Your post is more a criticism of "activism culture" than of the Climate Left.
I work in pretty close proximity to normalish Climate Left people (i.e. not tankie types). Most people seem to believe the following:
1. American or Western activism is unlikely to have much impact on Chinese policy? (E.g. Xinjiang)
2. If we in the US can't reach net zero (or whatever) to mitigate climate change, how can we expect others to do so?
3. If we Westerners go "all in" on climate mitigation (there is so much more we could do) and get our house in order, we will be better off AND in a position to push on China from a position of strength.
4. Democrats in Congress *know* we should be doing more on climate within the US, but they are afraid to do so and/or uncertain on what to do.
It's completely fair to argue that Leftists are too soft on China and that they should ALSO be pushing very hard on this globally. But I don't think it's right to say that it's a farce.
On something like nuclear (I am in favor), surely you can recognize why an environmentally-minded person might seriously (and rationally) see nuclear as a separate but still important environmental risk. They might be mistaken on the level of risk, but it's not a "farce" when activists miscalculate something.
Similarly, on issues like Palestine and police funding, people get activated into an "activism culture." I would argue that they are sometimes wrong, often distracted, and frequently undermining their own case on climate - but that does not make their climate activism a farce.
I'd be interested to see more of a steel man case for what a Climate Leftist could (realistically) be doing.
> I'd be interested to see more of a steel man case for what a Climate Leftist could (realistically) be doing.
In general, for all activists -- Write draft legislation that 47.5% of legislators would already agree with, then organize write in drives to sway around 5% of legislators in the middle, settling for incremental changes that actually move things in a positive direction.
I worry activism focuses way too much energy on "motivating legislators by signalling popular interest" in an issue. That was a more successful strategy in the 40s, before opinion polling makes it clear that a thousand people outside your office might be a bluff and doesn't necessarily mean it matters to your electoral chances.
Activism generally focuses too little energy on understanding how policy is actually made and what the real bottlenecks are. Legislators are constantly campaigning in one way or another, meeting with donors or managing an image, they are often too busy to research and draft policies. Hand them a reasonable bill they can introduce as-is with pre-typed talking points they can use to argue for it, and you save them work.
Usually I'm partial to Antoine de Saint Exupery, but I think in this domain... Don't make a legislator yearn for the sea, just lay out the tools so their job is half done.
Not sure if by "activism culture" you mean this or something more like what Julia Galef denotes with "soldier mindset", but it's definitely true that *going to left-of-center protests* is a subculture, one that's generally gatekept by far-leftists and ends up being a vector for liberals to move left or acquire additional leftist commitments (or, in the case of the liberal currently typing this, to not want to go to more protests).
The 'Climate Left' isn't interested in spending money effectively to improve carbon emissions—if they were, you would see an embrace of Generation IV nuclear reactors and fundamental R&D research that touches on many different kinds of energy sources.
Their aim, instead, is to spend endless trillions on uncompetitive technology and of course, increasingly, 'racial justice.' In their view, these issues are inseparable. They would rather sink vast amounts of money into all kinds of projects that form this left-wing constellation of perceived grievance.
Reducing carbon emissions is not their priority, even when the subject is climate change. If we were to follow their lead on this, the United States would find itself in a debt spiral as these extremists spend it into oblivion.. and a vanishing fraction of that spending would actually go to constructive efforts re: climate.
I'm sure many of these people would even prefer economic calamity compared to the status quo, as an opportunity to prostrate themselves before the world as martyrs. We're horrible racists, we're horrible carbon emitters—but *at least we tried.*
Re: activists getting things wrong. Your nominal activist obviously isn't responsible for the thinking - they're mostly just responsible for the broadcasting. So each individual activist getting something wrong aren't exactly farcacle. But when the people who actually do the thinking don't course-correct when the movement is getting things wrong on nuclear, then at some point you have to start calling it a farce.
But couldn't they be helping Democrats defeat Republicans in general elections, regardless of whether those Democrats are moderates or progressives? I spend a lot of my free time doing this: mainly text messaging, which is all I can really do since I live overseas.
Yglesias is right to emphasize the importance of winning legislative majorities, not just for climate but for all of the left's policy goals. Whoever is doing something else, unless it's at least equally effective, is causing harm by ignoring an opportunity cost.
Here's the problem: By spending his time and energy punching left Yglesias is actually harming Democrats political chances.
He's turning off the climate left by being mean to them. He's turning off swing voters who will associate the climate left with Democrats. He's doing far more harm to Democrats electoral chances than those he's complaining about.
That's a problem.
He could, instead, spend his time painting the GOP has the real problem preventing action on climate change which, importantly, would actually be true.
I mean, in a sense nothing any cultural or political commentator does or says will have much impact on the electorate itself. I would be shocked Matt Yglesias’ name recognition among swing voters was higher than 10%. The choices of politicians and parties will have much greater influence on swing voters.
It’s true he annoys a greater proportion of left activists, but if they’re so put off by his criticism that it distracts them from their activism then they are kind of proving his point.
I'd argue it's more of a collective action problem among center-left journalists and media outlets. Matt is just one example. Will any one article by one writer matter much? No. But moral panics like cancel culture and CRT became mainstream due to the way the center-left media and mainstream media act in aggregate, much like it did with the PC wars of the past. Their war against climate activists is no different. Center left media is harming the potential for action on climate by collectively complaining about the climate left instead of focusing on the actors that are actually holding us back.
