I am reading this as “we should create a social movement among The One Percent, which organizes together to cancel and oppress anyone who opposes strong climate action”. I think this is crazy for a lot of reasons:
The idea of creating a social movement to advocate for a change in behavior/norms, and having it start small with early-adopters and “true believers”, then grow over time as the benefits to joining the group become larger and larger with more members, is not a brilliant new idea. Rather, it is how pretty much all social movements already operate. The question you need to be thinking about isn’t just the idea of starting a movement, but “How will my social movement manage to outcompete all the others?” Your answer seems to be “we’ll be more willing to use aggressive cancel-culture techniques against our enemies”, and that probably works well in the late-game (when you’re already in control of the government, media, etc, you are free to be as totalitarian as you wish), but works badly in the early-game. What kind of early adopters would join such a spiteful movement with such a cynical long-term plan? Probably (totally spitballing here) angry people who feel rejected by ordinary society—not charismatic politicians and brilliant scientists and powerful entrepreneurs who all have better coalitions they could join elsewhere. That kind of movement will have a hard time snowballing to world domination. By contrast, Effective Altruism has had lots of success by being explicitly friendly and open-minded rather than combative and political.
Who is “The One Percent”? I don’t think you ever define it. Is this the most powerful 1% of people on the planet? Or the richest 1% in terms of net worth? Or are we talking yearly incomes? Twitter followers? You seem to be talking about rich people in the United States and Europe, but what about carbon emissions in China, India, and etc? Even if we achieve totalitarian cancel-culture in the western world, will we be able to bully China and other countries into following along? You might quibble, “look, these are minor differences—the top 1% most influential people in the world are gonna be pretty similar now matter how you slice it”. But I think it’s worse than that. I think “The One Percent” is not even a natural or coherent group of people—it’s just a slogan. If you look at graphs of net worth, wealth is clearly distributed on a power law. This means that there is often just as big a difference between the median person and the 1%, as between the 1% and the 0.1%, or the 0.1% and the 0.01%. I think this is a big mistake that left-leaning people make when they think about class conflict—they assume that “the rich” is a coherent group with a set of common interests, but actually there are many tiers of increasing richness with different common interests, there aren’t any hard divisions between the tiers (if you are in “the 2%”, which side do you choose in a class conflict?), and this phenomenon means that class conflict is harder to inflame than many activists assume.
I am reading you as proposing a campaign of repression and cultural change to make opposing climate action totally taboo. But this kind of thing has many obvious downsides: by silencing opposition and making people afraid to speak their minds freely, you will silence necessary debates on society’s direction. If we reorient our entire culture around climate change, what will happen to people who believe that climate change actually isn’t that bad and humanity might have bigger problems (like preparing for pandemics or working to avert nuclear war)? Will those people be cancelled, and will crucial work on solving other global problems not get done? Even within climate change, will there be room for necessary debate about strategy when everyone is rushing to demonstrate their allegiance to the party line? (How important is nuclear power for mitigating climate change? Does geoengineering have a role, and if so, what kinds of geoengineering? Will we have to electrify 100% of transportation, even airplanes, or should we also aim to create net-zero synthetic fuel from carbon in the air?) What about people who think that climate change is a big problem demanding urgent action, but who also think that exaggerated climate catastrophism is causing people to suffer from mental illness, like anxiety and depression, to the extent that people are refusing to have children because they are haunted by visions of an apocalyptic, uninhabitable planet, even though no scientist believes that such a dire future could ever occur due to global warming?
Overall, your post seems to express a mindset like “Everybody already knows that climate change is humanity’s #1 problem, and that this is a dire crisis justifying almost anything to solve it. Since it’s obvious to everyone what the necessary course of action is, we don’t need to indulge the luxuries of free discussion and scientific exploration and political debate, which all just leads to infighting and delay. Instead, we just need to browbeat the world into all working together and doing what we know is right!”
This is the correct strategy in some situations, like if it’s WW2 and you are being invaded by a fascist nation and the obvious response is to just try to fight the invaders with everything you’ve got.
But in my view, it’s not the correct strategy for our current age and the problems humanity now faces. Climate change is bad, but it is not apocalyptic. Estimates often say things like “the USA could lose up to 10% of GDP by 2100!”, which would be like having 5 extra recessions over the next 80 years of 0% growth, instead of normal years with 2% growth. That would be pretty lame, and I hope we take strong measures to avert that, but IMO it isn’t worth turning all of culture into a never-ending totalitarian propaganda cancel-fest, because creating such an oppressive culture would impede humanity’s efforts to make progress on… pretty much every other problem we face in society. (And I believe we face many dire problems in addition to climate change!) Instead, I think we have to have the humility to admit that the correct answers AREN’T all obvious (for starters, people don’t even agree about nuclear power or geoengineering), and we need to build movements that try to think hard and explore different potential solutions, and if anything encourage GREATER freedom, debate, and disagreement, instead of just browbeating.
It is good to see that you agree that the strategy I have outlined here is effective and appropriate if destructive climate change is otherwise likely to destroy human civilization this century. In particular, your penultimate paragraph states: “This is the correct strategy in some situations, like it’s WW2 and you are being invaded by a fascist nation and the obvious response is to just try to fight the invaders with everything you’ve got.”
In fact, I think that ‘business as usual’ will drive climate change that is far more destructive to human life on Earth than any fascist invasion. You clearly disagree that the threat of catastrophic climate change is that dire. We will have to agree to disagree on that. I am sure it would be futile to debate that issue with you here.
Nevertheless, it is gratifying that you see the value of the kind of strategy I have outlined for dealing with threats that endanger civilization.
