Giving Up The Fight: Why We Need An Anti-Rivalrous Approach To Climate Change
Progress depends on nuance, not blame
“There’s never gonna be change unless we start banning things!”
That was the summary of a recent conversation I had with a friend on climate change. As far as my friend can see, the biggest barrier to progress is an overwhelming hoard of deniers and selfish capitalists. Given the desperation of the situation and the impending ‘tipping points’, we have no choice but to start twisting arms. The time for conversation is over, we need action.
I can sympathize with the feeling of desperation. The narrative on reversing climate change is mostly pessimistic and has been for a long time. The situation does indeed look quite scary. And when we take a broader look at biodiversity and the health of ecosystems, it’s easy to become completely demoralized. It’s even easier to become angry.
We humans are very good at getting angry. We’re even better at channeling our rage toward enemies. With problems like climate change and environmental collapse, where solutions demand mass buy-in, battle lines are easily drawn. Deniers come first on that list. The uncaring closely follow — those heartless, selfish capitalists profiting from destroying the planet. Then there’s the ignorant who are too busy shopping to pay attention and the government enablers who let it all fly. The ‘good guys’ are those committed to doing better, especially those shouting about it. On the surface it all looks simple, the good guys have to overcome the bad guys if we’re going to turn the tide.
That kind of binary framing is our default mode. It’s simple and removes uncertainty. It creates a clear boundary line that separates good ideologies from evil ones. But the good-vs-evil framing deforms the problem-solving process. Where climate change was once a problem we needed to manage together, it’s now a war between good and evil. It becomes a side-taking exercise. We arrive at statements like:
“I’m not perfect but at least I admit it and don’t try to deny the problem”
We’re no longer talking about the intricacies of the problem or potential solutions. Instead, we’re talking about which team we’re on and what it says about our virtuousness.
War is all-consuming. It demands devotion and has a way of distorting ethics. It’s easy to lose sight of practical outcomes when we’re deep in conflict with an enemy. We can start out trying to protect something or bring about change, but find ourselves doing similar damage or missing the goal entirely. Progress and victory aren’t the same thing.
The good-vs-evil approach risks turning all of our energy towards winning, distracting us from progress. But surely if the ‘good guys’ gain dominance over the others, they can change all the rules and start banning stuff, right? Problem solved…
Not quite. That assumption is based on the flawed idea that the ‘good guys’ are fundamentally different from the ‘bad guys’. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a comic book movie.
The Power of Incentives
“Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome” - Charlie Munger
Incentives play a central role in determining outcomes. We all have our difficulties and challenges to overcome. And we’re all influenced by our cultures and their philosophical underpinnings. In mainstream Western culture, the vast majority of us grow up into consumerism. When all our measures of wellbeing, success, and self-worth are tied to material wealth, it’s hard to embrace alternatives. It can be especially difficult for anyone who has grown up in hardship or poverty, to be told the lifestyle they’ve pinned their hopes on is a false ideal. Even worse to be told it’s an ‘evil’ ideal.
None of us are perfect. Our very existence will exert a strain on the environment in some way. We all make compromises that should serve as lived examples of how we’re forced to balance our values with the pressure of incentives. If we’re to address climate change, we need to focus on the incentives that force our hands.
The economy is a complex system. The vast majority of people behave in the most obvious way from their position within the system. It doesn’t make sense for a farmer to shift to regenerative methods if the costs and risks are huge. It doesn’t make sense for a fashion manufacturer to use more expensive, eco-friendly materials when consumers constantly demand lower prices. The ‘good guys’ are products of circumstance and incentive, just as the ‘bad guys’ are. As long as the same cultural incentive structures persist, the balance of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ will remain unmoved.
To change behaviors, we need to reshape the system as a whole and make positive behaviors the most rational choice. How do we do that?
Who Do Governments Represent?
We look toward government to manage incentive structures through regulation and education. And many find themselves frustrated by government inaction on climate change. A question that arises often in our current era is whether governments truly represent citizens or actually represent special interest groups and corporations. We tend to slip into a warring tendency when government isn’t delivering. We make noise and express discontent until something gives. It sometimes works but often fails.
A lot of noise has been made about climate change over the last two decades whilst the health of the environment has been driven over a cliff. There are signs of progress today but the pace doesn’t match the volume of the debate.
Governments aren’t driven by any one interest group, but by the most prominent binding features of their societies. What do I mean by a binding feature? Think of it as the most prominent shared values of a culture. The binding feature often revolves around the sacred. The most prominent binding feature of most historical societies was religion. In those cases, governments reflect the shared moral code of the culture. Where dictators succeed, they themselves become sacred figures, as in North Korea. When dictators become detached from the binding features of their culture, they get toppled.
In the absence of a strong religious or philosophical unifying force in the western world, the biggest binding feature is the economy. The same applies on a global scale where worldviews differ but the economy is constant. Though we disagree about the details of our economic model, the vast majority of us buy in and function within the economy in its current form. We have little choice not to. Economic thriving, both on an individual and collective level, holds sacredness. Our governments fundamentally represent the economy.