The media plays a far bigger role in the attitudes of swing voters that you are giving them credit for. I'd argue the media has a bigger impact than politicians and parties.
Beyond that, Matt Yglesias’ has significant power. He's read in the White House and by members of Congress. He's distracting them from what they should actually be worried about which is the GOP and the far right.
My point is annoying climate activists won't distract them from their activism. He's giving them what they want which is attention. What Matt is doing is reducing the influence he might have to help them be more effective and reducing the likelihood that climate activists will turnout to vote for Democrats.
All of this is more problematic than the things Matt Yglesias’ is complaining about.
FWIW, I like Matt. I'm a paid subscriber to his Substack. I've listened to virtually every episode of the Weeds.
I'm just annoyed because he constantly complains about others doing ineffective things(often based on shallow evidence), but then he engages in behavior that has at least the same level of negative impact if not greater. He needs to follow his own advice as do the others like him(EG Jonathan Chait who I also generally like)
"But moral panics like cancel culture and CRT became mainstream due to the way the center-left media and mainstream media act in aggregate, much like it did with the PC wars of the past"
Um, no, they become mainstream because the right-wing media (which these days is a very different ecosystem from the mainstream media, which itself has blended in to the center-left media) pounds on those issues (because they always need some grievance for their old white grievance audience). CRT and cancel culture will still be issues even if all the media from mainstream on left didn't mention them at all. I personally think Yglesia should be listened to because the electorate is, in general, much older, much less educated, and much more socially conservative (also not all that much against right-wing authoritarianism) than the very vocal young left-wing that dominates online discourse. Essential, yes, I am agreeing with David Shor. And if you think Shor is correct (and also that the Trump party is a proto-authoritarian party now) then I would think you would want to keep Democratic politicians from the far-left as much as possible if you care about the US still staying a democratically elected representative republic.
Great article. Fairly certain you’ve touched on this before, but is the “strength” of the climate left in the minds of intellectual elites purely based on the Left being overrepresented on social media? The Left, and especially the climate left, is disproportionately young, disproportionately well-educated, and disproportionately engaged in politics—all factors that would lead to strong social media presence. Since lots of intellectual elites are on social media, they get an unrealistic perspective on the strength of leftist climate activism.
Your post made me wonder, have you read KSR's The Ministry For the Future? It deals with some of the issues you raised but from the perspective of a great sci-fi writer.
Overall, this article is much better that MY's whiny missive. I say that as a big MY fan. I just think his choice to spend so much time complaining about the left on issues like climate, CRT, and cancel culture, etc. are doing more harm to the causes he believes in than the people he is complaining about. He's talents are more useful elsewhere.
With that being said, I have two points of critique.
First, it's important to note, as you briefly do, that the reason the Climate Left does the things it does is because people like you and MY and outlets like the NY Times, the New Yorker and the Washington Post write about the things they do. If center-left writers stopped writing about the "stupid" things the climate left do, the climate left would probably stop doing them and do something else instead because their primary goal is to raise awareness. People like Matt are, in fact, the literal cause of the problem they are complaining about. By wasting time condemning them, Matt is reducing support for climate policy among centrists. I wish you made that point directly.
Second, it's a bit disingenuous to paint Elon Musk as a martyr when his empire and personal wealth were generated through $4.9 billion in government subsidies. He's not some saint. He's just like Peter Thiel, but he chose to get rich off public funds doing something we like instead of something objectively terrible. Musk is no martyr. He's just another selfish rich dude. If the government hadn't paid him to build this, he wouldn't have. He owes us. We don't owe him.
1. You think battery tech would have advanced as fast without Elon Musk existing (I don't).
2. You feel climate change is an existential threat that is paramount to everything else (or among the Big 2, along with preserving American democracy) or not. If you really do think that climate change is an existential threat, who cares who gets what credit so long as the technology advances quicker than it would have otherwise.
1. There's no way to prove a counterfactual, but based on the history of innovation it seems individual actors are far less important than we typically think. Perhaps this is a special case, but we don't have any way of knowing that. Beyond that Musk himself isn't an innovator or inventor in his work at Tesla, Space X and Solar City. He just employs them.
He is a manager and a marketer. To assume that he played a the decisive role in the evolution of battery technology is to assume that he is a master manager. That may be true, but the evidence appears mixed. Though he is a master marketer, it's probably his most powerful skill. It seems likely to me that skill is the core driver of the success of his firms.
So, who knows, but this is irrelevant to my point. Musk is not a martyr nor is he benevolent no matter how much you, personally, like the guy.
2. This is just a strange argument. If giving credit matters at all, it should matter who gets that credit. Other wise, why give anyone credit at all?
Again, we can't know what would have happened under a different scenario.
It seems to me like the battery chemistry improvements were the critical sticking point for EV viability. How much of those came from research done for smartphones and consumer electronics versus just Tesla? It's not like EVs are the only industry that would have put money into better batteries.
"Second, it's a bit disingenuous to paint Elon Musk as a martyr when his empire and personal wealth were generated through $4.9 billion in government subsidies. "
How so? The government literally provided the capital that allowed him to start those businesses. Without government subsidies (and in the case of Space X contracts) this companies would not exist.
