Killing Hope through Solution Denial

A short article in which I provide evidence that the kids are right, actually.

The prolific mathematician Paul Erdős had engraved on his tombstone:

“I've finally stopped getting dumber”

Although Erdős had a sense of humor, I’ll take this statement seriously rather than passing it off as one last attempt at witticism. While you do get more knowledgeable as you get older, curiosity declines and conformity becomes more entrenched. The kids are therefore stuck with the devil’s gift, which is the ability to question what’s going on, but haven't had enough time to acquire the knowledge to understand much of an answer.

In my view Erdős' claim that he was getting dumber is likely true, for him and for most adults. This is because you cannot have answers when you don’t have questions, which may imply that raising questions are at least as important as having answers for them when it comes to an assessment of intelligence.

I want to begin with one very simple example of a conformist in the New York Times, who seemed to think he knew better than Greta Thunberg about the climate and ecological crisis. Upon examining the evidence here, we will see that he didn’t.

The application of this analysis is to remind the kids that most of the adults are conformists. Do the kids need reminding of this? Yeah, a lot of them do unfortunately. The only way to build a better future (or less horrible at this point) is to stop asking “what can we do?”, and just do whatever you already know that you can do. Breaking through this inertia in my view requires constant reminder of how delusional the adults are.

A second application is to show an example of how the cultural managers are there to kill hope. To enforce the fatalist mind. To make you think that climate change, capitalism, and the ecological crisis are all inevitable forces. And to say that there are no solutions except the fake solutions, despite all evidence saying otherwise. A cursory investigation tells us that many good solutions for the ecological crisis have been suggested since the 1970s.

So, I'll start with an article written in 2019, written in the New York Times by Christopher Caldwell, which pretends to understand Thunberg’s views:

Her politics rests on two things. First is simplification. “The climate crisis has already been solved,” she said at a TED Talk in Stockholm this year. “We already have all the facts and solutions. All we have to do is wake up and change.” Second is sowing panic, as she explained at the World Economic Forum in Davos last winter.

Normally Ms. Thunberg would be unqualified to debate in a democratic forum. Since a 16-year-old is not a legally responsible adult, she cannot be robustly criticized and, even leaving aside her self-description as autistic, Ms. Thunberg is a complicated adolescent. Intellectually, she is precocious and subtle. She reasons like a well-read but dogmatic student radical in her 20s. Physically, she is diminutive and fresh-faced, comes off as younger than her years, and frequently refers to herself as a “child” — about the last thing the average 16-year-old would ever do.

This new focus may have the virtue of conveying urgency. But it is going to bring the climate protesters into conflict with democracy, whether they realize it or not.

Aside from being a few cringeworthy and condescending paragraphs, I want to examine the evidence of the statements in bold. Consider the first one, “The climate crisis has already been solved”. I think this has been known for a long time, and an Exxon scientist essentially came up with a pretty good solution in 1979. The solution to avoiding a catastrophe was documented in “Controlling Atmospheric CO2”, which found that:

uncontrolled fossil fuel use would lead to "dramatic climate changes" in the next 75 years and that preventing such an outcome would require "dramatic changes in patterns of energy use," including leaving most fossil fuels unused…and that immediate action was necessary to avoid severe global warming .

…

Knisely found that to achieve the relatively safe concentration, non-fossil fuels would need to be substituted for coal in the 1990s and supply 50% of world energy by 2010. Neither shale oil nor coal (nor, by extension, tar sands) could remain or be developed as major energy sources (Franta, 2022).

This one solution to incrementally stop using fossil fuels and replace them with alternative energy sources, was a pretty good one. Of course, they didn’t carry it out. Nevertheless, it was a solution. A very simple one as well. It’s likely that if they took their solution to the public and got more feedback, then the solution would have been greatly improved upon.

These solutions were proposed, and modelled. Note that one of them limits to 400ppm, which is around 1 degree of warming. Thus avoiding any risk of a cascade of tipping points. This is taken from Franta’s phd thesis (2022).

Another solution that has been suggested increasingly since the Great Financial Crisis is the Green New Deal. Today’s scholars often cite Thomas Friedman as being the earliest advocate of a Green New Deal that they know of. However, in researching for this article, I found that it was suggested as early as 1983, by an economist or activist called Derek Shearer.

