I'm commenting 3 weeks after this was posted, but I do want to push back on "Elon Musk is good".
A year ago, two years ago, I would have agreed with the proposition that Musk is hated by the activist left because he's a billionaire who's annoying on Twitter. To an extent, I still agree.
He's pretty clearly been given an unfair lack of gratitude by environmentalists and liberals in general for his (significant) accomplishments. He's far more hated than, say, Charles Koch was at his peak of infamy, something I consider the height of political absurdity.
But it's precisely *because* of that lack of gratitude that I think the phrase "Elon Musk is good" will not age well.
He's likely curdling into exactly the monster many think he is, out of a petulant need for payback and a deep paranoia if nothing else. His ideals regarding cooling the planet and colonizing Mars are noble, but they're hard--and "destroying the woke left" is relatively easy.
That might be dawning on him now. If you want evidence, think of his recent purchase of Twitter, but leave the words "Elon" and "Twitter" out of it.
Think, instead, of "A country's richest man", purchasing "one of its biggest media conglomerates", one whose operation he dislikes.
Russians, Hungarians, and other backsliding democracy citizens will find this familiar.
If, given the binary choice, you'd pick preserving democracy over making cars electric, Elon Musk is not good.
Capitalism incentivizes greenwashing. (If your competitor can get away with it you have to follow suit if you don't want fall behind.)
Therefore we we need groups like Sunrise who keep up the moral pressure.
I would even go as far as to say that if Democrats are willing to take climate action then this is to a large extend due to the youth movement that consistently calls out greenwashing and keeps up the pressure to do more.
Great piece. Completely agree. Hope this gets widely read in climate activist circles. I'm a fisherman and have seen many examples of fishing conservation groups and conservation promoting companies (Trout Unlimited, Orvis, etc.) working together with grass roots activists to successfully address and improve environmental problems--cleaning up polluted waters, stopping the permitting and building of mining operations that have the potential to destroy watersheds for generations, etc. These pragmatic efforts attract and mobilize Dems and Republicans, rich and middle class, college and non-college grads. The larger climate movement would do well to learn from and emulate these smaller scale successes by special interest conservation groups.
Check out Matt on Coleman Hughes Podcast. Listening to two public people you follow having a conversation is a lot like having two of your friends meet and hoping they get along. Coleman and Matt seemed to get along just fine. Matt makes a good case for American population growth and it importance to the balance of world power. There really should be some confluence of pro immigration liberals and pro American greatness conservatives.
Anyone have recommendations for making a donation to a group or cause that is making meaningful progress or contributions to mitigating climate change and global warming? Something that has a solid track record, and research and data that shows their impact?
This is a good essay, but the description of one of the charts has an error: "Democratic elites are systematically more left-wing than rank-and-file Democratic voters. But while Republican elites are more right-wing than GOP voters on most issues, climate change is an important exception."
Unless I've misread something (always possible!), the second sentence in the quote contradicts the chart: only on Medicare for all and wealth tax are Republican elites more conservative than the rank-an-file (the situation is roughly similar for independents).
In other words, elites of all political orientations tend to less conservative than their voters -- which makes sense in light of broader patterns we see regarding education and conservative/liberal political views.
we should add supporting changes to the grid--both on the business model side and on the infrastructure side--to what activists should support. Even if we magically woke up with enough carbon-free energy in the country, we wouldn't be able to execute to decarbonize the grid.
So I find Matt's description of the faulty assumptions of climate activists and donors to be plausible, but I have an alternate explanation (based on Canadian battles over climate policy): they see themselves as a *vanguard* rather than as representatives of a mass movement that already exists. That is, they believe that if they can raise public awareness of the terrible consequences of climate change, the public will support strong climate policy.
Joseph Heath argues that there's a basic fallacy here. Climate change is hard not because of awareness but because of incentives. It's a free-rider problem: when I drive or fly I get the benefit of burning fossil fuels, while the costs of climate disruption are spread over the entire world, they're not borne by me. So even though I know climate change has terrible consequences, I lack the incentive to stop using fossil fuels (e.g. by not flying): it's a huge cost to me while making little difference to the overall problem. http://induecourse.ca/hobbess-difficult-idea/https://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2011/12/its-not-easy-being-green/
In short, cooperation is surprisingly difficult. Just knowing that if we all cooperate we can fix some terrible problem is not sufficient to make it happen. You need to look at individual incentives.
I'm not sure how you would convince someone with the "vanguard" perspective that this assumption (about the link between awareness and support) is wrong. Evidence that the public doesn't care that much about climate change (e.g. not being willing to spend $100/year to help fix it) can be dismissed as a sign that public awareness of how bad the problem is needs to be raised further.
