From the Breakthrough Journal: 20 years ago this month, I published an essay called “The Death of Environmentalism” that anticipated the rise of the Abundance Movement. In the essay, I argued that modern environmentalism was incapable of solving climate change because climate change was, at bottom, not a pollution problem that could be solved by taxing or regulating carbon emissions. Instead, it was a technology and infrastructure problem that would require public investment in innovation.
That argument, I think it’s fair to say, won the day over the last two decades. Indeed, if anything, there is growing recognition that not only is solving climate change not, centrally, a regulatory problem, but in fact it is a deregulatory problem. Innovating, building infrastructure, and deploying technology at the scale that it will take to effectively combat climate change will require reforming much of the environmental regulatory policy that the last generation of environmentalists established in the 1960’s and 70’s. So today, I want to talk about some of the key lessons from the essay that I think it is important for the Abundance Movement to keep in mind.
So first, let’s take a quick walk down memory lane. Back when I published “The Death of Environmentalism,” the dominant view of the climate problem was that it was just a really big air pollution problem, acid rain on steroids if you will, that would be solved the same way that environmentalists had solved air pollution problems in the 1960s and 70s, by regulating carbon pollution.
The Death of Environmentalism said that was wrong, that climate change was not really an according to hoyle pollution problem at all. Carbon dioxide was not a trace pollutant resulting from a relatively small set of commercial and industrial applications. It was everywhere, completely intertwined with virtually every aspect of industrial modernity.
Because stopping the planet from warming requires that we stop emitting carbon dioxide entirely, that means that to effectively mitigate climate change, you have to build an entirely new energy economy. The essay argued that the modern environmental movement was spectacularly ill-suited—temperamentally, ideologically, and institutionally—to lead such an effort. A movement that centrally proposed to draw a circle around a thing called the environment, to speak for it politically, and protect it from us was simply not going to be serious about building the new worlds that we need to build so that both humans and the natural world might thrive.
More here.