What are you talking about? He only started SpaceX, and the government did not provide the capital for that? And conflating contracts for services with subsidies is deeply dishonest.
More generally, the problem is the complete lack of context. Tesla got subsidies? And GM, Ford et al did not? They didn't get bailed out? Buyers of their vehicles didn't get trillions in de facto subsidies on their fuel? Same with Solarcity: the tax credit is worth a mention, but not how coal plants don't have to pay for all the people they kill and climate change? SpaceX got some contracts and some piddling grants? And ULA doesn't get contracts, and a billion dollars a year to exist?
It implies that his companies have received special treatment, that they wouldn't be competitive (or even exist) without it, while completely ignoring the vast assistance everyone else in their industries has received.
You're making arguments that are tangential and irrelevant to the points I was making. All of his companies received startup funding from the federal government. That is a fact.
Whether or not those things are good or bad is completely independent of the fact that the public funded his businesses.
Did he receive federal funding that was not accessible to others that were equally qualified? The answer is yes. Prior to starting these companies he had done nothing to suggest that he was capable of building an electric car company, a solar energy company or a rocket company. He was a founder of PayPal. A great company, but a company that has nothing to do with any of these activities. He had friends in high places and he took advantage of that. I don’t blame him, but he’s not a benevolent actor.
Did I say It was good Ford, GM, and Chrysler received bailouts? No, I did not,
Did I say fossil fuel subsidies were good? No, I did not.
It is true that space x would likely not exist without government contracts? Yes, that is true. Did space x earn those? I’d argue NASA could have done what space X did. They did build every other rocket we’ve used to get to space. I don’t think we needed private companies to do that work. Others may disagree and that’s ok.
My argument is that Elon musk is a capitalist, not a martyr. The end.
I get that you like him and appreciate what his companies have done. There’s nothing wrong with that.
My argument is that his wealth is a byproduct of government funding. That is undoubtedly true. Has he succeeded where others have failed? Yes. I would never argue otherwise. He’s an incredible marketer. I envy that skill.
Honestly, your rant is incoherent and I honestly don’t know what your objections are beyond the fact that I don’t idolize your hero.
Just don’t make shit up to cover for the fact that you made a weak argument. If you disagree, use evidence to support your opinions, not bombastic, incoherent, and tangential rhetoric.
- I feel like people are defining the climate left as The Sunrise Movement. Contra to this though, a lot of people further to the left, including myself, are in favor of nuclear and pretty much whatever it takes to get our PPM under control. I don't agree with their activism on the substance or the tactics, but I also feel a constant internal critic is pretty counterproductive. To this end, I found this Sam Sanders episode reviewing the effectiveness of Act UP to be very informative: https://www.npr.org/2021/06/16/1007361916/act-up-a-history-of-aids-hiv-activism
- As an economist, I was hoping you might turn your sights towards the effectiveness of a carbon-border adjustment tax. The Niskanen Center had a good primary a while back: https://www.niskanencenter.org/qa-on-carbon-border-adjustments/. Basically, if we do it right, America is at a strategic advantage.
As far as I know, the Biden campaign made announcements of a carbon border adjustment but none of actual domestic carbon pricing, and it is trying to talk the EU into dropping the cba idea?
Regarding nuclear power which someone mentioned above: I'm a techno-optimist and interested in the development of safe fission reactors and nuclear fusion but it seems, from articles I read by Noah and others that it would be faster to deploy renewable energy than to deploy the next generation of nuclear reactors.
Baseload energy. Nuclear competes with batteries, not (intermittent) renewable energy. So the question is whether nuclear tech or battery tech would advance faster.
Batteries (short duration capacity) are about the last thing nuclear competes with. Nuclear needs the same thing - most of the world's pumped hydro was built to shift nuclear output.
Nuclear is mostly in competition with renewables + long duration (a couple of weeks) and seasonal storage in the north, where high heating demand, low solar output, and a couple weeks with little wind can all combine.
Pumped hydro and making chemical fuels to burn in gas plants is all old tech.
Yes, 25GW vs 61GW of nuclear, not to mention connections to the rest of Europe (Switzerland and Norway both do a lot of balancing for Europe with their hydro). They also use those same connections to supply their nuclear power to others, when they have too much. Nuclear is, just like renewables, both technically and economically inflexible, so connections help it a lot.
"Furthermore, their emissions are still increasing rapidly, thanks to the huge fleet of coal plants they’re building,"
No, it's thanks to oil and gas. Coal consumption peaked in 2013. New coal plants are somewhat worrying, but so far they've been replacing older less efficient ones (more MWhs, same emissions), and have been white elephants that just reduce the utilization of others (their coal plant capacity factors are very low).
"Yet as soon as you mention this to anyone on the Climate Left, and they instantly shift from talking about the imminent destruction of the planet to talking about moral issues, like per capita emissions or historical emissions — things which the climate definitely does not care about even a tiny, tiny bit."
You're doing exactly what you criticize the "climate left" for doing, Noah. The climate doesn't care about where emissions *reductions* come from, either. So why the focus on China? Why shouldn't the US reduce emissions to zero before China reduces them one bit*? Those are moral questions. You're just taking your morals as a given and criticizing others for wanting to talk about the issue.
