The climate movement really does not need Yascha Mounk's advice
A response to Mounk's latest nonsense-essay
Disgraced public intellectual Yascha Mounk wrote a Substack essay last week, titled “Where Environmentalists Went Wrong.”
It’s… really not a good piece of writing. It reads like Bjorn Lomborg fan fiction, composed by a guy hoping his audience has never heard of Bjorn Lomborg. He begins by explaining that this is the “second installment in [his] series on effective altruism,” [immediate red flag!] then complains for four paragraphs about how Parisian café culture just isn’t what it used to be. And it’s all the fault of those pesky climate activists!
Mounk writes:
This is, to be sure, a minor inconvenience—a great example of a “first world problem,” if you will. Having to forego sitting outside with your friends during the cold months is hardly a grave injustice, and it pales in comparison to the genuine dangers awaiting us unless we collectively combat climate change. But it is also characteristic of what is wrong with a particular kind of increasingly common environmental regulation: one that is short on impact but big on virtue signaling.
Consider just a few salient examples from the past few years:
Some American states have banned cafés and restaurants from offering their customers single-use plastic straws.
Many jurisdictions around the world now require grocery stores to charge their customers for plastic bags.
The EU has phased out incandescent light bulbs.
The EU has also banned plastic bottles with removable caps, leading to the introduction of bottles that don’t always properly close once they have been opened.
Though not yet implemented, some prominent organizations and activists have called for gas stoves to be banned.
Squint hard enough and you can see the vague outline of a point here. Banning plastic straws is a cosmetic victory in the fight against catastrophic climate change. If the climate movement were putting a high priority on the plastic straw ban, then that would indeed seem like quite a mistake.
But the thing is, this sort of cosmetic victory is virtually never driven by movement activists making strident demands and running strategic campaigns. Cities and states pass ordinances banning plastic straws in the hopes of appeasing climate activists who are asking for bigger, harder, more impactful things.
(By way of analogy, imagine a scenario where employees demand better working conditions in a factory, management responds by declaring “fun Fridays,” and then Yascha shows up and says “Fun Fridays is dumb and pointless. This is clearly the labor movement’s fault.”)
Mounk, in other words, sets up a (plastic) straw man, and then proceeds to spend the rest of the essay whacking it around. He builds to a call for a whole “new paradigm” that he labels “effective environmentalism.”
(Listen to the If Books Could Kill episode about Mounk. Wailing on straw men is kind of his whole deal.)
He exhibits zero familiarity with the actual history of the environmental movement, or with present-day climate campaigning, or really with much of anything. If he bothered to do even a cursory bit of research, he would likely find that his ideas aren’t new. They have a long pedigree and have mostly just served to further delay any serious climate action.
Yascha Mounk should try reading an actual book or two before he (self-)publishes on a topic.
In the meantime, let me gently note a few significant holes in Yascha’s argument.
Last month, at the American Political Science Association annual meeting, I presented a draft of a piece on the “pragmatic tradition” in the U.S. environmental movement. This is a chunk of an ongoing research project with a coauthor, so it doesn’t seem appropriate to post the whole thing in a newsletter essay. But the much-abbreviated version is that the dominant shaping force within the history of American environmentalism as a political movement has been its deeply pragmatic orientation.
The conservation movement in the 1890s-1920s was galvanizing public sentiment in response to the closing of the American frontier. The movement starts not with Henry David Thoreau sitting by Walden Pond, but ~40 years later, amidst public concern that some piece of the American identity is threatened and in need of preservation.
The environmental movement of the 1960s and 70s brought attention to toxic pollution after decades of postwar economic development. It also sounded the (ultimately false) alarm on (what seemed at the time like) runaway population growth, just in the shadow of a “baby boom” that seemed like it would go on forever.
Corporate backlash and rising Republican anti-environmental sentiment left the movement searching for effective action steps in the 1980s. This was when the personal responsibility frame became a major theme in movement comms.
And the climate movement really begins to accelerate in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina. (Climate change was part of the issue portfolio before 2005, and becomes the central focus afterward.)
The materially-significant strategic choices made by leaders of the environmental movement all respond to the overriding culture conditions and reformist political opportunities of the times.
Throughout these decades, there are also alternative traditions of environmental thought that focus on prefigurative political action. There is, for instance, the back-to-the-land movement in the 1970s. But the prefigurative traditions in environmentalism rarely have any direct tie to the strategic decisions of movement organizations. While the back-to-the-land hippies are starting communes and dropping off the grid, the mainstream environmental movement is holding mass actions and passing the National Environmental Policy Act.
Likewise, in the early 2020s, there were many prefigurative climate activists who mostly devote themselves to zero-carbon lifestyles. But the organizations with strategic capacity within the climate movement, at least in the U.S., were all focused on passing the Green New Deal/shaping the Inflation Reduction Act. We should probably judge them based on the major policy commitments they successfully enacted, instead of caricaturing them as anti-plastic-straw warriors.
Mounk recognizes none of these movement dynamics. He presents the environmental movement as a bunch of purist ideologues, obsessed with forcing the public to “feel pain” for having “sinned against nature.” And while I’m sure you can find individuals making those arguments, they really have never held sway amongst the movement actors who are positioned to make strategic decisions or allocate meaningful resources.
The best evidence he can find comes from the attestations of self-styled “eco-pragmatist” Mark Lynas, who likes to ask large audiences, “Imagine a fairy appeared in front of you, promising to solve the problem of climate change with a simple wave of the wand. Would you take her up on the offer?” Lynas says that environmental campaigners mostly reject the offer, insisting that solving the climate crisis without overthrowing capitalism would not be good enough.
