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.
"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."
This is not much different than the Christian view that assisted suicide is wrong in part because it deprives people of the spiritual growth that comes from suffering.
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.
"There are a variety of environmental goals, and it makes sense to recognize this plurality of goods."
As someone old enough to remember the time before climate change cannibalized the whole environmental movement, I have tried to make this point repeatedly.
The "Repent, Sinners!" aspect of the movement is so off-putting, I kind of hate these people now.
Here's another quote from Lynas: when he became a climate advisor to the government of the Maldives, "I began to think less like an ideologue and. more like an engineer."
Of all the ideas aimed at, for lack of a better word, taming the self-righteous progressive environmentalist, I think effective environmentalism may be able to persuade some of the fanatics to compromise and take actions that actually contribute to making progress on climate change. But I won't hold my breath. For ..the most part, I like theconcept. My one exception is from the policies effective environmentalism would promote, that is regulations to raise the prices of fossil fuels. Since fossil fuels, especially for production and transportation, are necessary to make a transition to clean energies without trying to force people into it. Moreover, I don't think any price increases on fossil fuels imposed by government regulations will do anything but stifle a clean energy transition.
Actually, the one thing that is clear from economics is that the most efficient (cheapest) way to transition away from fossil fuels is to price carbon emissions. This is easily calculated for any fuel. However this can be politically unpopular (important, as Yascha points out) and unfair. To make it more popular and actually reduce capitalist unfairness, I, and several other Economists, propose refunding the entire tax on a per-capita basis. I called this an untax in Carbonomics. People think the refund will undo the effect but that's easily proven wrong.
You make a great point about carbon pricing Steve. Unfortunately, getting people to accept it is difficult. You are probably aware of the political problems with carbon taxes in Canada.
I learned a little about the subject from Brookings, who did a pretty good analysis of the Inflation Reduction Act a year or so ago and they made the same point as you. Citizens in general and special interests in particular prefer opaque and inefficient subsidies. The reliance on subsidies and the open-ended nature of them made it impossible for them to evaluate the cost of the IRA. This is a big obstacle.
They did a podcast summary on the paper that is probably still available and easy to understand for those of us who do not have your expertise.
I'm not against pricing carbon emissions, and like the idea of refunding the entire tax on a per-capita basis. Tbh, I read raising prices on fossil fuels as a price hike at the fuel pump, which isn't what yascha meant. When I come across any proposal that I think might raise the price of gas, I get a bit worked up. When fuel prices increase it tends to squeeze people with tight budgets even tighter, potentially stifling progress and influencing enough people to elect more representatives who would seek to undue progress made towards clean energy transition. Admittedly, I don't know how valid this is, and I might be completely missing the mark. That said, I am optimistic about the future.
Yes, that's what I was thinking of when I said "politically unpopular," it's a real effect and important. But Europe has had much higher prices and more efficient cars. It would work here. The problem is we can't do the refund which would pay lower income people more than their extra cost of gas. The trouble is everyone, especially environmentalists, want to grab as much of the revenues as possible.
Baltimore is well beyond requiring merchants to charge customers for plastic bags: they are 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘩𝘪𝘣𝘪𝘵𝘦𝘥. (I've noticed that a few small ethnic grocery stores are still using plastic bags. I'm not sure whether they have an exemption or are simply ignoring the law.) To "encourage" consumers to adopt reusable bags - made, of course, from petroleum-derived materials and sold at various price points - the merchants are allowed to offer paper bags ... for a modest additional charge. We're saving the sea turtles but filling up the methane producing landfills. Well, I guess dead sea turtles do, too.
To do something or other about auto emissions - I'm not sure exactly what - the funds from the Recovery Act were used to erect plastic posts in puzzling ways to provide "traffic calming" (𝘴𝘪𝘤), to create traffic bottlenecks with new islands, to repave pedestrian crosswalks with brick, and to set up bicycle paths which, even where I live near the Johns Hopkins campus, are little used.
We've been using the same reusable bags for groceries and other shopping for years now. It's not the hill I want to die on.