Take a look at the chart in the article. You can't cut emissions below zero (well, you can suck carbon out of the air . . . also try to induce cloud cover through engineering the atmosphere, but I don't see the Climate Left pounding the table for that stuff) but China certainly can double/triple/quadruple the carbon emissions that the Western world cuts.
Did you look at the chart? The US and EU emits about 10b tons a year for energy and cement. China has grown emissions for that by about 6.5b tons a year in a decade. So even if you somehow magically cut to zero immediately in the West (which can’t/won’t happen), China will replace all that in 15 years if they keep doing what they have been doing.
But they're not going to keep doing what they have been doing. No one is. Extending trendlines from the past is a terrible method of predicting the future.
Regardless, I still don't know what point you're trying to make.
Why assume that this activism will cause liberal elites to want to push for climate policy? I have a masters degree and the absolutely farcical nature of the climate left forces me to lower my prior belief in the importance of climate policy.
I guess your master's degree didn't involve any critical thinking if you think that it's a good idea to judge the importance of something by what activists do.
A bit too straw man-based a take to be really useful.
"But the Climate Left does not actually mean business. The way you know this is that absolutely none of the people calling for radical civil disobedience and pipeline destruction etc. are calling for it to be done in China."
But:
A) In what sense would it be "serious" to call on a set of people (e.g.the Chinese) to do anything in a language they largely don't speak using platforms they don't read, and often are prevented from reading? Call a comms professional and ask them: I guarantee they will not describe this as a serious strategy. On the contrary, it makes sense to connect channels to targets to outcomes, and in that sense this litmus test does the opposite of what it intends.
B) But rhetorically the point that comes across is: the Climate Left are really Climate Tankies, and that is why they don't want to criticise China, we know.
This would always be an extremely bad take, but it's worse following a discussion of Malm, whose ideological roots are in anarchosyndicalism - he made his way up writing for Sweden's anarchosyndicalist paper.
He is also the author of a paper about emissions in China, and a book which apparently touches on the topic. Dealing critically with them - which I'd believe they deserve - would be useful, this isn't.
C) A model of society consisting of elites, the Climate Left and Climate sceptics seems oddly to give the Climate Left too much credit. Malm and his co-thinkers probably don't have much influence on mass opinion, directly or indirectly. The problem you seem to be pushing at is less the Climate Left than the general impotence of most of society, including both the Climate Left and ultra climate sceptics, in the face of mass institutional politics.
BTW there is a global economic history of emissions by Simon Pirani, which you should check out.
There have been cases when certain countries imposed a policy on others, such as Britain going after the slave trade. But it's doubtful anyone will do that to China, particularly when so little is already being done domestically.
Violent revolutions don't happen when the pot is simmering, only when it's boiling. Climate change is pretty bad already but it's not obvious that these natural disasters are a result of climate change, nor is anyone in the west being especially affected by them.
Once important medicinal species start to disappear en masse, and people lose their crops, and it becomes too hot to live, etc. things will go bad fast. You might then see a lot of people becoming 'climate activists'. And the battles they will fight probably wont be bombing pipelines because it will already be too late for that kind of solution. You will start to see something scarier, like people fighting over water or liveable land.
This article seems to be strawmanning the activist left, and also amalgamating a diverse cluster of activist groups into one group apparently holding conflicting and seemingly random beliefs at the same time. You also contradict yourself with the "what about China?" line, as you subsequently admit that protesting in China would be ineffective, as activists well know. "Why don't you go protest in China where your protest will have 0 impact and get yourself thrown in a dungeon or killed?" I think you just answered your own question. On the other hand, we all remember the greenpeace activists who chained themselves to the Russian offshore oil rigs and got arrested, so that form of activism does exist, despite its lack of impact and high risk.
In addition, you completely omit the fact that there is of course a political, societal and justice element to climate change, as well as the behaviour change element. It is to be expected that leftists and developing countries will take a "you caused this mess you pay to clean it up" approach, rather than the "how much decarb can we get per dollar spent?" approach preferred by wealthy nations and technocrats. I think this is at the heart of this disagreement, and it isn't really reconcilable, but I don't see a problem with that. Both lenses are necessary and inevitable and attempt to address different aspects of the problem of climate change.
Who benefits from strangling America with the Climate Change non-sense? China. Can we explore that, in this age where a foreign actor can change society and get us to fight each other (China, Russia), isn't it not possible the China is pushing this crap on us? China is eating our lunch.
Your post is more a criticism of "activism culture" than of the Climate Left.
I work in pretty close proximity to normalish Climate Left people (i.e. not tankie types). Most people seem to believe the following:
1. American or Western activism is unlikely to have much impact on Chinese policy? (E.g. Xinjiang)
2. If we in the US can't reach net zero (or whatever) to mitigate climate change, how can we expect others to do so?
3. If we Westerners go "all in" on climate mitigation (there is so much more we could do) and get our house in order, we will be better off AND in a position to push on China from a position of strength.
4. Democrats in Congress *know* we should be doing more on climate within the US, but they are afraid to do so and/or uncertain on what to do.
