense only if you assign zero value to the natural world and zero cost to extinction of species. Even city dwellers like Mr. Yglesias may find in time that there was some underappreciated value in fresh water, oxygen, healthy soils, living oceans and forests, and the hugely information-rich and essentially irreplaceable genetic library of our fellow species.
By eliding distinctions between the Bush era and the present, this piece may understate the chances that polarization, partisan filters, and antidemocratic electoral moves on the right interact to create a crisis that leads to society's functioning much less well with almost everyone becoming poorer and living more difficult and stressful lives. Still, the piece provides an extremely illuminating synthesis to the effect that mostly, conditions are best viewed in relative terms that reveal their continuity with other moments of challenge. Adopting this lens itself appears to reinforce democratic norms. Thanks for this very strong piece. One question I have, Matt, is how you account for what I would assume you agree is the change of perspective between the thesis you advance here and the one you offered in your 2015 piece "American Democracy Is Doomed."
In the Bush years, I was scared that the US, Russia, and China were converging on a world of consumer luxury combined with superficial “managed democracy,” where entrenched ruling elites would let regular people, left and right, live our lives if we didn’t oppose their torture and wars.
Now I’m worried that the Republican Party will have state legislatures give Republicans electoral votes, have federal courts uphold voter suppression and gerrymandering, remove the powers of governors and mayors as needed, and create a situation where Democrats can’t win elections for generations no matter how much support they have, while Republican-aligned police departments suppress left-of-center dissent.
So yes, there’s always something to oppose, and the stakes always feel high, but it doesn’t follow that the stakes are always the same or that the stakes are not high today. This piece feels like you’re telling Black people in 1896 not to worry about Plessy v. Ferguson because their great-grandchildren will be able to fit the dawning era into a “two steps forward, one step back” story of long-term progress toward equality.
I'm pretty persuaded by most of this, but I keep thinking... what about January 6? Are we supposed to shrug that off as a one off that won't be repeated?
Hi Matt, long time reader first time commenter. You're my favourite public intellectual by a wide margin but, by golly, this is an embarrassingly bad take on the climate crisis.
Believing that emissions have fallen in the US since the 1990s, attributing this to clean tech innovation, and interpreting this as an appropriate response to global warming betrays both a) a misunderstanding of the amount and drivers of decarbonization in the US and b) a completely inadequate standard for how humanity should act in the face of a crisis that is leading to mass extinction and a handicap on human flourishing for at least dozens of generations.
According to Our World in Data, the source you cited for CO2 emission, US CO2 emissions were 5.13 billion T in 1990 and 5.28 billion T in 2019. Not a decrease at all!
Even if you believe the mild increase in CO2 emissions represents an appropriate response to the climate crisis (it doesn't), attributing this response to advances in clean tech is simply wrong. Primary energy use between 1990 and 2019 increased by 8.38 quadrillion BTU. Coal use decrease by ~10 quadrillion BTU. To make up for this increase in energy demand and for the displacement of coal, natural gas use increased by 12 quadrillion BTU and renewables increased by 6 quadrillion BTU (https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/). So the majority of coal displacement was actually enabled by the shale gas revolution, not progress in clean energy technologies. So capitalism actually hasn't done a good job of developing clean technologies that show up in emissions reduction for the US. An honest reading of the data shows that oil and gas folks figured out how to get so much better at harvesting natural gas that coal became obsolete. This definitely should not be considered as an endorsement of capitalism's ability to address the climate crisis.
Now that your factual misunderstanding has been addressed, let's address your framework. You present flat CO2 emissions in the 30 years since 1990 in the richest nations as evidence of the system working. A few moments of reflection should reveal that it is the opposite. The global scientific consensus on the severity and urgency of the climate crisis emerged in the late 1980s (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html). Therefore, the 1990s is a great time to start evaluating the world on how it treats a bona fide extinction threat. Any reasonable person who took the climate crisis seriously starting in the 1990s would have understood the following: 1) that the only thing that matters is global CO2e emissions, 2) that developing nations will rightfully aspire to the per capita CO2e emissions of the developed world, and that 3) the project of decarbonization will become increasingly difficult with time, since there is a wide range in the ease of sectoral decarbonization. Given this framework, a world that took climate change seriously would have behaved as follows: first the richest nations would have aggressively and rapidly reduced their per capita emissions to set a good standard for the developing world. CO2 emissions would initially decrease rapidly and then more slowly as we move from easy to decarbonize sectors to hard ones (e.g. air travel, steel production). Our system, whether you call it liberalism or capitalism, has only succeeded in producing tepid reductions in per capita emissions enabled by switching to low or negative cost low carbon technologies. While this might meet your standards for responsible environmental behaviour, the physics of the greenhouse effect unfortunately do not give a f***. Whatever our system is called, it is not responding appropriately to severity and urgency of the crisis.