(Canada's approach to tackling the incentive problem is admirably direct: apply a steadily rising carbon price on fossil fuels, so that whenever I buy and burn fossil fuels I'm paying for the additional cost of climate disruption, giving me a direct self-interested incentive to cut low-value uses of fossil fuels. The revenue from the federal carbon tax in each province where it applies is divided up equally and returned directly to households in the province; since rich households spend more on fossil fuels, being less sensitive to prices, they pay a larger share and most people come out ahead even if they can't cut back at all. So far the federal carbon tax has survived two federal elections and a legal challenge. Mark Jaccard argues in "The Citizen's Guide to Climate Success" that a more indirect approach would probably be more politically feasible.)
This was a great read but am I the only one who had a really hard time internalizing that this is actually the left's view of climate politics, especially the first point? I could see it applying in some issues where benefits are really concentrated but that really doesn't apply to climate. The idea that people don't want (or at least aren't asking for) sweeping changes to their own consumption patterns is so obvious and backed up by data that it's hard for me to think that a large group can come to believe otherwise.
I'm not disagreeing with Matt's point at all, I just don't understand how this kind of distortion happens on a somewhat large scale.
I think what's really happening is that many people (especially idealistic ones) have an "ethic of conviction" of approach to politics. They want to advocate for things in whatever way feels truest to themselves. Then they buy into whatever read on politics says that won't be counterproductive. It's a post hoc rationalization.
Where I slightly disagree with Matt (and Weber!) is that I don't think the solution has to be for people to adopt an "ethic of responsibility." Instead, more people just need to fold into their panoply of convictions the conviction that it's wrong to implement policies that the majority of your fellow citizens aren't OK with. I think there's more than just a semantic difference there.
They have poll data that think shows this. Of course we know issues polls are frankly useless, but that’s the place where their intuition starts. Jesse Singal wrote about this the other day in fact.
Isn't that broadly the problem with paid activism? It always seemed to me that any enduring entity is primary interested in its own survival. For Non-profits, this primarily means generating revenue through donations. This in turn creates the incentive to prioritize approaches that maximize donations over approaches that have a higher chance of achieving the stated goal of the No-profit. As donations are primarily gathered from people emotionally invested in this stated goal, communication to potential donors needs to generate and deepen this investment.
This is best achieved by leveraging humanities tribal instincts, glorifying all allies while demonizing everybody who does not deserve the status of ally. As a result, these communications drive away all fence-sitters and thus reduce the chance of any political victory.
At the same time a carbon tax is bad because it is all stick and no carrot so nobody really likes it.
I know it doesn't solve the whole problem, but I sort of wonder if there is a place for a return to the environmental issues of the 60s-80s. 60s environmental pastoralism has gotten a terrible reputation because it's associated with de-growth hippyism, etc. It has also gotten a bad rap because CEQA is a bad law, and basically there's an idea that this form of environmentalism favors a vetocracy.
But on the other hand the 60s environmental movement and its successors had a lot of successes in cleaning the air and water, making cars cleaner and more efficient, forcing factories to be cleaner, etc. If we could take a similar energy today and target it at coal power plants and cars, I feel like that would cut down on particulate emissions and also help with climate. It also shifts the debate to terrain that's a lot more favorable to climate activists than the green new deal OR carbon tax framings. Thoughts on this?
While I'm predisposed to be on board with the general points, I feel like this article ignores the (somewhat) success of CAFE. CAFE makes vehicles, ergo driving more expensive, but in a pretty hidden bureaucratic way that's pretty popular because there's no listed dollar cost. I think the goal of supply-side anti-oil activists is to do pretty much the same thing. Of course, that probably relies on it being pretty low-salience rather than high-salience, and so conflicts with the populism that Sunrise wants to bank on. But I'd feel much better about the article, and future efforts in this vein, if they had solid discussion of CAFE, Obama's coal plant regulations (which drove a lot of older ones out of business, raising energy prices), and similar wonky supply-side energy price increases.
What I initially liked about the "Green New Deal" branding was the idea that it could fix this history of bad climate strategy, even though it hasn't work out that way.
The public doesn't like rising energy prices and voters (correctly) see that it shouldn't all be on their shoulders to fix decarbonize at a time in which economic inequality is already high. So move away from the "sacrifice" narrative and move towards a "build" narrative. Carbon tax is unpopular, but taxes on corporations and the wealthy are popular, there is a way to make this work if you make the right person pay for it.
