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.
"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.
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.
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.
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?
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."
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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."
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.