You are probably on to the something about how most of today's crises are not in fact so, but global warming is not one of them.
“that’s the essence of the climate crisis — not an ideological crisis for liberalism, but tragically a crisis of mass indifference”
Isn’t that the problem though? Under the current liberal order action against an impending catastrophe (climate change in this case) is only possible if public opinion is aligned to prevent it. And we don’t seem to be able to do it.
I don’t think it is good enough to say a solution is possible under liberalism, solutions will be possible under many forms of government, results are actually required.
I think this post underestimates the possibility of the collapse of our political institutions, which in turn could lead to a social crisis. Its useful to step back and not accept the alarmism of many media analyses at face value, so I enjoyed reading this post. But I think there's a real possibility of a crisis in our political institutions, triggered by the GOP's undermining or ignoring democratic norms in our next presidential election, which then in turn triggers massive response from the left and a crisis of legitimacy. I think the US has a situation much worse than most of western Europe in this regard.
Re: "today’s progressives are fighting Trumpian fascism in exactly the sense that the progressives of 15 years ago were fighting Bushian fascism". Setting aside whether "fascism" is the correct term, what bothers me is when people in the media (like Matt in this quote) characterize the "fight[] [against] Trumpian fascism" as being something uniquely being waged by "progressives" or "the left". There are many, many centrists and conservatives who are now loudly sounding the alarm about the risk of right-wing authoritarianism in America (Anne Applebaum, David Frum, David French, the entire Bulwark crew... heck, even Liz Cheney)-- this is not just some overwrought play-acted fear-mongering on the left. And that, to me, is an indication that the danger here is just on a different scale than anything in recent memory.
OR George W *really did* launch a war we're still fighting, sanction torture, and open up a camp in Cuba to evade US law around due process which is *still there* and *still keeping people in endless limbo whether or not they are guilty of anything*
I'm really surprised to be getting to the post this late in the day, and not see a single comment pointing out that of *course* we're in a crisis, since we're in a new and awful wave of a pandemic! I suppose the general successes of the vaccination effort this spring, in getting us to a June that truly felt post-pandemic (us gays are so lucky that our celebration month happened to fall at just the right moment! but too bad about Provincetown) make most of us feel that this is no longer the sort of crisis one would catastrophize.
I'm intrigued by the take that climate change isn't a "crisis" either - I need to think about it more.
The rest is definitely very plausible - I've definitely been having this weird feeling my whole adult life about how "this time it's for real, this Republican is worse than the one before" and it's probably true, but the fact that I've had it so many times, and that Trump seems to repeat so much of Reagan (and Harding for that matter) does suggest it's not "crisis" level.
The pandemic may be a public health crisis but it isn't a crisis of liberalism. The post goes in a lot of directions, admittedly, but I took the gist of it to be arguing that there are problems, some very serious, but nothing to suggest liberalism is no longer capable of meeting the challenges of today, contrary to what Jeet Heer seemed to be saying.
FWIW, I mostly agree with this piece. Maybe I am pointing out a link that only exists in my head but this piece sort of reminds of the tweets the other day that essentially asked: “why should you care about the unvaccinated 30%? Make a dispassionate case!” Yglesias (correctly) pushed back against that view. It’s OK to care and be passionate about other people and/or policy. Zaid Jilani and Bari Weiss love to troll left-of-center types because they think caring about stuff is passé (other than LARPing as their favorite Soviet dissidents).
I agree with Yglesias that we’ve faced similar crises before and handled them with our existing system. There is a lot of strawmaning going on where people are saying he doesn’t think any of our current problems are important. That’s unfair and lazy.
I do think Bouie and Chait’s points about the turn against democracy by the GOP are relevant. The GOP could very well be in a position to engage in all kinds of fuckery in 2024 and I guess I am Shor pilled enough to be existentially worried about that!
I recently (finally) read Chernow's Hamilton biography. I wish I had read it long ago. This kind of stuff has been going on literally since just after Constitution was ratified, maybe before. Only much worse. You don't even have to bring the 1850s into the conversation.
As a new subscriber I see I'm late to commenting on this article. But this is a great article and I agree with it 100%. Really enjoying Slow Boring.
You missed one. The pandemic, post-vaccines, Delta Hysteria, and the Great (re) Lockdown.