It's completely fair to argue that Leftists are too soft on China and that they should ALSO be pushing very hard on this globally. But I don't think it's right to say that it's a farce.
On something like nuclear (I am in favor), surely you can recognize why an environmentally-minded person might seriously (and rationally) see nuclear as a separate but still important environmental risk. They might be mistaken on the level of risk, but it's not a "farce" when activists miscalculate something.
Similarly, on issues like Palestine and police funding, people get activated into an "activism culture." I would argue that they are sometimes wrong, often distracted, and frequently undermining their own case on climate - but that does not make their climate activism a farce.
I'd be interested to see more of a steel man case for what a Climate Leftist could (realistically) be doing.
well, you have a substack, write the steelman post, post the link in the comments and we can all and read it, it'll be fun
Haha. I like the suggestion - I was hoping to get someone smarter than me to do it! But perhaps I will give it a shot!
Thanks for reminding me that I have a substack of my own.
> I'd be interested to see more of a steel man case for what a Climate Leftist could (realistically) be doing.
In general, for all activists -- Write draft legislation that 47.5% of legislators would already agree with, then organize write in drives to sway around 5% of legislators in the middle, settling for incremental changes that actually move things in a positive direction.
I worry activism focuses way too much energy on "motivating legislators by signalling popular interest" in an issue. That was a more successful strategy in the 40s, before opinion polling makes it clear that a thousand people outside your office might be a bluff and doesn't necessarily mean it matters to your electoral chances.
Activism generally focuses too little energy on understanding how policy is actually made and what the real bottlenecks are. Legislators are constantly campaigning in one way or another, meeting with donors or managing an image, they are often too busy to research and draft policies. Hand them a reasonable bill they can introduce as-is with pre-typed talking points they can use to argue for it, and you save them work.
Usually I'm partial to Antoine de Saint Exupery, but I think in this domain... Don't make a legislator yearn for the sea, just lay out the tools so their job is half done.
Not sure if by "activism culture" you mean this or something more like what Julia Galef denotes with "soldier mindset", but it's definitely true that *going to left-of-center protests* is a subculture, one that's generally gatekept by far-leftists and ends up being a vector for liberals to move left or acquire additional leftist commitments (or, in the case of the liberal currently typing this, to not want to go to more protests).
This is very obviously incorrect.
The 'Climate Left' isn't interested in spending money effectively to improve carbon emissions—if they were, you would see an embrace of Generation IV nuclear reactors and fundamental R&D research that touches on many different kinds of energy sources.
Their aim, instead, is to spend endless trillions on uncompetitive technology and of course, increasingly, 'racial justice.' In their view, these issues are inseparable. They would rather sink vast amounts of money into all kinds of projects that form this left-wing constellation of perceived grievance.
Reducing carbon emissions is not their priority, even when the subject is climate change. If we were to follow their lead on this, the United States would find itself in a debt spiral as these extremists spend it into oblivion.. and a vanishing fraction of that spending would actually go to constructive efforts re: climate.
I'm sure many of these people would even prefer economic calamity compared to the status quo, as an opportunity to prostrate themselves before the world as martyrs. We're horrible racists, we're horrible carbon emitters—but *at least we tried.*
At least we did the right thing in the end.
Re: activists getting things wrong. Your nominal activist obviously isn't responsible for the thinking - they're mostly just responsible for the broadcasting. So each individual activist getting something wrong aren't exactly farcacle. But when the people who actually do the thinking don't course-correct when the movement is getting things wrong on nuclear, then at some point you have to start calling it a farce.
But couldn't they be helping Democrats defeat Republicans in general elections, regardless of whether those Democrats are moderates or progressives? I spend a lot of my free time doing this: mainly text messaging, which is all I can really do since I live overseas.
Yglesias is right to emphasize the importance of winning legislative majorities, not just for climate but for all of the left's policy goals. Whoever is doing something else, unless it's at least equally effective, is causing harm by ignoring an opportunity cost.
Here's the problem: By spending his time and energy punching left Yglesias is actually harming Democrats political chances.
He's turning off the climate left by being mean to them. He's turning off swing voters who will associate the climate left with Democrats. He's doing far more harm to Democrats electoral chances than those he's complaining about.
That's a problem.
He could, instead, spend his time painting the GOP has the real problem preventing action on climate change which, importantly, would actually be true.
I mean, in a sense nothing any cultural or political commentator does or says will have much impact on the electorate itself. I would be shocked Matt Yglesias’ name recognition among swing voters was higher than 10%. The choices of politicians and parties will have much greater influence on swing voters.
It’s true he annoys a greater proportion of left activists, but if they’re so put off by his criticism that it distracts them from their activism then they are kind of proving his point.
Patrick Healyjust now
I'd argue it's more of a collective action problem among center-left journalists and media outlets. Matt is just one example. Will any one article by one writer matter much? No. But moral panics like cancel culture and CRT became mainstream due to the way the center-left media and mainstream media act in aggregate, much like it did with the PC wars of the past. Their war against climate activists is no different. Center left media is harming the potential for action on climate by collectively complaining about the climate left instead of focusing on the actors that are actually holding us back.
The media plays a far bigger role in the attitudes of swing voters that you are giving them credit for. I'd argue the media has a bigger impact than politicians and parties.
