The Invisible Line Between Power and Science

Why cynicism doesn't help us in the debate over climate politics

I admit it. For a long time, my thinking about climate change was simplistic. I thought the case for an imminent catastrophe was ironclad and that societies would invariably have to “de-grow” in order to avert the worst consequences and cope with the already inevitable results of people’s environmental meddling. Had I been born ten years later, I’d have read Roger Hallam’s book and would be attending Extinction Rebellion protests. Instead, I showed up to Transition Town meetings (remember them?) and started learning how to garden.

The idea that technological advancements could prevent or undo climatic changes was, I thought then, simply nuts. Self-styled eco-modernists were just failing to face up to scientific realities.

Transition Towns: I seriously thought that I’d be living in one by now. Today I worry that it was just post-apocalyptic fan fiction for affluent environmentalists

Now I’m far less confident in my beliefs. That I’ve even published a short article in an eco-modernist journal shows that I’ve come a long way, that the doomism of my youth is no longer with me. Yet, I find myself often as uncomfortable with the anti-apocalyptic environmental movement as with those prophesizing certain catastrophe. They seem often a little too convinced of themselves, as if they actually knew what the planet’s future holds.

There’s a risk in what looks at first to be hard-nosed political realism. Often it’s the case that those who see themselves as a bulwark against political extremism start to think more like than unlike their opponents. In fighting fanatics, we risk becoming zealots ourselves. Learning to do otherwise is one of the biggest challenges that we face in realizing a more functional and intelligent democracy.

Puppets and Masters

As I noted in an article in The New Atlantis a few years back, much of contemporary politics is polarized because of the simplistic way we tend to think about facts and expertise. Some experts (the one’s we agree with) are beyond repute. Governments ought to be simply executing their recommendations. Others (the one’s we disagree with) are charlatans, laundering the desires of elites and other questionable special interest groups into only ostensibly objective science.

Jessica Weinkle’s latest article in the Breakthrough Journal unfortunately falls prey to this framing. I say “unfortunately,” because I almost agree with her. But when she claims that “the path back to scientific integrity and rational deliberation” is blocked by the questionable research regarding so-called “planetary boundaries”, she is doing the debate a disservice.

Weinkle is partly right. As I’ve also noted, at least twice, in this Substack, claims about planetary boundaries and environmental tipping points are invariably rooted in subjective judgement calls and people’s values. Modelers have to make assumptions about nature that can’t be completely proven, or at least not until it could be too late. The idea that the human-climate-environment system is fragile, that it sits upon a precipice, below which we face the certainty of a barely habitable planet, is as much storytelling as science.

Visual depiction of proposed planetary boundaries

More apocalyptic climate activists and scientists are not just coolly interpreting the research data when they come to their conclusions. That Donella and Dennis Meadows built their Limits to Growth model upon not just reams of data but also their moral beliefs about a free and life-fulfilling society is something that the average Science and Technology Studies undergrad could deduce with a few hours work. That the editor of The Lancet is little different in embracing an apocalyptic framing of climate change isn’t really all that surprising.

And no doubt that is Weinkle also correct in noting that transforming this science-based story into something that seems authoritative, if not indisputable, is politically unsavory. It is an effort to give climate doomists the upper hand and portray their opponents as ignorant, as science denialists who ought to be ignored, when the reality is actually much more complex.

Yet, to call it “systems of power masquerading as science,” as Weinkle does, goes too far. Academics who turn the same cynical lens upon eco-modernism come to similarly unfavorable conclusions. For an issue like climate change, no one has “clean hands.” Politics and science are going to mix simply because the issue is so important. Moreover, translating research into policy invariably means that science gets mixed up with power in all sorts of ways.

To try to reveal the whole effort as corrupt, through allusions to the elite entrepreneurs who started The Club of Rome and coalitions of planetary boundary-enforcing central banks, is really a bit much. Rarely does a political perspective gains traction without powerful backers. It is unfair to depict the whole thing as driven by power, when there is a more mundane and more sympathetic interpretation: that movements are inherently messy and often conflicted coalitions in which the true believers are often hard to distinguish from the opportunists.

Whither Environmental Politics?

Weinkle doesn’t exactly say what rational deliberation looks like for climate change. But I would be hard pressed to imagine a version of it that wouldn’t treat believers of the possibility for runaway climate change and planetary tipping points as reasonable people who just happen to start with different premises. Otherwise, the implication seems to be that eco-modernists, with their opposite story of planetary resilience and human ingenuity, have a monopoly on reason and evidence. Given that a lot of doomist climate people believe the same about their own beliefs, that line of thinking would leave us with an unproductively polarized political situation.

The more that I deal with issues like climate change, the less that I think that most public deliberation does little more than preach to competing choirs. If there’s really a marketplace of ideas, we all seem to have fairly established, almost unmovable, brand preferences. Even though my own thinking changed, I believe it has less to do with suddenly seeing the light and recognizing the objective merits of the facts and arguments that I originally saw as misguided. I can think of no moment in which I suddenly felt persuaded by an opponent’s reasoning. Rather, I think it was due to my own personal commitment to not be so lost within my own ideology. I convinced myself to look for what probably *persuaded others* to think the way that they did.

Ecomodernist rejection of traditional environmentalism tends to lean towards embracing an seemingly opposite but actually counterintuitively similar kind of preservationism as the humanity’s telos: embrace high-tech, hyper-urbanism to get people out of nature.

The more that I tried to put myself in the shoes of others, politically speaking, the more that I couldn’t avoid dwelling on uncomfortable inconsistencies. How could I lecture students about the challenges posed by uncertainty when running a nuclear power plant but not also appreciate the unknowns in achieving plans for a proposed degrowth society? Why would I defend people who didn’t want fracking in their backyard, but portray NIMBYs for urban densification or rural opponents of wind turbines as simply led by the nose by elite interests? Suddenly I became aware that I would need a lot more evidence to be able to judge the political stances of other people, evidence that I often didn’t have or didn’t have the time or ability to acquire or fully understand.

Such is the nature of our current political system, unfortunately, that that kind of intellectual humility can’t find a good place to land. We need decisions now, and the pressure *to know* leads to dogmatism among activists, journalists, politicians, and experts alike. We reach for facts, models, and scenarios to authoritatively justify our political choices, because we struggle to imagine how to do a different kind of politics. What if we started by admitting our ignorance? What if we focused on ongoing learning and maintaining the ability to “re-choose”, given that our original ideas about achieving better societies probably won’t quite work out as well as we thought they would?

My hope for eco-modernists is that they can rediscover the appreciation of uncertainty that originally drove the movement. Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus wrote in 2007, “Whenever people convince themselves that they know what the end of history will look like, they tend to become rather dogmatic about how to achieve it.” Indeed.