There is a good deal here to agree with. But this fairly flippant take on climate change makes sense only if you assign zero value to the natural world and zero cost to extinction of species. Even city dwellers like Mr. Yglesias may find in time that there was some underappreciated value in fresh water, oxygen, healthy soils, living oceans and forests, and the hugely information-rich and essentially irreplaceable genetic library of our fellow species.
By eliding distinctions between the Bush era and the present, this piece may understate the chances that polarization, partisan filters, and antidemocratic electoral moves on the right interact to create a crisis that leads to society's functioning much less well with almost everyone becoming poorer and living more difficult and stressful lives. Still, the piece provides an extremely illuminating synthesis to the effect that mostly, conditions are best viewed in relative terms that reveal their continuity with other moments of challenge. Adopting this lens itself appears to reinforce democratic norms. Thanks for this very strong piece. One question I have, Matt, is how you account for what I would assume you agree is the change of perspective between the thesis you advance here and the one you offered in your 2015 piece "American Democracy Is Doomed."
Sorry, I missed that others had raised the 2015 piece already.
the planet needs to chill out a bit too
In the Bush years, I was scared that the US, Russia, and China were converging on a world of consumer luxury combined with superficial “managed democracy,” where entrenched ruling elites would let regular people, left and right, live our lives if we didn’t oppose their torture and wars.
Now I’m worried that the Republican Party will have state legislatures give Republicans electoral votes, have federal courts uphold voter suppression and gerrymandering, remove the powers of governors and mayors as needed, and create a situation where Democrats can’t win elections for generations no matter how much support they have, while Republican-aligned police departments suppress left-of-center dissent.
So yes, there’s always something to oppose, and the stakes always feel high, but it doesn’t follow that the stakes are always the same or that the stakes are not high today. This piece feels like you’re telling Black people in 1896 not to worry about Plessy v. Ferguson because their great-grandchildren will be able to fit the dawning era into a “two steps forward, one step back” story of long-term progress toward equality.
I'm pretty persuaded by most of this, but I keep thinking... what about January 6? Are we supposed to shrug that off as a one off that won't be repeated?
Hi Matt, long time reader first time commenter. You're my favourite public intellectual by a wide margin but, by golly, this is an embarrassingly bad take on the climate crisis.
Believing that emissions have fallen in the US since the 1990s, attributing this to clean tech innovation, and interpreting this as an appropriate response to global warming betrays both a) a misunderstanding of the amount and drivers of decarbonization in the US and b) a completely inadequate standard for how humanity should act in the face of a crisis that is leading to mass extinction and a handicap on human flourishing for at least dozens of generations.
According to Our World in Data, the source you cited for CO2 emission, US CO2 emissions were 5.13 billion T in 1990 and 5.28 billion T in 2019. Not a decrease at all!
Even if you believe the mild increase in CO2 emissions represents an appropriate response to the climate crisis (it doesn't), attributing this response to advances in clean tech is simply wrong. Primary energy use between 1990 and 2019 increased by 8.38 quadrillion BTU. Coal use decrease by ~10 quadrillion BTU. To make up for this increase in energy demand and for the displacement of coal, natural gas use increased by 12 quadrillion BTU and renewables increased by 6 quadrillion BTU (https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/). So the majority of coal displacement was actually enabled by the shale gas revolution, not progress in clean energy technologies. So capitalism actually hasn't done a good job of developing clean technologies that show up in emissions reduction for the US. An honest reading of the data shows that oil and gas folks figured out how to get so much better at harvesting natural gas that coal became obsolete. This definitely should not be considered as an endorsement of capitalism's ability to address the climate crisis.
Now that your factual misunderstanding has been addressed, let's address your framework. You present flat CO2 emissions in the 30 years since 1990 in the richest nations as evidence of the system working. A few moments of reflection should reveal that it is the opposite. The global scientific consensus on the severity and urgency of the climate crisis emerged in the late 1980s (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html). Therefore, the 1990s is a great time to start evaluating the world on how it treats a bona fide extinction threat. Any reasonable person who took the climate crisis seriously starting in the 1990s would have understood the following: 1) that the only thing that matters is global CO2e emissions, 2) that developing nations will rightfully aspire to the per capita CO2e emissions of the developed world, and that 3) the project of decarbonization will become increasingly difficult with time, since there is a wide range in the ease of sectoral decarbonization. Given this framework, a world that took climate change seriously would have behaved as follows: first the richest nations would have aggressively and rapidly reduced their per capita emissions to set a good standard for the developing world. CO2 emissions would initially decrease rapidly and then more slowly as we move from easy to decarbonize sectors to hard ones (e.g. air travel, steel production). Our system, whether you call it liberalism or capitalism, has only succeeded in producing tepid reductions in per capita emissions enabled by switching to low or negative cost low carbon technologies. While this might meet your standards for responsible environmental behaviour, the physics of the greenhouse effect unfortunately do not give a f***. Whatever our system is called, it is not responding appropriately to severity and urgency of the crisis.