In recent years, a number of them, myself included, have proposed structural economic reforms outside the ground rules of the industrial policy debate. This group of "democratic" economists is a part of the post-Keynesian generation. Many hold Ph.D.s in economics or government; others are financial journalists or attorneys or community or union organizers. There's no name to describe this school of thought (I have argued for "economic democracy" with no great success), but there is agreement on certain basic principles:

§ Greater workplace democracy.

§ Public spending to create jobs and stimulate balanced economic growth.

§ Greater public control of capital investment through state and local development banks and employee pension funds.

§ Economic growth guided by social and environmental considerations.

§ Democratic planning mechanisms at the neighborhood, city, state and national levels.

…

A Green economic program would call not just for more jobs; it would call for the creation of jobs, cleaning up the environment, rebuilding the cities, manufacturing trains and trolleys, teaching the young. In short, it would emphasize useful work and the production of things that people need. Green economics would show that the peace issue is linked to the economically destructive effects of military spending. It would also seek to shorten the work week—an issue that has been neglected by left-liberals in this country. The average work week for nonmanufacturing jobs is now about thirty-six hours. Why not lower it to thirty-five or even thirty hours?

The next New Deal should be a Green New Deal—not simply more government programs at the Federal level. It should stress democracy and quality of life for all Americans. And it should be a democratic "greening" of business and government at all levels.

Although Derek Shearer seems to have become a conformist since then, credit is still due for coming up with a pretty good solution to the ecological crisis. If anyone wants to point out real world applications of the social sciences and humanities, they might point to this example. It may well have saved us from severe ecological overshoot if people listened to him. That’s one application of post Keynesian economics.

Of course, it's not even remotely difficult to come up with solutions that would save millions of lives. Anyone of high school education should be able to do it. A lot of them are extremely simple, and sometimes require either doing nothing, or pushing a lever. Here are some:

• Not selling arms to mass murderers and oppressive nations. (doing nothing)

• Not imposing harsh economic sanctions on other nations. (doing nothing)

• Creating money and giving it to people in the global south. (pushing a lever)

• Cancelling some or all debts for governments in the global south. Also known as a debt jubilee. (pushing a lever)

• Abolishing intellectual property rights for big pharma and agribusiness (pushing a lever).

Derek Shearer is hardly the first person to advocate for economic democracy. Historically, it can often take thousands of years of struggle for society to come around to the idea that slavery is bad, or that women’s rights might be a good idea. Given this experience, the hard problem is not coming up with solutions, but getting the rest of society to fight for them. But somehow “grown ups” like Christopher Caldwell cannot even understand this simple distinction.

So the conclusion to make here is that Greta Thunberg’s statement that “The climate crisis has already been solved”, is true. It was solved by scientists working for ExxonMobil in the late 70s, and much better solutions have been suggested ever since.

Now consider the second statement about Thunberg. “She reasons like a well-read but dogmatic student radical in her 20s”. Let’s start by considering that Thunberg said that:

You only speak of green eternal economic growth because you are too scared of being unpopular (COP24, 2018).

Despite her argument against green growth, she still invited the perspectives of Nicholas Stern and Jason Hickel in her Climate Book. These are the leading green growth and degrowth advocates respectively. So she is open to these two perspectives, despite believing that one of them is delusional, and motivated by a desire for conformity. I largely agree with this take.

But more importantly, the book listens to dissidents and activists in the Global South. Very few people do this. So her approach seems to be the opposite of dogmatic.

Now, consider this last statement in the NYT: “But it is going to bring the climate protesters into conflict with democracy, whether they realize it or not.” In Thunberg's Climate Book, she says:

Democracy is the most precious thing we have, but as we have been reminded far too many times it is a fragile system and, unless the citizens are well informed and well educated in the matters that fundamentally shape their lives, democracy is easily manipulated.

Here then, we see that the “grown up” in the New York Times likes to make alternate reality versions of what the kids think. So in summary, the evidence suggests that this particular adult in the New York Times is dogmatic, rather than Thunberg. As seen by his ability to make things up about people with different views, without reading or listening to what they say. And that Greta Thunberg listens to a wide range of perspectives, which is not what top scholars are often capable of doing.

