Where Environmentalists Went Wrong
To tackle climate change, we need policies that make the biggest difference at the lowest cost. It’s time for “effective environmentalism.”
This is the second installment in my series on effective altruism. The first piece, a meditation on how the movement went wrong and why its core intuition is nonetheless worth defending, was published last week.
The thing I most love about Substack is that I get to write about what I believe to be important for my own audience in my own style. The other thing I love is that Substack is growing to be its own little universe of writers, and that much of what I’ve written on here has inspired thoughtful commentary. For an excellent example, see Andrew Doris’ defense of effective altruism.
Thanks for reading. I promise that next week’s piece will be on something completely different! - Yascha
Paris barely gets more sunlight than famously gray London, and has winters whose harshness can surprise newcomers. But for much of the year, it manages to sustain a more convivial atmosphere in part because Parisian cafés know how to keep their customers warm. Some of my fondest memories of Paris involve drinking red wine with friends on an outdoor terrace on a chilly autumn day, warmed by blankets and heat lamps.
Or perhaps I should say: Parisian cafés knew how to keep their customers warm in the past. For when I visited Paris in the late fall last year, I was surprised that outdoor terraces had all but disappeared. A few shivering Parisians could be seen huddling outside of cafés, cigarette in hand and a scarf wrapped around their neck. But for the most part, Paris felt uncharacteristically deserted.
When I asked my friends what was going on, they gave me a simple explanation: France has banned outdoor heating. Citing the need to fight climate change, the government of Emmanuel Macron forbade cafés and restaurants from wasting energy on keeping their customers warm.
This is, to be sure, a minor inconvenience—a great example of a “first world problem,” if you will. Having to forego sitting outside with your friends during the cold months is hardly a grave injustice, and it pales in comparison to the genuine dangers awaiting us unless we collectively combat climate change. But it is also characteristic of what is wrong with a particular kind of increasingly common environmental regulation: one that is short on impact but big on virtue signaling.
Consider just a few salient examples from the past few years:
Some American states have banned cafés and restaurants from offering their customers single-use plastic straws.
Many jurisdictions around the world now require grocery stores to charge their customers for plastic bags.
The EU has phased out incandescent light bulbs.
The EU has also banned plastic bottles with removable caps, leading to the introduction of bottles that don’t always properly close once they have been opened.
Though not yet implemented, some prominent organizations and activists have called for gas stoves to be banned.
These seemingly disparate examples share an important commonality: They are a form of policy intervention that achieves small improvements for the environment at the cost of a salient deterioration in quality of life or a large loss of political goodwill. For that reason, each of these interventions is likely to backfire.
Anyone who wants to tackle serious environmental problems like climate change needs to win majority support for impactful policies in a large number of countries and sustain that consensus over a long period of time. To do that, policy makers and environmentalists need to get smart about political capital: how to build it and, most importantly, how to avoid wasting it.
Low-impact policies that demand small, if frequent and highly salient, sacrifices feel virtuous. But they deplete a disproportionate amount of political capital. Cumulatively, they risk giving citizens the impression that those in charge care more about forcing them to change their lifestyle than about solving real problems. By contrast, high-impact policies that are less visible because they operate through indirect mechanisms like public investment or tax incentives don’t feel nearly as virtuous, in part because they leave more freedom to each individual about how to adjust to them. But it is precisely these kinds of large-scale structural changes that are more likely to make a real and lasting difference.
If we want to win the fight against climate change, we need to get serious about achieving the biggest possible environmental impact for the smallest possible price in quality of life and political goodwill. Environmentalist policies don’t just need to be well-intentioned or feel virtuous; they need to be effective in accomplishing their stated goals.
It’s time for a new paradigm. Call it “effective environmentalism.”
How Environmentalists Lost Momentum
When he gives talks in front of large audiences, Mark Lynas, a lifelong environmentalist campaigner and the author of many bestselling books about climate change, likes to ask a simple question: Imagine a fairy appeared in front of you, promising to solve the problem of climate change with a simple wave of the wand. Would you take her up on the offer?
Nearly always, Lynas says, most members of the audience reject the offer. Fixing climate change in such an easy way, they feel, would be a form of cheating. In the minds of many people who say that they are gravely concerned about environmental problems, Lynas concludes, any real solution must involve a large element of self-flagellation; their real motivation seems to be a belief that we have sinned against nature—and the concomitant conviction that we must repent before we can hope to make things right.
This is driven by a deeper sense, widespread in the environmental movement, that the fight against climate change is coterminous with the fight to remake the world from scratch. To many, social ills like racism, sexism and even capitalism itself are facets of one interrelated system of oppression. A victory against any one facet requires a victory against all.