There is a small stash in the trunk of the car and a few in the house at any given time. I can't recall having ever discarded any of our reusable bags. They're sturdy and even washable. And they didn't come from a piss-elegant upper middle class lifestyle emporium either. I found one when I was beachcombing. Three were tote-bag handouts at seminars. A few come from the general store. The oldest is approaching two decades of use.
Super good, Yascha. You could have added DEI and Socialism to feel-good causes that backfire. You could have mentioned the ‘empathy trap’ that sucks rationality out of the minds of progressives. Keep up the good work. Maybe it will turn a few heads; probably not. But I’ll pass it on, anyway.
Yascha’s critique of Enviros is spot on, but misses the key principle of Effective Altruism — We should apply our theories to ourselves. So said Al-Gharbi in last Saturday’s podcast, “to the communities the theorist himself participates in.” His influence on climate policy is nil, while his influence right here is vast So … We should apply Yascha’s “thoughtful altruism,” (as I’ll call it) to ourselves.
Or do we have the strategy best already? In four years, I’ve heard no discussion of our strategy for building community among subscribers or how we could fight effectively as a community, “The community for those who believe that a free society is worth fighting for,” as our tagline says.
There’s been plenty of strategizing, I’m sure, among Yascha’s Persuasion team, and the magazine part has thrived spectacularly. But what of the community part and the “fight of a lifetime” part? Building community takes more than reading philosophical essays—no matter how good—in disconnected unison. And an activist community would add to subscriptions. The two are complements.
The illiberal side employs frighteningly effective strategies. BLM’s Alicia Garza explained how they “fight for space in all the places where knowledge is produced and cultured.” They’ve won at the NY Times, the AAP and AMA, in universities, etc. — after they built communities.
Community building must involve us, not just the top few, in thoughtful planning. That’s how to harness the incredible talent that I saw in the old self-started Slack community, in the old Zoom discussions, and in comments. “When I conceived of this project, I was betting on the idea that a lot of people were champing at the bit to defend the values of a free society.” —Yascha Mounk, 7/5/20
“Champing at the bit” means the horse is eager to race but held back by the rider. In frustration, the horse grinds its teeth on the bit. Fighting requires community action. That requires community thought, and that requires community discussion — of exactly how best to fight the good fight. Let’s open the gates and put an end to “champing at the bit.” What do you think?
I deleted my original post as not keeping in the spirit of what Yascha is trying to do. I had to get pretty old before I understood that many or most people had no interest in what works or what is true. Here, there is a community of people who actually are interested in what works to promote the common goals that are more widespread than partisans and fundamentalist ideologues would have us believe. Effective environmentalism is precisely the type of approach that I have sought for decades.
If it can become accepted by those who have cultural influence, then there is a possibility of success. I applaud the effort.
I strongly agree with the ideas in this important post, not least because I live in Europe, and everyone here HATES that new rule requiring caps to be attached to bottles.
If we actually wanted to do something about climate change, instead of flagellating ourselves for our wicked, wasteful ways, we would support nuclear power, permitting reform, giving clean energy technology to developing countries, and a carbon tax. (To be fair, the environmental movement does support a carbon tax.)
But I had a slightly different take on your magic-wand thought experiment. Yes, there are environmentalists who would say no to a quick fix because they are degrowthers who want to make us consume less and obliterate capitalism or whatever. No question.
But others of us (I include myself in this group) are suspicious of quick fixes in the form of geo-engineering in particular. We are aware of the law of unintended consequences, and of how so many quick-fix solutions, imposed by people with a limited view of the true situation, have gone horribly wrong. In fact this was one of your best points in last week’s essay on effective altruism—that people who think they know everything don’t even know what they’re ignorant of, and that that ignorance is dangerous. Or, put simply, are we sure that shooting a ton of chemicals into the atmosphere to slow climate change is a good idea? What could possibly go wrong?
So yes, we need solutions to climate change that will not impose mass suffering. But a little humility about what we don’t know is an important part of our plans.
I can remember back when Amory Lovins was seemingly everywhere on the energy front and had,. or appeared to have, the answers to everything. Then he vanished from the world stage. In 50 years, will Effective Altruism seem as passé as Amory Lovins does now?
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
"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."