Of course, economically speaking (non-leftists know that) imposing large costs on the wealthy, corporations, and the energy sector broadly will spread through the economy and lead to higher energy prices and inflation. But if you are 1) actually creating the energy transformation you said you would, and 2) taking care of middle class and working class voters, then it should all work even if the kind of change voters would have been apprehensive about.
But it hasn't work out that way. I believe that "progressive taxation + decarbonization" can be more popular with voters than decarbonization alone even though it is more "progressive", but it's too much for GND advocates to transform healthcare at the same time as they transform energy. It's too much to ask everything on the progressive wishlist be granted simultaneously, rather than what I hoped would be "just do climate, but spend more to mitigate the downsides for consumers".
I'm not sure what the politics are, but "carbon tax" has "tax" attached to it - that won't work. Very simply, if one lives in the Mojave Desert where the sun shines 360 days a year and the wind, noticeably, blows most days, it seems like a utter waste to not capture that "free" energy each day. The fact that the great majority of roof tops have no solar panels nor have I ever seen a windmill seems like an abject policy failure. I know very conservative individuals that have solar panels on the roof. Focus on the economics and the climate change will happen - without the political contention. This change will be incremental, at best.
Among the dumbest phrases ever uttered by any human being are the words "solving climate change is just a matter of political will". This is an opinion popular among climate activists, not a few climate scientists and, regrettably, most economists including Nobel Prize winners. The level of ignorance, specifically technological ignorance, is astounding.
Now I am a Materials Science engineer and it is my business to understand what things are made of and why and to what uses any given material might be used. And this is why Raskin was an idiot: a huge percentage of every barrel of oil extracted from the ground is not burned at all. About forty percent (and rising) are used to make the petrochemicals that are the foundation building blocks of nearly everything you can touch. You cannot even make an EV without oil. If, 30 years from now, the same evil oil corporations are not producing them it will be because civilization has ended.
One day in the distant future we may have energy in such surplus that it is possible to create such chemicals without using fossil oil as the base but is it not now. And it is unlikely to be any time soon.
I'm commenting 3 weeks after this was posted, but I do want to push back on "Elon Musk is good".
A year ago, two years ago, I would have agreed with the proposition that Musk is hated by the activist left because he's a billionaire who's annoying on Twitter. To an extent, I still agree.
He's pretty clearly been given an unfair lack of gratitude by environmentalists and liberals in general for his (significant) accomplishments. He's far more hated than, say, Charles Koch was at his peak of infamy, something I consider the height of political absurdity.
But it's precisely *because* of that lack of gratitude that I think the phrase "Elon Musk is good" will not age well.
He's likely curdling into exactly the monster many think he is, out of a petulant need for payback and a deep paranoia if nothing else. His ideals regarding cooling the planet and colonizing Mars are noble, but they're hard--and "destroying the woke left" is relatively easy.
That might be dawning on him now. If you want evidence, think of his recent purchase of Twitter, but leave the words "Elon" and "Twitter" out of it.
Think, instead, of "A country's richest man", purchasing "one of its biggest media conglomerates", one whose operation he dislikes.
Russians, Hungarians, and other backsliding democracy citizens will find this familiar.
If, given the binary choice, you'd pick preserving democracy over making cars electric, Elon Musk is not good.
Capitalism incentivizes greenwashing. (If your competitor can get away with it you have to follow suit if you don't want fall behind.)
Therefore we we need groups like Sunrise who keep up the moral pressure.
I would even go as far as to say that if Democrats are willing to take climate action then this is to a large extend due to the youth movement that consistently calls out greenwashing and keeps up the pressure to do more.
Great piece. Completely agree. Hope this gets widely read in climate activist circles. I'm a fisherman and have seen many examples of fishing conservation groups and conservation promoting companies (Trout Unlimited, Orvis, etc.) working together with grass roots activists to successfully address and improve environmental problems--cleaning up polluted waters, stopping the permitting and building of mining operations that have the potential to destroy watersheds for generations, etc. These pragmatic efforts attract and mobilize Dems and Republicans, rich and middle class, college and non-college grads. The larger climate movement would do well to learn from and emulate these smaller scale successes by special interest conservation groups.
Check out Matt on Coleman Hughes Podcast. Listening to two public people you follow having a conversation is a lot like having two of your friends meet and hoping they get along. Coleman and Matt seemed to get along just fine. Matt makes a good case for American population growth and it importance to the balance of world power. There really should be some confluence of pro immigration liberals and pro American greatness conservatives.
Anyone have recommendations for making a donation to a group or cause that is making meaningful progress or contributions to mitigating climate change and global warming? Something that has a solid track record, and research and data that shows their impact?