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Naomi Klein’s bestselling This Changes Everything is a classic of the genre. Tellingly, the first change she admonishes her readers to make concerns their lifestyle: “For us high consumers,” she writes, preventing the dire future that awaits humanity requires “changing how we live.” She quickly goes on to note that these changes would, in any case, prove to “be downright exciting.” Even more tellingly, Klein maintains that making these changes will require nothing short of the abolition of capitalism. To her, the right way to understand this historical moment is as “a battle between capitalism and the planet.”
The American politicians who ban plastic straws or the European politicians who ban outdoor heating are far less radical than Klein. But if they focus on interventions that have a noticeable impact on the way people live without making much of a difference to real environment goals, it is in good part because they have internalized a similar set of assumptions. They too think that we have sinned against nature. And they too seem to feel that the pain involved in combating climate change can serve as a cleansing fire.
That strategy, however, seems to be failing. Over the course of the past decade, mainstream media outlets have given enormous attention to outspoken activists like Greta Thunberg and extremist movements like Extinction Rebellion. There was a widespread sense that the climate was the overriding political concern of young people. Environmentalist parties, such as Greens across Western Europe, were projected to keep gaining momentum as young voters flocked to them.
But it turns out that you can’t scare and shame people into taking action on climate change. If anything, this political moment seems to be characterized by a mix of apathy and backlash. In the United States, a recent poll of young voters reveals that only 6 percent of them consider “environmental issues” their top priority, the same number who say their top priority is immigration (economic issues easily eclipse both).
Things don’t look all that different in Europe. As recently as four years ago, Germany’s Green Party was polling around 25 percent of the vote, and looked likely to lead a federal government for the first time in the country’s history. Now, its support is down to about ten percent, with the decline among young voters especially dramatic. Opinions about the party in the electorate give a clue about the source of its troubles: In a recent exit poll conducted during the state election in Brandenburg, 71 percent of voters complained that the party “has insufficient concern with the economy and creating jobs.” 66 percent complained that the party “wants to tell us how to live.”
Given the stakes of the climate crisis, it is morally irresponsible and strategically short-sighted to invoke one cause to run cover for the others, or to use the climate as an excuse to evangelize your preferred lifestyle. If your purported concern is about climate change, you must take the measures that could actually curb carbon emissions and mitigate the fallout of a warming world. That’s what the principles of effective environmentalism can help us do.
The Principles of Effective Environmentalism
The environment, like most areas of public policy, is the realm of painful trade-offs. Efforts to fix the climate crisis will involve a significant degree of expense and inconvenience. For both moral and strategic reasons, the goal of environmental regulation should therefore be to accomplish important goals while minimizing these costs insofar as possible. To offer a simple definition, effective environmentalism consists in actions or policies which maximize positive impact on the environment while minimizing both the price for humans’ quality of life and the depletion of a collective willingness to adopt other impactful measures.
A formal definition is important for the purposes of rigor. But most of the time, such a definition is less helpful than the spirit which animates it. And that spirit is best captured in a more informal register. So rather than focusing on the definition, effective environmentalists should evaluate any proposed action, policy or regulation by asking themselves three questions:
1. How big a positive impact (if any) will the proposed action have?
This seems like such an obvious question that it should not be necessary. But there are plenty of examples of supposedly environmentalist policies that, even before considering trade-offs with non-environmental goals like economic growth, do more harm than good. Germany, for example, claims to be a leader in the worldwide fight against climate change; and yet the country recently demolished a perfectly functional atomic reactor, further increasing the country’s reliance on fossil fuel. Even if it is clear that a policy does have some positive impact, it is important to be rigorous about how much of a difference it will make. In politics, it’s easy to obsess over whatever happens to be salient. If some question touches a cultural nerve, or has given rise to major political battles in the past, its stakes can come to seem existential—even if not much hinges on it in the real world. This is part of what makes it so tempting to obsess about such things as banning plastic straws or detachable bottle caps (which have little impact) rather than tax incentives or cap-and-trade schemes (which would have a vastly larger impact). Effective environmentalists must avoid that temptation at all cost.
2. To what extent will the proposed action lead to a deterioration in quality of life?
For the most part, people who worry about climate change and other forms of environmental degradation are motivated by a concern about human welfare. They worry about the negative consequences that runaway climate change would have for humankind. But this also gives them reason to care about the negative consequences that environmental policies may have for human welfare. So the extent of the trade-off needs to be a key consideration. The bigger an adverse impact a particular policy has on people’s quality of life, the more skeptical we should be about implementing it.
