Are technological progress and environmental responsibility compatible aims? Or does a concern for the climate necessitate a degrowth mindset?
In the following lightly edited conversation with The Hub’s editor-at-large Sean Speer, Alex Trembath, the deputy director of the Breakthrough Institute, explains the origin and the aims of ecomodernism, the limitations of the modern climate movement, and why degrowth is a dead-end for environmentalism.
To listen to the rest of their conversation exploring ecomodernism and nuclear energy, check out Alex’s appearance on Hub Dialogues here.
SEAN SPEER: What is ecomodernism and how does it contrast with some of the other perspectives about how societies ought to confront the challenge of climate change and environmental sustainability?
ALEX TREMBATH: In 2004, [Ted] Nordhaus and [Mike] Shellenberger wrote an essay, “The death of environmentalism,” and after that, they founded the Breakthrough Institute and embarked on a long and growing mission to deconstruct what was wrong, in our view, with environmentalism.
This wasn’t just something that the Breakthrough Institute was doing. There was a growing network of scholars—including folks from ecology and environmental philosophy, engineers, agronomists, political scientists, and economists—who were writing for our journal and coming to our events, and opening up the Pandora’s box of what environmentalism had started as decades prior and what it had evolved into.
That process of interrogation, deconstruction, criticism, and analysis ultimately culminates in 2014-15 with the publication of an ecomodernist manifesto, which was co-authored by 18 or 19 self-identified ecomodernists.
Their chief argument was that the problem with environmentalism wasn’t that it just got nuclear wrong, and if they just change their opinion about nuclear, then everything else with environmentalism is fine. No, what we argued, and what we continue to believe, is that American environmentalism as it developed, starting really with the Romantics like Thoreau and Roosevelt, and through the post-war era like Rachel Carson, Paul Ehrlich, is a coherent framework. But the ideas at the centre of it are wrong.
Environmentalism insists that the human species sits within this pagan thing that they call the environment and that when we violate this fragile, singular thing called the environment, for instance by too much economic growth, or by splitting atoms open, or by transferring genes from one genome to another, then we violate the neo-pagan impulse that is sacrosanct.
Our view was this is wrong. That we didn’t just need a kind of warmed-over environmentalism, or that environmentalism needs a software upgrade, but that we needed a wholly new and sort of equally coherent alternative; an alternative philosophical and empirical framework. And that’s what we try to articulate in an ecomodernist manifesto, and that’s what we have tried to sort of build upon in the decade or so since the manifesto was published.
SEAN SPEER: I want to spend a minute interrogating the alternative viewpoint, which, as you say, has a long pedigree. Talk more about where you think this type of degrowth thinking comes from, and why at some level it may seem even more intuitive than abundance.
ALEX TREMBATH: In our view, environmentalism and the politics of limits that characterize it are fundamentally a reaction to industrial and consumerist modernity. In the 19th century, you have the Romantics like Emerson and Thoreau who escaped the city to go to Walden Pond. These are elites who can’t stand the sort of hustle and bustle and pollution of the modern industrial urban landscape. They react to it, and they run away from it to escape modernity.
This intensifies the post-war era, particularly with the invention and development not just of nuclear weapons and nuclear power, but also organochlorine pesticides, and post-war suburbanization, and the diffusion of the internal combustion engine, and the atomization of society.
Figures like Rachel Carson, Paul Ehrlich, and Jane Goodall, these folks are literally escaping cities and escaping technological modernity. They’re really standing up to technological modernization and yelling “Stop.”
Then of course there’s “the limits to growth” project from the Club of Rome, which argued that the material throughput of the human species was peaking and would collapse. This was in the 1970s and now the material throughput and the economic throughput of the human species have grown by an order of magnitude. Obviously, Paul Ehrlich predicted mass famine and death in the 1970s that does not actually come to pass, and we’ve just had a repeating cycle of these prognostications and predictions ever since. The most common ones today are climate-related because climate change dislodged the environmental concerns that came before it for good and bad reasons.
Climate change was actually well understood 50 years ago and even 100 years ago but was not a major issue of concern until the last 30 or 40 years. I think that merits the attention of the environmental movement and other movements. But I also think that the reason that climate change has become really the only issue that environmentalists talk about much of the time, and if not the only one, then by far the most important one, the most dire, the most prioritized, is because of how totalizing climate change is, and what sort of powerful, comprehensive limits that climate change can or should put on the human project.
Whereas 50 years ago, you had Paul Ehrlich predicting that our practices of reproduction and industrial food production were going to cause famine in these certain places, now we have an environmental movement that, despite their protestations, mostly is predicting the end of the world after a 2 °C temperature rise. They talk about uninhabitable Earth, and they talk about of crisis for the human species. There are reasons to be concerned about climate change, but I don’t actually think that any of those really strong characterizations of the climate problem are defensible scientifically.
SEAN SPEER: If we shifted the conversation Alex to more practical terms, how might an ecomodernist philosophy manifest itself in public policy? How would it inform the right set of policies to catalyse more abundance as a solution to sustainability?
ALEX TREMBATH: One of the first things is that ecomodernists take a proactionary approach, not a precautionary one, and so putting the putative and aggregate limits aside, in terms of what the right human population is, or what the optimal amount of carbon emissions in the atmosphere is, there are just a whole bunch of proceduralist and precautionary rules put in place to stop or slow technological growth and development. These are things like zoning restrictions that the city of Berkeley, where I’m sitting right now, invented early in the 20th century and now widely present in places across the United States.
The Breakthrough Institute has written quite a bit about the proceduralist and, frankly, outdated, technophobic rules at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which make it functionally illegal to license, let alone build, a new advanced nuclear reactor in the United States. You see similar problems at the FDA and the USDA in terms of regulation around biotech for things like new crops, biotech vaccines, and treatments for livestock, even biotech livestock. We could be genetically altering the genome of cattle and chickens for both ecological and animal welfare reasons at a greater clip if it weren’t for precautionary regulations that are in place.
So one ecomodernist approach to public policy would be proactionary, not precautionary. That isn’t anarchy. You could run down a list of what we think is a good regulation or a bad regulation. But in general, an ecomodernist would be looking at both public investments and government regulations and asking, how can these responsibly accelerate the development and diffusion of promising new technologies, particularly ones that that lessen the human impact on the environment and lower pollution and lower land use and things like that. So that’s one answer.
Another answer would get back to the previous discussion we just had about limits. I think that a bunch of the problems of the climate movement, and not just the kind of far-Left climate movement that protests freeways and throws paint on art and museums, but even the sort of more moderate, pragmatic climate movement is that they rely on these both global and national temperature targets.
Whether it’s 2 °C or net zero, or whatever it is, the claim is always that we have to be decarbonizing or evolving our energy systems so that we can meet these climate targets, so that we can meet these temperature targets. And just to be very clear and blunt about it, the temperature targets are made up. They’re fake. There’s no reason to prefer a 2 °C outcome over a 1.5 °Coutcome or over a 2.5 °C outcome. These are not threshold-based problems.
The alternative, we think at Breakthrough, is that more warming globally is worse than less warming, but that that is part of an optimization problem that includes things like energy access, energy costs, and the pace at which you can actually deploy new technologies. I think that in policies like the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act or international agreements like the Paris Agreement, we get the framework backward by trying to work backward from these temperature targets like 2 or 1.5 °C and then trying to graft our policies onto that.
An ecomodernist understanding would insist that, actually carbon emissions and these temperature outcomes are emergent from our techno-industrial systems. They are not determined by them. There’s no carbon emissions knob that anyone can turn, and if, if they could, it would have to trade off against a whole bunch of these other things that I’ve mentioned.