Beyond that, Matt Yglesias’ has significant power. He's read in the White House and by members of Congress. He's distracting them from what they should actually be worried about which is the GOP and the far right.
My point is annoying climate activists won't distract them from their activism. He's giving them what they want which is attention. What Matt is doing is reducing the influence he might have to help them be more effective and reducing the likelihood that climate activists will turnout to vote for Democrats.
All of this is more problematic than the things Matt Yglesias’ is complaining about.
FWIW, I like Matt. I'm a paid subscriber to his Substack. I've listened to virtually every episode of the Weeds.
I'm just annoyed because he constantly complains about others doing ineffective things(often based on shallow evidence), but then he engages in behavior that has at least the same level of negative impact if not greater. He needs to follow his own advice as do the others like him(EG Jonathan Chait who I also generally like)
"But moral panics like cancel culture and CRT became mainstream due to the way the center-left media and mainstream media act in aggregate, much like it did with the PC wars of the past"
Um, no, they become mainstream because the right-wing media (which these days is a very different ecosystem from the mainstream media, which itself has blended in to the center-left media) pounds on those issues (because they always need some grievance for their old white grievance audience). CRT and cancel culture will still be issues even if all the media from mainstream on left didn't mention them at all. I personally think Yglesia should be listened to because the electorate is, in general, much older, much less educated, and much more socially conservative (also not all that much against right-wing authoritarianism) than the very vocal young left-wing that dominates online discourse. Essential, yes, I am agreeing with David Shor. And if you think Shor is correct (and also that the Trump party is a proto-authoritarian party now) then I would think you would want to keep Democratic politicians from the far-left as much as possible if you care about the US still staying a democratically elected representative republic.
Great article. Fairly certain you’ve touched on this before, but is the “strength” of the climate left in the minds of intellectual elites purely based on the Left being overrepresented on social media? The Left, and especially the climate left, is disproportionately young, disproportionately well-educated, and disproportionately engaged in politics—all factors that would lead to strong social media presence. Since lots of intellectual elites are on social media, they get an unrealistic perspective on the strength of leftist climate activism.
Your post made me wonder, have you read KSR's The Ministry For the Future? It deals with some of the issues you raised but from the perspective of a great sci-fi writer.
Nuclear is clearly the answer if you are serious about arresting climate change now. Renewables aren’t a serious answer yet. YIMBY.
Renewables are clearly the answer if you are serious about arresting climate change now. Nuclear isn't a serious answer yet. YIMBY.
Do everything and anything that will help. There is no single "answer."
Overall, this article is much better that MY's whiny missive. I say that as a big MY fan. I just think his choice to spend so much time complaining about the left on issues like climate, CRT, and cancel culture, etc. are doing more harm to the causes he believes in than the people he is complaining about. He's talents are more useful elsewhere.
With that being said, I have two points of critique.
First, it's important to note, as you briefly do, that the reason the Climate Left does the things it does is because people like you and MY and outlets like the NY Times, the New Yorker and the Washington Post write about the things they do. If center-left writers stopped writing about the "stupid" things the climate left do, the climate left would probably stop doing them and do something else instead because their primary goal is to raise awareness. People like Matt are, in fact, the literal cause of the problem they are complaining about. By wasting time condemning them, Matt is reducing support for climate policy among centrists. I wish you made that point directly.
Second, it's a bit disingenuous to paint Elon Musk as a martyr when his empire and personal wealth were generated through $4.9 billion in government subsidies. He's not some saint. He's just like Peter Thiel, but he chose to get rich off public funds doing something we like instead of something objectively terrible. Musk is no martyr. He's just another selfish rich dude. If the government hadn't paid him to build this, he wouldn't have. He owes us. We don't owe him.
Source: https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-20150531-story.html#page=1
This comes back to whether
1. You think battery tech would have advanced as fast without Elon Musk existing (I don't).
2. You feel climate change is an existential threat that is paramount to everything else (or among the Big 2, along with preserving American democracy) or not. If you really do think that climate change is an existential threat, who cares who gets what credit so long as the technology advances quicker than it would have otherwise.
1. There's no way to prove a counterfactual, but based on the history of innovation it seems individual actors are far less important than we typically think. Perhaps this is a special case, but we don't have any way of knowing that. Beyond that Musk himself isn't an innovator or inventor in his work at Tesla, Space X and Solar City. He just employs them.
He is a manager and a marketer. To assume that he played a the decisive role in the evolution of battery technology is to assume that he is a master manager. That may be true, but the evidence appears mixed. Though he is a master marketer, it's probably his most powerful skill. It seems likely to me that skill is the core driver of the success of his firms.
So, who knows, but this is irrelevant to my point. Musk is not a martyr nor is he benevolent no matter how much you, personally, like the guy.
2. This is just a strange argument. If giving credit matters at all, it should matter who gets that credit. Other wise, why give anyone credit at all?
Again, we can't know what would have happened under a different scenario.
It seems to me like the battery chemistry improvements were the critical sticking point for EV viability. How much of those came from research done for smartphones and consumer electronics versus just Tesla? It's not like EVs are the only industry that would have put money into better batteries.
This is correct.
"Second, it's a bit disingenuous to paint Elon Musk as a martyr when his empire and personal wealth were generated through $4.9 billion in government subsidies. "
Utter bullshit.