3. To what extent will the proposed action lead to backlash?
Political capital is limited. In most democracies, a clear majority of the population now cares about climate change to some extent. But this genuine concern competes with, and tends to be eclipsed by, voters’ concern about economic priorities like the availability of good jobs. This context makes it all the more important for voters to feel that governments and environmental groups are focusing on impactful steps that leave them in charge of decisions about their own lives; otherwise, support for any environmental policy is likely to polarize along partisan lines, or even to crater across the board.
The Kernel of Truth in Effective Altruism
When I coined the term “effective environmentalism,” I was of course inspired by an earlier movement: “effective altruism.”
As I explained last week, effective altruism has recently fallen from grace, and the reasons for its troubles go deep: Advocates of the movement were not sufficiently interested in the complexity of psychology or politics. They embraced a long-termist vision which prioritized the achievement of uncertain progress in the distant future over the ability to improve the lives of needy people in the here-and-now. Their messianic sense of self-importance could at times serve as an excuse for dispensing with the requirements of ordinary morality.
Effective environmentalists must be on guard against adopting similar habits of mind. But for all of the problems with effective altruism, the original insight on which it is built is hard to contest. People spend billions of dollars on charitable contributions every year. Much of that money goes to building new gyms at fancy universities or upgrading the local cat shelter. Wouldn’t it be better to direct donors’ altruistic instincts to more impactful endeavors, potentially saving the lives of thousands of people?
Something similar holds true for the environmental movement. Many activists are more focused on interventions that feel virtuous than on ones that will make a real difference. As a result, much of the movement has proven ineffective. Just as effective altruists set out to improve what philanthropy usually looks like in practice, effective environmentalists hope to get serious about what it would take to save the environment.
There’s another lesson that effective environmentalism can take from effective altruism. Effective altruists pride themselves in adopting principles and mental heuristics that are supposed to help them assess what to do in a more rational way. These include not judging an idea based on who says it; reserving judgment about an idea until you’ve analyzed both its benefits and its costs; paying attention to the relative weight of different priorities; and being skeptical about forms of symbolic politics that don’t lead to real change. Despite the hubris that has so often led effective altruism astray, these norms make a lot of sense, and have relevance for environmentalists focused on having real impact.
So, to figure out what policies can make the biggest difference in the fight against climate change, and actually win the political capital to put these into practice, effective environmentalists should:
Assess Policies on the Basis of their Impact, not Their Perceived Purity:
Banning plastic bags is an example of a policy that feels green. Plastic is produced from oil, creates pollution, and can harm animals. Wouldn’t it be better if people brought reusable canvas bags when they go shopping instead? The problem with this is not only that people will often forget to bring a bag, forcing them to purchase a significant number of reusable bags over time. It is also that cotton bags are actually extremely resource-intensive to produce. According to one study, a cotton bag would need to be reused a staggering 7,100 times for its carbon footprint to be as low as that of single-use plastic bags. This is the kind of data point to which effective environmentalists should pay close attention. Some policies “feel” green. Other policies “feel” dirty. But effective environmentalists should insist that the right metric for whether a policy should be adopted is not their feels or their cultural valence; it is whether they can help humanity solve the momentous challenge posed by climate change.
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Prioritize Actions that Solve the Biggest Problems:
It would be a mistake to subsume all environmental concerns to the fight against climate change. People have reasons to care about living in a clean environment or alleviating animal suffering even if it does not help to protect us from the threat posed by climate change. There are a variety of environmental goals, and it makes sense to recognize this plurality of goods. And yet, those who care about environmental goals need to have a clear sense of relative priorities. Some goals are more important than others. And some of the time, taking action on one really does deplete the ability to take action on another. In those circumstances, effective environmentalists should unflinchingly give precedence to the most important goals.
Be Willing to Build Cross-Ideological Coalitions:
Activists increasingly pride themselves in being “intersectional.” Since they believe that various forms of oppression intersect, people who want to participate in the fight against one form of injustice must also get on board with a set of progressive assumptions about how to combat other forms of perceived injustice. This can raise the entrance ticket for anyone who wants to get involved in fighting for an environmental cause; distract major environmental organizations from fighting for their stated goals; and make powerful players unwilling to forge tactical coalitions with partners whose broader worldview they disdain. Effective environmentalists should reject this purist instinct, making common cause with anyone who favors impactful action irrespective of the views they may hold about unrelated issues.
Put People in Charge of Their Own Lives:
Effective environmentalists should fight to transition as much of the economy as possible to forms of energy that do not emit carbon. This will require broad political support and, yes, real financial trade-offs. But effective environmentalists should avoid overly intrusive regulations about how people then go about using that energy. If consumers are willing to pay an elevated price for the pleasure of sitting on an outside terrace in the late fall, it shouldn’t be for the government or for environmental activists to decide that a different use of energy is more morally righteous.