This is a good essay, but the description of one of the charts has an error: "Democratic elites are systematically more left-wing than rank-and-file Democratic voters. But while Republican elites are more right-wing than GOP voters on most issues, climate change is an important exception."
Unless I've misread something (always possible!), the second sentence in the quote contradicts the chart: only on Medicare for all and wealth tax are Republican elites more conservative than the rank-an-file (the situation is roughly similar for independents).
In other words, elites of all political orientations tend to less conservative than their voters -- which makes sense in light of broader patterns we see regarding education and conservative/liberal political views.
we should add supporting changes to the grid--both on the business model side and on the infrastructure side--to what activists should support. Even if we magically woke up with enough carbon-free energy in the country, we wouldn't be able to execute to decarbonize the grid.
So I find Matt's description of the faulty assumptions of climate activists and donors to be plausible, but I have an alternate explanation (based on Canadian battles over climate policy): they see themselves as a *vanguard* rather than as representatives of a mass movement that already exists. That is, they believe that if they can raise public awareness of the terrible consequences of climate change, the public will support strong climate policy.
Joseph Heath argues that there's a basic fallacy here. Climate change is hard not because of awareness but because of incentives. It's a free-rider problem: when I drive or fly I get the benefit of burning fossil fuels, while the costs of climate disruption are spread over the entire world, they're not borne by me. So even though I know climate change has terrible consequences, I lack the incentive to stop using fossil fuels (e.g. by not flying): it's a huge cost to me while making little difference to the overall problem. http://induecourse.ca/hobbess-difficult-idea/ https://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2011/12/its-not-easy-being-green/
In short, cooperation is surprisingly difficult. Just knowing that if we all cooperate we can fix some terrible problem is not sufficient to make it happen. You need to look at individual incentives.
I'm not sure how you would convince someone with the "vanguard" perspective that this assumption (about the link between awareness and support) is wrong. Evidence that the public doesn't care that much about climate change (e.g. not being willing to spend $100/year to help fix it) can be dismissed as a sign that public awareness of how bad the problem is needs to be raised further.
(Canada's approach to tackling the incentive problem is admirably direct: apply a steadily rising carbon price on fossil fuels, so that whenever I buy and burn fossil fuels I'm paying for the additional cost of climate disruption, giving me a direct self-interested incentive to cut low-value uses of fossil fuels. The revenue from the federal carbon tax in each province where it applies is divided up equally and returned directly to households in the province; since rich households spend more on fossil fuels, being less sensitive to prices, they pay a larger share and most people come out ahead even if they can't cut back at all. So far the federal carbon tax has survived two federal elections and a legal challenge. Mark Jaccard argues in "The Citizen's Guide to Climate Success" that a more indirect approach would probably be more politically feasible.)
"Climate change is hard not because of awareness but because of incentives."
+100
Lighting the money on fire would release carbon. Better to bury it - carbon sequestration
This was a great read but am I the only one who had a really hard time internalizing that this is actually the left's view of climate politics, especially the first point? I could see it applying in some issues where benefits are really concentrated but that really doesn't apply to climate. The idea that people don't want (or at least aren't asking for) sweeping changes to their own consumption patterns is so obvious and backed up by data that it's hard for me to think that a large group can come to believe otherwise.
I'm not disagreeing with Matt's point at all, I just don't understand how this kind of distortion happens on a somewhat large scale.
I think what's really happening is that many people (especially idealistic ones) have an "ethic of conviction" of approach to politics. They want to advocate for things in whatever way feels truest to themselves. Then they buy into whatever read on politics says that won't be counterproductive. It's a post hoc rationalization.
Where I slightly disagree with Matt (and Weber!) is that I don't think the solution has to be for people to adopt an "ethic of responsibility." Instead, more people just need to fold into their panoply of convictions the conviction that it's wrong to implement policies that the majority of your fellow citizens aren't OK with. I think there's more than just a semantic difference there.
They have poll data that think shows this. Of course we know issues polls are frankly useless, but that’s the place where their intuition starts. Jesse Singal wrote about this the other day in fact.
Isn't that broadly the problem with paid activism? It always seemed to me that any enduring entity is primary interested in its own survival. For Non-profits, this primarily means generating revenue through donations. This in turn creates the incentive to prioritize approaches that maximize donations over approaches that have a higher chance of achieving the stated goal of the No-profit. As donations are primarily gathered from people emotionally invested in this stated goal, communication to potential donors needs to generate and deepen this investment.