How so? The government literally provided the capital that allowed him to start those businesses. Without government subsidies (and in the case of Space X contracts) this companies would not exist.
What are you talking about? He only started SpaceX, and the government did not provide the capital for that? And conflating contracts for services with subsidies is deeply dishonest.
More generally, the problem is the complete lack of context. Tesla got subsidies? And GM, Ford et al did not? They didn't get bailed out? Buyers of their vehicles didn't get trillions in de facto subsidies on their fuel? Same with Solarcity: the tax credit is worth a mention, but not how coal plants don't have to pay for all the people they kill and climate change? SpaceX got some contracts and some piddling grants? And ULA doesn't get contracts, and a billion dollars a year to exist?
It implies that his companies have received special treatment, that they wouldn't be competitive (or even exist) without it, while completely ignoring the vast assistance everyone else in their industries has received.
You're making arguments that are tangential and irrelevant to the points I was making. All of his companies received startup funding from the federal government. That is a fact.
Whether or not those things are good or bad is completely independent of the fact that the public funded his businesses.
Did he receive federal funding that was not accessible to others that were equally qualified? The answer is yes. Prior to starting these companies he had done nothing to suggest that he was capable of building an electric car company, a solar energy company or a rocket company. He was a founder of PayPal. A great company, but a company that has nothing to do with any of these activities. He had friends in high places and he took advantage of that. I don’t blame him, but he’s not a benevolent actor.
Did I say It was good Ford, GM, and Chrysler received bailouts? No, I did not,
Did I say fossil fuel subsidies were good? No, I did not.
It is true that space x would likely not exist without government contracts? Yes, that is true. Did space x earn those? I’d argue NASA could have done what space X did. They did build every other rocket we’ve used to get to space. I don’t think we needed private companies to do that work. Others may disagree and that’s ok.
My argument is that Elon musk is a capitalist, not a martyr. The end.
I get that you like him and appreciate what his companies have done. There’s nothing wrong with that.
My argument is that his wealth is a byproduct of government funding. That is undoubtedly true. Has he succeeded where others have failed? Yes. I would never argue otherwise. He’s an incredible marketer. I envy that skill.
Honestly, your rant is incoherent and I honestly don’t know what your objections are beyond the fact that I don’t idolize your hero.
Just don’t make shit up to cover for the fact that you made a weak argument. If you disagree, use evidence to support your opinions, not bombastic, incoherent, and tangential rhetoric.
A couple of things:
- I feel like people are defining the climate left as The Sunrise Movement. Contra to this though, a lot of people further to the left, including myself, are in favor of nuclear and pretty much whatever it takes to get our PPM under control. I don't agree with their activism on the substance or the tactics, but I also feel a constant internal critic is pretty counterproductive. To this end, I found this Sam Sanders episode reviewing the effectiveness of Act UP to be very informative: https://www.npr.org/2021/06/16/1007361916/act-up-a-history-of-aids-hiv-activism
- As an economist, I was hoping you might turn your sights towards the effectiveness of a carbon-border adjustment tax. The Niskanen Center had a good primary a while back: https://www.niskanencenter.org/qa-on-carbon-border-adjustments/. Basically, if we do it right, America is at a strategic advantage.
As far as I know, the Biden campaign made announcements of a carbon border adjustment but none of actual domestic carbon pricing, and it is trying to talk the EU into dropping the cba idea?
Regarding nuclear power which someone mentioned above: I'm a techno-optimist and interested in the development of safe fission reactors and nuclear fusion but it seems, from articles I read by Noah and others that it would be faster to deploy renewable energy than to deploy the next generation of nuclear reactors.
Baseload energy. Nuclear competes with batteries, not (intermittent) renewable energy. So the question is whether nuclear tech or battery tech would advance faster.
Batteries (short duration capacity) are about the last thing nuclear competes with. Nuclear needs the same thing - most of the world's pumped hydro was built to shift nuclear output.
Nuclear is mostly in competition with renewables + long duration (a couple of weeks) and seasonal storage in the north, where high heating demand, low solar output, and a couple weeks with little wind can all combine.
If you prefer, use the term “long duration/seasonal storage” instead of “batteries”. How is that technology coming along?
And does France have a ton of hydroelectric dams, then? Because I remember something like 70% of their electricity being from nuclear at one point.
Pumped hydro and making chemical fuels to burn in gas plants is all old tech.
Yes, 25GW vs 61GW of nuclear, not to mention connections to the rest of Europe (Switzerland and Norway both do a lot of balancing for Europe with their hydro). They also use those same connections to supply their nuclear power to others, when they have too much. Nuclear is, just like renewables, both technically and economically inflexible, so connections help it a lot.
"Furthermore, their emissions are still increasing rapidly, thanks to the huge fleet of coal plants they’re building,"
No, it's thanks to oil and gas. Coal consumption peaked in 2013. New coal plants are somewhat worrying, but so far they've been replacing older less efficient ones (more MWhs, same emissions), and have been white elephants that just reduce the utilization of others (their coal plant capacity factors are very low).
"Yet as soon as you mention this to anyone on the Climate Left, and they instantly shift from talking about the imminent destruction of the planet to talking about moral issues, like per capita emissions or historical emissions — things which the climate definitely does not care about even a tiny, tiny bit."