You are probably on to the something about how most of today's crises are not in fact so, but global warming is not one of them.
“that’s the essence of the climate crisis — not an ideological crisis for liberalism, but tragically a crisis of mass indifference”
Isn’t that the problem though? Under the current liberal order action against an impending catastrophe (climate change in this case) is only possible if public opinion is aligned to prevent it. And we don’t seem to be able to do it.
I don’t think it is good enough to say a solution is possible under liberalism, solutions will be possible under many forms of government, results are actually required.
I think this post underestimates the possibility of the collapse of our political institutions, which in turn could lead to a social crisis. Its useful to step back and not accept the alarmism of many media analyses at face value, so I enjoyed reading this post. But I think there's a real possibility of a crisis in our political institutions, triggered by the GOP's undermining or ignoring democratic norms in our next presidential election, which then in turn triggers massive response from the left and a crisis of legitimacy. I think the US has a situation much worse than most of western Europe in this regard.
I read this entirely to find out why Matt deleted all his tweets today. Still no answer.
@Matt are you reading Niall Ferguson's new book "Doom"?
Re: "today’s progressives are fighting Trumpian fascism in exactly the sense that the progressives of 15 years ago were fighting Bushian fascism". Setting aside whether "fascism" is the correct term, what bothers me is when people in the media (like Matt in this quote) characterize the "fight[] [against] Trumpian fascism" as being something uniquely being waged by "progressives" or "the left". There are many, many centrists and conservatives who are now loudly sounding the alarm about the risk of right-wing authoritarianism in America (Anne Applebaum, David Frum, David French, the entire Bulwark crew... heck, even Liz Cheney)-- this is not just some overwrought play-acted fear-mongering on the left. And that, to me, is an indication that the danger here is just on a different scale than anything in recent memory.
So, calling George W a fascist was the left crying wolf, and later the wolf showed up.
OR George W *really did* launch a war we're still fighting, sanction torture, and open up a camp in Cuba to evade US law around due process which is *still there* and *still keeping people in endless limbo whether or not they are guilty of anything*
I didn’t support Bush’s foreign policy but was it the threshold of the f-word?
Bush did not incite a mob to try to stop Obama from taking office.
I'm really surprised to be getting to the post this late in the day, and not see a single comment pointing out that of *course* we're in a crisis, since we're in a new and awful wave of a pandemic! I suppose the general successes of the vaccination effort this spring, in getting us to a June that truly felt post-pandemic (us gays are so lucky that our celebration month happened to fall at just the right moment! but too bad about Provincetown) make most of us feel that this is no longer the sort of crisis one would catastrophize.
I'm intrigued by the take that climate change isn't a "crisis" either - I need to think about it more.
The rest is definitely very plausible - I've definitely been having this weird feeling my whole adult life about how "this time it's for real, this Republican is worse than the one before" and it's probably true, but the fact that I've had it so many times, and that Trump seems to repeat so much of Reagan (and Harding for that matter) does suggest it's not "crisis" level.
The pandemic may be a public health crisis but it isn't a crisis of liberalism. The post goes in a lot of directions, admittedly, but I took the gist of it to be arguing that there are problems, some very serious, but nothing to suggest liberalism is no longer capable of meeting the challenges of today, contrary to what Jeet Heer seemed to be saying.
FWIW, I mostly agree with this piece. Maybe I am pointing out a link that only exists in my head but this piece sort of reminds of the tweets the other day that essentially asked: “why should you care about the unvaccinated 30%? Make a dispassionate case!” Yglesias (correctly) pushed back against that view. It’s OK to care and be passionate about other people and/or policy. Zaid Jilani and Bari Weiss love to troll left-of-center types because they think caring about stuff is passé (other than LARPing as their favorite Soviet dissidents).
I agree with Yglesias that we’ve faced similar crises before and handled them with our existing system. There is a lot of strawmaning going on where people are saying he doesn’t think any of our current problems are important. That’s unfair and lazy.
I do think Bouie and Chait’s points about the turn against democracy by the GOP are relevant. The GOP could very well be in a position to engage in all kinds of fuckery in 2024 and I guess I am Shor pilled enough to be existentially worried about that!
I recently (finally) read Chernow's Hamilton biography. I wish I had read it long ago. This kind of stuff has been going on literally since just after Constitution was ratified, maybe before. Only much worse. You don't even have to bring the 1850s into the conversation.