This is best achieved by leveraging humanities tribal instincts, glorifying all allies while demonizing everybody who does not deserve the status of ally. As a result, these communications drive away all fence-sitters and thus reduce the chance of any political victory.
I think it's pretty clear that the Sunrise "Green New Deal" approach where you wrap everything into one huge existential crisis so that the climate solution also has to solve inequality and racism, etc. is doomed to fail because it is just overly broad and will piss off too many interests. https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/9/28/17899804/washington-1631-results-carbon-fee-green-new-deal
At the same time a carbon tax is bad because it is all stick and no carrot so nobody really likes it.
I know it doesn't solve the whole problem, but I sort of wonder if there is a place for a return to the environmental issues of the 60s-80s. 60s environmental pastoralism has gotten a terrible reputation because it's associated with de-growth hippyism, etc. It has also gotten a bad rap because CEQA is a bad law, and basically there's an idea that this form of environmentalism favors a vetocracy.
But on the other hand the 60s environmental movement and its successors had a lot of successes in cleaning the air and water, making cars cleaner and more efficient, forcing factories to be cleaner, etc. If we could take a similar energy today and target it at coal power plants and cars, I feel like that would cut down on particulate emissions and also help with climate. It also shifts the debate to terrain that's a lot more favorable to climate activists than the green new deal OR carbon tax framings. Thoughts on this?
“…doomed to fail because it is just overly broad and will piss off too many interests”
Don’t loose sight of the fact that they deserve to lose because most of their ideas are objectively bad.
While I'm predisposed to be on board with the general points, I feel like this article ignores the (somewhat) success of CAFE. CAFE makes vehicles, ergo driving more expensive, but in a pretty hidden bureaucratic way that's pretty popular because there's no listed dollar cost. I think the goal of supply-side anti-oil activists is to do pretty much the same thing. Of course, that probably relies on it being pretty low-salience rather than high-salience, and so conflicts with the populism that Sunrise wants to bank on. But I'd feel much better about the article, and future efforts in this vein, if they had solid discussion of CAFE, Obama's coal plant regulations (which drove a lot of older ones out of business, raising energy prices), and similar wonky supply-side energy price increases.
What I initially liked about the "Green New Deal" branding was the idea that it could fix this history of bad climate strategy, even though it hasn't work out that way.
The public doesn't like rising energy prices and voters (correctly) see that it shouldn't all be on their shoulders to fix decarbonize at a time in which economic inequality is already high. So move away from the "sacrifice" narrative and move towards a "build" narrative. Carbon tax is unpopular, but taxes on corporations and the wealthy are popular, there is a way to make this work if you make the right person pay for it.
Of course, economically speaking (non-leftists know that) imposing large costs on the wealthy, corporations, and the energy sector broadly will spread through the economy and lead to higher energy prices and inflation. But if you are 1) actually creating the energy transformation you said you would, and 2) taking care of middle class and working class voters, then it should all work even if the kind of change voters would have been apprehensive about.
But it hasn't work out that way. I believe that "progressive taxation + decarbonization" can be more popular with voters than decarbonization alone even though it is more "progressive", but it's too much for GND advocates to transform healthcare at the same time as they transform energy. It's too much to ask everything on the progressive wishlist be granted simultaneously, rather than what I hoped would be "just do climate, but spend more to mitigate the downsides for consumers".
I'm not sure what the politics are, but "carbon tax" has "tax" attached to it - that won't work. Very simply, if one lives in the Mojave Desert where the sun shines 360 days a year and the wind, noticeably, blows most days, it seems like a utter waste to not capture that "free" energy each day. The fact that the great majority of roof tops have no solar panels nor have I ever seen a windmill seems like an abject policy failure. I know very conservative individuals that have solar panels on the roof. Focus on the economics and the climate change will happen - without the political contention. This change will be incremental, at best.
Among the dumbest phrases ever uttered by any human being are the words "solving climate change is just a matter of political will". This is an opinion popular among climate activists, not a few climate scientists and, regrettably, most economists including Nobel Prize winners. The level of ignorance, specifically technological ignorance, is astounding.
Now I am a Materials Science engineer and it is my business to understand what things are made of and why and to what uses any given material might be used. And this is why Raskin was an idiot: a huge percentage of every barrel of oil extracted from the ground is not burned at all. About forty percent (and rising) are used to make the petrochemicals that are the foundation building blocks of nearly everything you can touch. You cannot even make an EV without oil. If, 30 years from now, the same evil oil corporations are not producing them it will be because civilization has ended.
One day in the distant future we may have energy in such surplus that it is possible to create such chemicals without using fossil oil as the base but is it not now. And it is unlikely to be any time soon.