You're doing exactly what you criticize the "climate left" for doing, Noah. The climate doesn't care about where emissions *reductions* come from, either. So why the focus on China? Why shouldn't the US reduce emissions to zero before China reduces them one bit*? Those are moral questions. You're just taking your morals as a given and criticizing others for wanting to talk about the issue.
*for effect, I am not arguing this
Take a look at the chart in the article. You can't cut emissions below zero (well, you can suck carbon out of the air . . . also try to induce cloud cover through engineering the atmosphere, but I don't see the Climate Left pounding the table for that stuff) but China certainly can double/triple/quadruple the carbon emissions that the Western world cuts.
I don't know what point you're trying to make. And no, China certainly can't add 16/24/32 billion tonnes per annum.
Did you look at the chart? The US and EU emits about 10b tons a year for energy and cement. China has grown emissions for that by about 6.5b tons a year in a decade. So even if you somehow magically cut to zero immediately in the West (which can’t/won’t happen), China will replace all that in 15 years if they keep doing what they have been doing.
But they're not going to keep doing what they have been doing. No one is. Extending trendlines from the past is a terrible method of predicting the future.
Regardless, I still don't know what point you're trying to make.
Why assume that this activism will cause liberal elites to want to push for climate policy? I have a masters degree and the absolutely farcical nature of the climate left forces me to lower my prior belief in the importance of climate policy.
I guess your master's degree didn't involve any critical thinking if you think that it's a good idea to judge the importance of something by what activists do.
You don’t think that unreasonable ideas are more likely than reasonable ideas to have unreasonable advocates?
I don't think the answer to that question has any relevance to the validity of any given idea.
It does, actually.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes%27_theorem
A bit too straw man-based a take to be really useful.
"But the Climate Left does not actually mean business. The way you know this is that absolutely none of the people calling for radical civil disobedience and pipeline destruction etc. are calling for it to be done in China."
But:
A) In what sense would it be "serious" to call on a set of people (e.g.the Chinese) to do anything in a language they largely don't speak using platforms they don't read, and often are prevented from reading? Call a comms professional and ask them: I guarantee they will not describe this as a serious strategy. On the contrary, it makes sense to connect channels to targets to outcomes, and in that sense this litmus test does the opposite of what it intends.
B) But rhetorically the point that comes across is: the Climate Left are really Climate Tankies, and that is why they don't want to criticise China, we know.
This would always be an extremely bad take, but it's worse following a discussion of Malm, whose ideological roots are in anarchosyndicalism - he made his way up writing for Sweden's anarchosyndicalist paper.
He is also the author of a paper about emissions in China, and a book which apparently touches on the topic. Dealing critically with them - which I'd believe they deserve - would be useful, this isn't.
C) A model of society consisting of elites, the Climate Left and Climate sceptics seems oddly to give the Climate Left too much credit. Malm and his co-thinkers probably don't have much influence on mass opinion, directly or indirectly. The problem you seem to be pushing at is less the Climate Left than the general impotence of most of society, including both the Climate Left and ultra climate sceptics, in the face of mass institutional politics.
BTW there is a global economic history of emissions by Simon Pirani, which you should check out.
There have been cases when certain countries imposed a policy on others, such as Britain going after the slave trade. But it's doubtful anyone will do that to China, particularly when so little is already being done domestically.
We won't solve a thing without social change. Oh well.
Violent revolutions don't happen when the pot is simmering, only when it's boiling. Climate change is pretty bad already but it's not obvious that these natural disasters are a result of climate change, nor is anyone in the west being especially affected by them.
Once important medicinal species start to disappear en masse, and people lose their crops, and it becomes too hot to live, etc. things will go bad fast. You might then see a lot of people becoming 'climate activists'. And the battles they will fight probably wont be bombing pipelines because it will already be too late for that kind of solution. You will start to see something scarier, like people fighting over water or liveable land.
This article seems to be strawmanning the activist left, and also amalgamating a diverse cluster of activist groups into one group apparently holding conflicting and seemingly random beliefs at the same time. You also contradict yourself with the "what about China?" line, as you subsequently admit that protesting in China would be ineffective, as activists well know. "Why don't you go protest in China where your protest will have 0 impact and get yourself thrown in a dungeon or killed?" I think you just answered your own question. On the other hand, we all remember the greenpeace activists who chained themselves to the Russian offshore oil rigs and got arrested, so that form of activism does exist, despite its lack of impact and high risk.
In addition, you completely omit the fact that there is of course a political, societal and justice element to climate change, as well as the behaviour change element. It is to be expected that leftists and developing countries will take a "you caused this mess you pay to clean it up" approach, rather than the "how much decarb can we get per dollar spent?" approach preferred by wealthy nations and technocrats. I think this is at the heart of this disagreement, and it isn't really reconcilable, but I don't see a problem with that. Both lenses are necessary and inevitable and attempt to address different aspects of the problem of climate change.
Who benefits from strangling America with the Climate Change non-sense? China. Can we explore that, in this age where a foreign actor can change society and get us to fight each other (China, Russia), isn't it not possible the China is pushing this crap on us? China is eating our lunch.
If they didn't reject nuclear out of hand, I would take them far more seriously.