While I don’t know Lynas personally, I would humbly suggest that he is misreading the response. When environmental campaigners say "no, that seems like bullshit,” what they mean is “this is an idiotic thought experiment, and seems quite obviously to be a rhetorical trap. Kindly fuck off, pleaseandthankyou.”
And that’s because, alongside the pragmatic political orientation, the environmental movement also has a deep distrust of large corporations declaring that they have seen the light and will happily help to solve climate/environmental problems, so long as we can get rid of those pesky government regulations. It is a weary distrust, born from experience — a real Lucy-and-the-football situation.
Mounk’s “effective environmentalism” (Effective Altruism + Environmentalism… yes, Yascha, very clever) reads like a dimestore retread of Bjorn Lomborg’s greatest hits.
Lomborg has spent 20+ years posing as the “skeptical environmentalist,” offering snide remarks in the form of “aw geez have you tried cost-benefit analysis?” The guy bought a Greenpeace membership, decided Greenpeace wasn’t for him, and then built a whole career on the flimsy premise that he had some grand realization that his movement peers couldn’t understand.
It’s basically a grift. It’s the softer side of climate denial, insisting that (1) “yes, sure, the science is real,” but (2) we should do nothing about it, because we could do more good by spending government money on other causes. Just leave Exxon et al to innovate their way out of this climate mess! In the meantime, think of all the poverty and hunger and malaria that we could eliminate with the money that would go towards developing renewables and rebuilding the power grid.
(NOTE: today’s climate activists would jump to point out that electrifying everything is a great way to drive economic growth. And they are absolutely right.)
The trick here, from Lomborg et al, is to pretend that political power does not exist. There is no single, finite pool of money that governments are tasked with efficiently allocating, either to malaria or world hunger or climate change. None of that money gets allocated, none of those crises are addressed, without the mass strategic mobilization of political will.
Lomborg spent decades writing reports that said “hey think of all the good things you could do instead!’ while never advancing the cause of doing any of those things.
(It’s a bit like, oh-just-hypothetically, if the effective altruism movement told people “hey we should all donate money to mosquito nets,” but then instead buys a $20 million castle for all the EA leaders to hang out in instead. Boy would that be embarrassing!)
And the net result has always been just a stalling tactic. The strategic purpose of every one of Bjorn Lomborg’s books and reports has been to delay and dissuade. Addressing the climate crisis will be uncomfortable for some very wealthy people. It will be bad business for petrostates and fossil fuel companies. There’s plenty of money in defending their interests. The Lomborg/Mounk style of declaring “we must do something but definitely not that” is an effort to preserve and protect the status quo ante.
It’s worth dwelling on the similarities between Lomborg and Mounk for an additional moment, because they highlight that Mounk’s proposal is far from new. The project of techno-optimist, don’t-mess-with-anyone’s-business-model environmentalism has been tried repeatedly for decades. It just hasn’t gone well.
For as long as we have had environmental doomsayers, we have had bland techno-optimists insisting that a mix of markets, innovation, and the power of positive thinking can solve all problems. With the exception of a brief string of victories in the 1970s, the neoliberal optimists have been much more powerful than their critics. The laws passed in the 1970s (NEPA especially) constrain development today. But the tech optimists haven’t exactly been brought to heel. They have reigned! For decades! My whole life, in fact! And the legacy of the 1970s environmental movement is mostly that they sometimes-but-not-always face a few extra regulatory hurdles. That’s really it!*
Climate optimism, particularly the sort of let’s-run-the-numbers-and-not-rock-any-boats variety advanced by Mounk and Lomborg, has chiefly contributed to preventing any meaningful political action at all. It is of a piece with the techno-optimist dream of a deus ex machina resolution, in which the best thing we can all do is have faith that there is no problem unfettered capitalism can produce that more unfettered capitalism cannot solve.
The reason why young climate activists today so often sound so alarmist is that objective conditions are, in fact, alarming! The project of trusting markets and technology and positive thinking keeps being tried, and keeps failing, and then keeps being re-proposed, as thought it were somehow new and deserves a fresh shot.
Of course they’re outraged and at times despondent. They’ve paid attention long enough to see that adults-like-Yascha will never accept action that makes them, personally, the least big less comfortable. (The fella wrote 3,500 words based off the premise that Parisian cafés just ain’t as comforting as they used to be. Come on, man!) Many of them have come to the conclusion that power yields nothing without demand.
And y’know what? They ain’t wrong.
The LAST THING the climate movement needs is advice from Yascha Mounk. His “bold, new” idea is neither bold nor new. It’s a tired retread of a tired retread. It’s vapid social movement criticism, dressed up in sophisticated language to make it appear more serious than it is.
*NOTE: I’m basically a YIMBY, fwiw. And there’s a long tradition of YIMBY environmentalism, dating at least back to my high school days, when the Sierra Club was campaigning for “smart growth” development policies that opposed endless suburbs and instead advocated for changes to local zoning laws that would support transit-oriented, mixed-use development. But that’s a topic for another time.
Dave, "neither bold, nor new, nor an idea" was *right there*!
Like the commenters here, I am annoyed that Mounk padded out his list of things that are "short on impact but big on virtue signaling" with things that are in fact long on impact. Phasing out gas stoves is a good idea! Lighting is estimated to account for around 2% of carbon emissions; cutting that by 80-90% would be significant! And yes I realize that it is a mistake to engage someone on these points when they are obviously writing in bad faith, but that just makes it more annoying, not less.
Mounk's mockery of the threat of gas stoves is the one that got to me. They're poisoning children and the industry has known about it for decades.