No-Bullshit Environmentalism
For the last decades, the environmentalist movement has tried its hand at fear-mongering. The names that the most visible organizations of this moment have given themselves tell this story eloquently: from Last Generation to Extinction Rebellion, they signal that humanity is about to be destroyed by environmental catastrophe. But while climate change is undoubtedly a real and serious problem, this kind of rhetoric is factually misleading and politically disastrous.
This is why I favor a different approach. This approach centers the serious risks posed by climate change. But it also insists that humans are capable of meeting this moment with a mix of collective action and ingenuity. With the right investments and regulations, we can reduce carbon emissions and mitigate the impact of a warming planet. And while this transition will exact considerable costs, it need not make us poor or require us to abstain from putting plentiful energy to its many miraculous uses. As the astonishing reduction in the price of renewables over the course of the last decades demonstrates, we are even making the first big strides in the right direction.
Even within effective environmentalism, there will likely be persistent disagreements about the precise mix of policies that can help combat climate change. But at a start, the mix of policies advocated by effective environmentalists is likely to include: a commitment to creating energy abundance while transitioning towards a low-carbon economy; significant investment in both renewable and nuclear energy; regulatory action to raise the price of fossil-fuels; the adoption of genetically-modified crops that can withstand a changing climate; public and private investment to mitigate the effects of the warming that is already underway; the development and adoption of new technologies that can capture carbon; and a willingness to do serious research on speculative ideas, such as marine cloud brightening, that have the potential to avert worst-case outcomes in the case of a climate emergency.
The fight against climate change and other forms of environmental degradation will never be costless. In life as in economics, trade-offs are real. But in the context of a growing economy, we should be able to bear those costs without suffering any overall reduction in human affluence or well-being. If we adopt the principles of effective environmentalism and take energetic action, our future shines bright.
If a fairy appeared promising to solve climate change, would you take her up on it? Nope, they wouldn’t. That’s the most brilliant summary of the Environmentalist problem I’ve ever seen. Twenty years ago, our #1 climate enviro, Bill McKibben, voted not to eradicate black flies in his small town because suffering from them kept people in touch with the natural world. Same attitude.
But you never touch on how to solve that, and seem to think explaining a rational approach will do some good. I got into the climate fight from 2005 to 2017, and I’m sorry to say that no rational explanation will have any impact on that crowd. But at higher levels some do better.
This is why I wrote my other comment, saying that with your help we should apply effective altruism here in the Persuasion community. We could do better if we all put our heads together. Here’s an example of how I did this once before by building a little community with friends.
While all of your suggestions are basically good advice, you miss the biggest problem — Altruism itself. That could almost work in some advanced EU countries (except for the fairy & black fly problem). But climate is a global version of the tragedy of the commons. Every country realizes that their efforts make so little difference that they are better off letting others solve it.
That problem is so well known that lefty Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz was writing about in 2006. In my 2008 book, Carbonomics, I proposed a slight improvement on his way of solving that problem, then recruited a couple of better known friends and we organized a book with 12 authors, including three Nobel Prize winners and published Global Carbon Pricing: The Path to Climate Cooperation in 2017 with MIT press. It’s been cited 180 times. Nonetheless it failed. Climate cooperation is a very nasty problem.
The Paris Conference in 2015 also failed, because it was so in-tune with your suggestion #3, “To what extent will the proposed action lead to backlash?” that the agreement has no teeth at all (hence no backlash) and allows every country to virtue signal and then cheat — it depends solely on altruism.
Probably the most often performed experiment in the social sciences tests the tragedy of the commons (the public goods problem). At first the players are surprisingly altruistic. But they notice some are shirking and soon they are all playing cutthroat. I’ve actually spent time in Köln, where Axel, one of my friends working with me on this, is Director of the Cologne Laboratory of Economic Research. We ran experiments on this and our hoped-for improvement.
The trick to international cooperation is reciprocity. I will commit and contribute if you will. That was almost possible in 2008, but now politics is so polarized nationally and internationally, that the chance is slim indeed. Yacha, this is why you should apply effective altruism to the Persuasion community. It’s the right community to work on the most important problem which you studied in Identity Trap.
If you want to read a very short intro to these ideas, we published a short piece in Nature shortly before the Paris Conference.
https://www.nature.com/news/polopoly_fs/1.18538!/menu/main/topColumns/topLeftColumn/pdf/526315a.pdf
The silliness of the French outdoor heating ban is compounded by the fact that France produces seventy per cent of its electricity from nuclear. The only reason to ban outdoor electric heaters would be if there were a power shortage. This could happen if France continues to send power to Germany which has shut down its nuclear reactors in favor of intermittent wind and solar (actually Russian, Emirates and American natural gas, of course.) We should stop subsidizing intermittent renewables and subsidize nuclear.