This is not much different than the Christian view that assisted suicide is wrong in part because it deprives people of the spiritual growth that comes from suffering.
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.
Complete agree with all of this.
"There are a variety of environmental goals, and it makes sense to recognize this plurality of goods."
As someone old enough to remember the time before climate change cannibalized the whole environmental movement, I have tried to make this point repeatedly.
The "Repent, Sinners!" aspect of the movement is so off-putting, I kind of hate these people now.
Here's another quote from Lynas: when he became a climate advisor to the government of the Maldives, "I began to think less like an ideologue and. more like an engineer."
Of all the ideas aimed at, for lack of a better word, taming the self-righteous progressive environmentalist, I think effective environmentalism may be able to persuade some of the fanatics to compromise and take actions that actually contribute to making progress on climate change. But I won't hold my breath. For ..the most part, I like theconcept. My one exception is from the policies effective environmentalism would promote, that is regulations to raise the prices of fossil fuels. Since fossil fuels, especially for production and transportation, are necessary to make a transition to clean energies without trying to force people into it. Moreover, I don't think any price increases on fossil fuels imposed by government regulations will do anything but stifle a clean energy transition.
Actually, the one thing that is clear from economics is that the most efficient (cheapest) way to transition away from fossil fuels is to price carbon emissions. This is easily calculated for any fuel. However this can be politically unpopular (important, as Yascha points out) and unfair. To make it more popular and actually reduce capitalist unfairness, I, and several other Economists, propose refunding the entire tax on a per-capita basis. I called this an untax in Carbonomics. People think the refund will undo the effect but that's easily proven wrong.
You make a great point about carbon pricing Steve. Unfortunately, getting people to accept it is difficult. You are probably aware of the political problems with carbon taxes in Canada.
I learned a little about the subject from Brookings, who did a pretty good analysis of the Inflation Reduction Act a year or so ago and they made the same point as you. Citizens in general and special interests in particular prefer opaque and inefficient subsidies. The reliance on subsidies and the open-ended nature of them made it impossible for them to evaluate the cost of the IRA. This is a big obstacle.
They did a podcast summary on the paper that is probably still available and easy to understand for those of us who do not have your expertise.
I'm not against pricing carbon emissions, and like the idea of refunding the entire tax on a per-capita basis. Tbh, I read raising prices on fossil fuels as a price hike at the fuel pump, which isn't what yascha meant. When I come across any proposal that I think might raise the price of gas, I get a bit worked up. When fuel prices increase it tends to squeeze people with tight budgets even tighter, potentially stifling progress and influencing enough people to elect more representatives who would seek to undue progress made towards clean energy transition. Admittedly, I don't know how valid this is, and I might be completely missing the mark. That said, I am optimistic about the future.
Yes, that's what I was thinking of when I said "politically unpopular," it's a real effect and important. But Europe has had much higher prices and more efficient cars. It would work here. The problem is we can't do the refund which would pay lower income people more than their extra cost of gas. The trouble is everyone, especially environmentalists, want to grab as much of the revenues as possible.
Baltimore is well beyond requiring merchants to charge customers for plastic bags: they are 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘩𝘪𝘣𝘪𝘵𝘦𝘥. (I've noticed that a few small ethnic grocery stores are still using plastic bags. I'm not sure whether they have an exemption or are simply ignoring the law.) To "encourage" consumers to adopt reusable bags - made, of course, from petroleum-derived materials and sold at various price points - the merchants are allowed to offer paper bags ... for a modest additional charge. We're saving the sea turtles but filling up the methane producing landfills. Well, I guess dead sea turtles do, too.
To do something or other about auto emissions - I'm not sure exactly what - the funds from the Recovery Act were used to erect plastic posts in puzzling ways to provide "traffic calming" (𝘴𝘪𝘤), to create traffic bottlenecks with new islands, to repave pedestrian crosswalks with brick, and to set up bicycle paths which, even where I live near the Johns Hopkins campus, are little used.
We've been using the same reusable bags for groceries and other shopping for years now. It's not the hill I want to die on.