This NYT commentator is not atypical. To give a short overview of what media coverage was like in 2010-2020, The organization Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) did an analysis of how the capitalist media portrays climate change. In aggregate, the narrative has been to “mourn”, rather than “organize”. They summarize it here:

And while it turns out that the US media have indeed ramped up their coverage of the climate crisis, they continue to give short shrift to what are arguably the most important factors for determining our future: what specific human practices are responsible for the changing climate, why carbon emissions continue to rise, and what we can and should be doing about it.

This media analysis was done in 2020. Since then, two solutions have barely entered the debate in the media. These solution sets include both green growth and degrowth. But the problem is their coverage is minimal. Consider the fact that about a third of the global population thinks about the climate crisis every single day. You might expect that at the very least, a critical media would talk about these solutions to the ecological crisis every single day as well.

From this I conclude that solution denial in the media has moved from not talking about solutions, to not talking about them enough. As well as focusing on the anti-solutions.

Degrowth in particular, is a solution that is heavily misrepresented in the media, as well as in academic scholarship. I doubt Joseph Stiglitz or Nicholas Stern have ever read a single article on it. Yet they felt the need to dismiss “no growth” (??) in an article that contains zero citations or quotes from degrowthers. So I mean yes, even the most well established, most “left” of the green growth economists find it very difficult to go outside their echo chambers.

Then there is the fact that social media is what most young people get their information from now. I have to point out that I’ve never used Tiktok or Twitter before. So I cannot have too much of an opinion here.

There are arguments given by climate scientists on social media that human beings are more wired to engage with bad news, due to a negativity bias. That this can reinforce climate doomism echo chambers. These arguments are given by Zahra Biabani in Climate Optimism. I’m not sure if they are convincing enough for me to agree with them. However, social media is not a news generator itself. It is still parasitic of legacy media for people to feed each other news stories. That’s a problem for combating solution denial.

Maybe it’s best to end here with some solutions from databases, handbooks, and “the case for” book series. Some of the policy ideas here are not good. But most are. The existence of them in aggregate should be enough to know that the nightmare that’s coming can be still be heavily mitigated.

Solution Databases and Sets:

Degrowth Database https://degrowth.net/extra/resources/the-degrowth-database/

Drawdown https://drawdown.org/solutions/table-of-solutions

The Case for series:

The Case for a New Bretton Woods by Kevin P. Gallagher and Richard Kozul-Wright

The Case for a Debt Jubilee by Richard Vague

The Case for a Four Day Week by Anna Coote, Aidan Harper, and Alfie Stirling

The Case for Degrowth by Giorgos Kallis, Susan Paulson, Giacomo D'Alisa, and Federico Demaria

The Case for a Job Guarantee by Pavlina R. Tcherneva

The Case for Economic Democracy by Andrew Cumbers

The Case for Medicare for All by Gerald Friedman

The Case for Universal Basic Services by Anna Coote and Andrew Percy

The Case for Community Wealth Building by Joe Guinan and Martin O'Neill

The Case For People's Quantitative Easing by Frances Coppola

The Case for Universal Basic Income by Louise Haagh

The Case for Carbon Dividends by James Boyce

The Case for a Maximum Wage by Sam Pizzigati

Handbooks:

The Sustainable Urban Design Handbook by Nico Larco and Kaarin Knudson - Routledge (2024)

Handbook on Green Growth - Edward Elgar Publishing (2019)

Routledge Handbook of Degrowth edited by Anitra Nelson - Routledge (2024)

Bibliography

Books:

Biabani, Zahra. Climate Optimism. 2024.

Journal Articles

Stern, Nicholas, and Joseph E. Stiglitz. "Climate change and growth." Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, London School of Economics and Political Science. https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/118100/3/Stern_Stiglitz_Climate_change_and_growth_published.pdf

Dissertations

Franta, Benjamin. "Big Carbon's Strategic Response to Global Warming, 1950-2020." PhD dissertation, Stanford University, Department of History, 2022.

Magazine Articles

Shearer, Derek. "Planning With a Political Face." The Nation, December 31, 1983 - January 7, 1984, Vol. 237, Issue 22.

Online Publications

FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting). "Media on Climate Crisis: Don't Organize, Mourn." https://fair.org/home/media-on-climate-crisis-dont-organize-mourn/

Hickel, Jason. "How popular are post-growth and post-capitalist ideas? Some recent data." Jason Hickel Blog, November 24, 2023. https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2023/11/24/how-popular-are-post-growth-and-post-capitalist-ideas