There is an intellectual divide brewing among those who want to see bold climate action and want to see it now. It is a divide between the Pastoralists and the Futurists.
The Pastoralists remain rooted in the “Limits to Growth” environmentalism of the 1970s. They are more committed to keeping things the way they are, often hostile to economic growth and markets, more eager to attach environmental concerns to other left-wing causes, and more skeptical of technological solutions to climate change. For them, the cause of environmental degradation is the greed of consumer capitalism and so the answer to that degradation is to convince people to want less. They want climate action to be rooted in an ethos of solidarity, sustainability, localism, and perhaps a touch of tie-dye. This form of environmentalism is first and foremost about stopping commercial actors from doing environmentally damaging activities. The central image is an activist standing in front of a bulldozer. You can see this Pastoralism in cultural productions like Fern Gully, Captain Planet, and Avatar. Even today, the Pastoralists’ anti-development sensibilities and activist orientation infuses much of the environmental advocacy world; it unites the Sierra Club with the Sunrise Movement, the Extinction Rebellion with King Charles.
The Futurists, on the other hand, are ready to abandon that 1970s-style environmentalism. They are interested in innovation, more enthusiastic about economic growth and markets, more willing to separate climate action from other left-wing causes if necessary, and very enthusiastic about new technologies. For them, the main problem is the link between carbon/pollution and consumption. If that link can be broken, then not only do people not need to be asked to sacrifice, they can be even more materially well-off without harming the planet. They want climate action to be cool, sexy, and fun. This form of environmentalism is first and foremost about facilitating commercial actors’ engagement in environmentally helpful activities. The central image here is a construction worker putting up solar panels. You can see this Futurism in plant-based meats and fast electric vehicles, in YIMBY urbanism and renewed support for nuclear power.
Each constitutes a direct threat to the other. For the Pastoralists, the Futurists threaten to steal control of ‘their’ issue and take it in a direction that is anathema to their preferred aesthetics. They fear that Futurism is insufficiently dedicated to the cause of environmentalism. For the Pastoralists, caring for the planet is so important that it is worth sacrificing for, so when a Futurist comes along and say “sacrifice isn’t necessary”, to the Pastoralist, that sounds like a greenwashing dodge. They think that Futurists telling people they do not need to sacrifice is whistling past the planetary grave. For the Futurists, the Pastoralists threaten to stymie progress and problem-solving. The Futurists see the Pastoralists as self-righteous paper-straw environmentalists more committed to being ‘right’ than being effective, and as being far too quick to dismiss carbon-reducing technologies if and when they feel too capitalist or insufficiently ‘natural.’ They think Pastoralists are as politically naïve as they are ideologically extreme.
There are a couple of reasons to think that the Futurists have the better argument. First, decoupling is real, it just needs to be finished. One of the most widely underappreciated facts is that, globally, economic growth is not nearly as tightly linked with increased carbon consumption as it once was. In other words, we’re getting richer but we’re not consuming more carbon to do so. To many people’s surprise, even in the United States, we are using less carbon per person even as our economy grows.
It is no longer true that economic growth is tightly linked with carbon emissions. Andrew McAfee, a researcher at MIT, has a whole book on this (More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources―and What Happens Next). What needs to happen is for the link between carbon and growth to be almost completely, not just partially, broken. The good news is that we can do that. The rise of green energy, plant-based meats, better insulation, and electric vehicles is going to do wonders for carbon intensity. Green energy prices are already often cost competitive with fossil fuels and are set to get even cheaper. Battery prices are way down too.
Contra Pastoralists, Futurists focus on how many of the government regulations promoted by 1970s environmental thinking are in practice hurting the environment by making it harder to build denser housing and green infrastructure. Carbon taxes are another policy where there is an emerging split. Since the main objectors to carbon taxes are Republicans, one way to make them more politically palatable is to let Republicans pick some other tax in exchange. Contra Futurists, Pastoralists would likely be viscerally opposed to a pro-environment policy being used to further some Republican political objective. The tagline of the Ecomodernism Conference in August 2022 was “Deregulating Abundance.” They couldn’t have picked a more anti-Pastoralist tagline if they had tried.
In line with this difference, perhaps the most significant conceptual problem in Pastoralist thinking is their almost-Malthusian belief that resources and indeed prosperity itself are always and everywhere fixed, that for someone to have more, others have to have less. This leads them to being obsessed with distributional arguments and to being allergic to the straightforward idea that growth is good. They should read Superabundance, a new book by Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley, that shows that additional humans create more resources than they consume meaning that we live in a world where the availability of resources is going up rather than dwindling.
The Pastoralist sensibility is especially inappropriate for developing countries. Take Jamaica for example. As Matt Yglesias explains, Jamaica currently exports bauxite which is used to make aluminum rather than make aluminum there, but “if Jamaica had abundant electricity, it would be natural to make aluminum there rather than just shipping out the bauxite. And once you’re making aluminum, you could become a place that manufactures things that are made out of aluminum.” As he goes on to point out, greater energy abundance, perhaps generated by new smaller nuclear plants, could significantly improve Jamaican living standards.
Speaking of developing countries, except for a small handful of activists in the Global North, virtually everyone else will reject being told that they have to be materially less well-off in order to fight climate change. Even degrowth advocates recognize how unfair and impossible an ask that is. Even in the Global North, climate change does not generate the kind of broad-based public sentiment that climate activists would like. Less than one in five Americans consider climate change one of the top two problems facing the country.
Not only is the Futurist approach better than the Pastoralist one on the merits, it has a much broader political appeal. We’re going to have to invent our way out of this because asking people to sacrifice for climate is a political non-starter and no amount of Greta Thunberg shouting “you have stolen my dreams!” is going to change that. We will utterly fail to beat climate change if our main strategy is to tell citizens that they are bad people for wanting fast cars, big houses, and tasty lunches. That path is doomed to political failure. As Noah Smith says:
“I have seen climate activists tell everyone to read books like David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth. I have seen Sunshine Movement activists angrily confront Senator Dianne Feinstein in her office. I have seen Netflix release a disaster movie about how everyone is complacent about the climate. I have seen climate strikes and Extinction Rebellions. I have seen any number of articles about climate anxiety. None of it has worked.”
And it’s not going to.
Rather than Puritanically telling people that being consumers and having fun are sins, a better approach would be for climate activists to continually emphasize how awesome and high-tech and prosperous a green energy-based future is going to be. The Futurist sensibility naturally leads to telling people about all of the abundant good jobs that will come from green energy, i.e. solar panel installer, wind turbine mechanic, and electric vehicle manufacturer. The Pastoralist approach, because it is so capitalism and growth skeptic, doesn’t have a vision for how protecting the planet and creating good jobs work together. The Pastoralist approach abandons can-do optimism; the Futurist approach embraces it. We need that can-do optimism. We need builders more than critics, and that means unleashing rather than restraining capitalism. As much as it will pain Pastoralists to hear this, between helping to break the carbon/consumption link, promoting positive-sum growth, and generating a vision of an abundant society that has broad political appeal….capitalism is a big part of the solution to climate change.