There is a small stash in the trunk of the car and a few in the house at any given time. I can't recall having ever discarded any of our reusable bags. They're sturdy and even washable. And they didn't come from a piss-elegant upper middle class lifestyle emporium either. I found one when I was beachcombing. Three were tote-bag handouts at seminars. A few come from the general store. The oldest is approaching two decades of use.
Super good, Yascha. You could have added DEI and Socialism to feel-good causes that backfire. You could have mentioned the ‘empathy trap’ that sucks rationality out of the minds of progressives. Keep up the good work. Maybe it will turn a few heads; probably not. But I’ll pass it on, anyway.
Yascha’s critique of Enviros is spot on, but misses the key principle of Effective Altruism — We should apply our theories to ourselves. So said Al-Gharbi in last Saturday’s podcast, “to the communities the theorist himself participates in.” His influence on climate policy is nil, while his influence right here is vast So … We should apply Yascha’s “thoughtful altruism,” (as I’ll call it) to ourselves.
Or do we have the strategy best already? In four years, I’ve heard no discussion of our strategy for building community among subscribers or how we could fight effectively as a community, “The community for those who believe that a free society is worth fighting for,” as our tagline says.
There’s been plenty of strategizing, I’m sure, among Yascha’s Persuasion team, and the magazine part has thrived spectacularly. But what of the community part and the “fight of a lifetime” part? Building community takes more than reading philosophical essays—no matter how good—in disconnected unison. And an activist community would add to subscriptions. The two are complements.
The illiberal side employs frighteningly effective strategies. BLM’s Alicia Garza explained how they “fight for space in all the places where knowledge is produced and cultured.” They’ve won at the NY Times, the AAP and AMA, in universities, etc. — after they built communities.
Community building must involve us, not just the top few, in thoughtful planning. That’s how to harness the incredible talent that I saw in the old self-started Slack community, in the old Zoom discussions, and in comments. “When I conceived of this project, I was betting on the idea that a lot of people were champing at the bit to defend the values of a free society.” —Yascha Mounk, 7/5/20
“Champing at the bit” means the horse is eager to race but held back by the rider. In frustration, the horse grinds its teeth on the bit. Fighting requires community action. That requires community thought, and that requires community discussion — of exactly how best to fight the good fight. Let’s open the gates and put an end to “champing at the bit.” What do you think?
I deleted my original post as not keeping in the spirit of what Yascha is trying to do. I had to get pretty old before I understood that many or most people had no interest in what works or what is true. Here, there is a community of people who actually are interested in what works to promote the common goals that are more widespread than partisans and fundamentalist ideologues would have us believe. Effective environmentalism is precisely the type of approach that I have sought for decades.
If it can become accepted by those who have cultural influence, then there is a possibility of success. I applaud the effort.
I strongly agree with the ideas in this important post, not least because I live in Europe, and everyone here HATES that new rule requiring caps to be attached to bottles.
If we actually wanted to do something about climate change, instead of flagellating ourselves for our wicked, wasteful ways, we would support nuclear power, permitting reform, giving clean energy technology to developing countries, and a carbon tax. (To be fair, the environmental movement does support a carbon tax.)
But I had a slightly different take on your magic-wand thought experiment. Yes, there are environmentalists who would say no to a quick fix because they are degrowthers who want to make us consume less and obliterate capitalism or whatever. No question.
But others of us (I include myself in this group) are suspicious of quick fixes in the form of geo-engineering in particular. We are aware of the law of unintended consequences, and of how so many quick-fix solutions, imposed by people with a limited view of the true situation, have gone horribly wrong. In fact this was one of your best points in last week’s essay on effective altruism—that people who think they know everything don’t even know what they’re ignorant of, and that that ignorance is dangerous. Or, put simply, are we sure that shooting a ton of chemicals into the atmosphere to slow climate change is a good idea? What could possibly go wrong?
So yes, we need solutions to climate change that will not impose mass suffering. But a little humility about what we don’t know is an important part of our plans.
I can remember back when Amory Lovins was seemingly everywhere on the energy front and had,. or appeared to have, the answers to everything. Then he vanished from the world stage. In 50 years, will Effective Altruism seem as passé as Amory Lovins does now?