I am reading this as “we should create a social movement among The One Percent, which organizes together to cancel and oppress anyone who opposes strong climate action”. I think this is crazy for a lot of reasons:
The idea of creating a social movement to advocate for a change in behavior/norms, and having it start small with early-adopters and “true believers”, then grow over time as the benefits to joining the group become larger and larger with more members, is not a brilliant new idea. Rather, it is how pretty much all social movements already operate. The question you need to be thinking about isn’t just the idea of starting a movement, but “How will my social movement manage to outcompete all the others?” Your answer seems to be “we’ll be more willing to use aggressive cancel-culture techniques against our enemies”, and that probably works well in the late-game (when you’re already in control of the government, media, etc, you are free to be as totalitarian as you wish), but works badly in the early-game. What kind of early adopters would join such a spiteful movement with such a cynical long-term plan? Probably (totally spitballing here) angry people who feel rejected by ordinary society—not charismatic politicians and brilliant scientists and powerful entrepreneurs who all have better coalitions they could join elsewhere. That kind of movement will have a hard time snowballing to world domination. By contrast, Effective Altruism has had lots of success by being explicitly friendly and open-minded rather than combative and political.
Who is “The One Percent”? I don’t think you ever define it. Is this the most powerful 1% of people on the planet? Or the richest 1% in terms of net worth? Or are we talking yearly incomes? Twitter followers? You seem to be talking about rich people in the United States and Europe, but what about carbon emissions in China, India, and etc? Even if we achieve totalitarian cancel-culture in the western world, will we be able to bully China and other countries into following along? You might quibble, “look, these are minor differences—the top 1% most influential people in the world are gonna be pretty similar now matter how you slice it”. But I think it’s worse than that. I think “The One Percent” is not even a natural or coherent group of people—it’s just a slogan. If you look at graphs of net worth, wealth is clearly distributed on a power law. This means that there is often just as big a difference between the median person and the 1%, as between the 1% and the 0.1%, or the 0.1% and the 0.01%. I think this is a big mistake that left-leaning people make when they think about class conflict—they assume that “the rich” is a coherent group with a set of common interests, but actually there are many tiers of increasing richness with different common interests, there aren’t any hard divisions between the tiers (if you are in “the 2%”, which side do you choose in a class conflict?), and this phenomenon means that class conflict is harder to inflame than many activists assume.
I am reading you as proposing a campaign of repression and cultural change to make opposing climate action totally taboo. But this kind of thing has many obvious downsides: by silencing opposition and making people afraid to speak their minds freely, you will silence necessary debates on society’s direction. If we reorient our entire culture around climate change, what will happen to people who believe that climate change actually isn’t that bad and humanity might have bigger problems (like preparing for pandemics or working to avert nuclear war)? Will those people be cancelled, and will crucial work on solving other global problems not get done? Even within climate change, will there be room for necessary debate about strategy when everyone is rushing to demonstrate their allegiance to the party line? (How important is nuclear power for mitigating climate change? Does geoengineering have a role, and if so, what kinds of geoengineering? Will we have to electrify 100% of transportation, even airplanes, or should we also aim to create net-zero synthetic fuel from carbon in the air?) What about people who think that climate change is a big problem demanding urgent action, but who also think that exaggerated climate catastrophism is causing people to suffer from mental illness, like anxiety and depression, to the extent that people are refusing to have children because they are haunted by visions of an apocalyptic, uninhabitable planet, even though no scientist believes that such a dire future could ever occur due to global warming?
Overall, your post seems to express a mindset like “Everybody already knows that climate change is humanity’s #1 problem, and that this is a dire crisis justifying almost anything to solve it. Since it’s obvious to everyone what the necessary course of action is, we don’t need to indulge the luxuries of free discussion and scientific exploration and political debate, which all just leads to infighting and delay. Instead, we just need to browbeat the world into all working together and doing what we know is right!”
This is the correct strategy in some situations, like if it’s WW2 and you are being invaded by a fascist nation and the obvious response is to just try to fight the invaders with everything you’ve got.
But in my view, it’s not the correct strategy for our current age and the problems humanity now faces. Climate change is bad, but it is not apocalyptic. Estimates often say things like “the USA could lose up to 10% of GDP by 2100!”, which would be like having 5 extra recessions over the next 80 years of 0% growth, instead of normal years with 2% growth. That would be pretty lame, and I hope we take strong measures to avert that, but IMO it isn’t worth turning all of culture into a never-ending totalitarian propaganda cancel-fest, because creating such an oppressive culture would impede humanity’s efforts to make progress on… pretty much every other problem we face in society. (And I believe we face many dire problems in addition to climate change!) Instead, I think we have to have the humility to admit that the correct answers AREN’T all obvious (for starters, people don’t even agree about nuclear power or geoengineering), and we need to build movements that try to think hard and explore different potential solutions, and if anything encourage GREATER freedom, debate, and disagreement, instead of just browbeating.
It is good to see that you agree that the strategy I have outlined here is effective and appropriate if destructive climate change is otherwise likely to destroy human civilization this century. In particular, your penultimate paragraph states: “This is the correct strategy in some situations, like it’s WW2 and you are being invaded by a fascist nation and the obvious response is to just try to fight the invaders with everything you’ve got.”
In fact, I think that ‘business as usual’ will drive climate change that is far more destructive to human life on Earth than any fascist invasion. You clearly disagree that the threat of catastrophic climate change is that dire. We will have to agree to disagree on that. I am sure it would be futile to debate that issue with you here.
Nevertheless, it is gratifying that you see the value of the kind of strategy I have outlined for dealing with threats that endanger civilization.