Unfortunately, our economy is based on extraction. There are intrinsic incentives to take resources from the natural world and convert them into monetary value. Anything that can’t be turned into money, has little to no value. The way governments use GDP as a measure of success illustrates this. GDP growth doesn’t describe wellbeing or health. It doesn’t describe beauty or community cohesion. It doesn’t describe love or compassion. GDP describes how much stuff is being turned into money.
Democratically elected governments represent the common binding feature by nature. It determines the incentives that generate action. Leaning on governments to tax emissions and prohibit harmful consumption is like demanding the head chef slow the kitchen down, whilst staring at a restaurant full of hungry diners. The system we live in is a fast food restaurant — the food is affordable, plentiful, and quick. And to pile on the pressure there are more people banging on the door, desperate to get in and get their fill.
What if everyone in that restaurant had come for a slow dining experience? What if they came for a lovingly prepared, modest yet rewarding meal in good company? What if they came knowing they had a part to play in the process — they were contributing homegrown vegetables, helping in the kitchen, or washing the dishes? Now the chef would have the freedom to keep the pace in check and pay attention to quality over quantity. The values and expectations that bring people together are the binding features, that determine the outcomes.
A Bottom-Up Approach
There’s a temptation to see average citizens, corporations, and governments as separate and distinct. But influence runs in all directions. The binding feature or dominant culture is universal to them all — governments are in service to it, citizens are driven by it, and the priorities of corporations are dictated by it. If reverence for nature was the common thread that ran through our culture, governments would represent that. Corporations that tried to exploit nature for profit would find no foothold. We wouldn’t lean on consumer goods to deliver happiness and wellbeing, we’d look to nature instead. If close community or minimalism were sacred values, the whole system would revolve around those. To reshape all parts of the system in unison, we need a new cultural narrative.
Governments can play a part in shaping a new narrative. They can make it easier for people to access and connect with nature. They can help communities form tighter bonds. They can help lift citizens out of poverty and become contributing members of healthy neighborhoods. They can reshape education. The current obsession with churning out revenue-generating box-tickers should give way to a new kind of education prioritizing civics, creativity, and innovation. Our children should learn about what makes us happy and develop a useful relationship with philosophy and ethics.
Governments can turn collective resources toward fostering a new cultural narrative. But it’s futile to expect governments to do that if the new narrative isn’t present in the culture, to begin with. We need a bottom-up approach, rather than a top-down one.
It can feel hopeless for any individual to play a meaningful part in remedying the ecological crisis. We can recycle, eat less meat and give up flying without making the slightest dent in those alarming statistics. The hopelessness of it leads many to give up altogether, they might as well ‘enjoy their lives’, since there’s nothing they can do. And in the existing narrative, enjoying one’s life demands consumption and material wealth. We wrestle with prohibition and sacrifice, without questioning whether consumption actually delivers on its promises.
Research on happiness and wellbeing suggests it doesn’t. All that stuff we accumulate doesn’t provide the kind of happiness we can get from meaningful relationships or regular walks in nature, flow experiences, mindfulness, and close connection with community. A shift to a more ecologically sound lifestyle doesn’t necessarily demand sacrifice.
Change Worth Living
Meaningful change demands a different philosophy of life, a new world view that can be shared by the many. Is there any hope of achieving that shift at scale through bullying, shaming, and banning?
Polarised power battles won’t get us across that line. The good news is that we can find common ground across political divides because many of those things mentioned above are universally beneficial. It doesn’t matter where you sit on the political spectrum, loving relationships and close community are objectively valuable. Flow experiences and time spent outdoors have observable positive effects on wellbeing. There’s more impact in inviting someone on a nature hike than shaming them for driving a truck. The former offers a path to recalibrating values, the latter encourages withdrawal from the conversation.
When we slip into the binary mode, we risk losing sight of the goal altogether. We incentivize virtue signaling over solution-seeking. You might feel compelled to scold someone for flying thousands of miles for a vacation, which is firmly on the naughty list. But what if that vacation sparks a new appreciation for nature? What if it encourages a nature-friendly lifestyle shift? Suddenly the binary good/bad distinctions don’t look so watertight. Experience matters beyond proposition. It’s not enough to be told that nature is worth protecting, it needs to be felt. There’s no working incentive in being told to give up all those things you want, to protect something you’ve never experienced. We need to feel the value in positive alternatives to materialism.
This cultural movement demands an awakening on a mass scale. No one was ever bullied into a new worldview. If we try to bludgeon people into climate consciousness, we risk a drawn-out struggle that we most likely can’t afford. Instead, we need to foster a new set of sacred values and recalibrate wanting.
Powerful network effects will kick in when there’s a critical mass of people tuned in to a new story. It’s already happening. It isn’t a story of doom and gloom, prohibition, sacrifice, and hopelessness. It’s a story of positivity and regeneration, where everyone has the opportunity to improve their lives and benefit the common good.
There are many answers still to find but we have a starting point for overcoming the inertia. We have to develop a new understanding of what it is to thrive, build communities around that, and embrace a new story together.
