Here's My Solution to Climate Change: Part IV

Or, People Do Change But Only for the Better

A bunch of people proving both Status Quoists and Degrowthers wrong. "Ellis Island Public Health Service Physicians" by NIAID is licensed under CC BY 2.0

I want to talk about my great-grandfather, Emilio. About 111 years ago, he got on a boat in Naples and got off that boat in New York City. This is both unbelievably interesting and not at all interesting. It’s unbelievably interesting because, well, how much time do you spend thinking about your ancestors emigrating to America? I moved to a different state and it was the biggest event of my life. It’s almost mind-boggling to think about what they went through. Due to technology, there’s nothing we could do today that’s similar. Even the Bezos Space Stations will probably be linked to your Amazon Prime account. It’s an amazing thing.

It’s also completely uninteresting because about four million people did this. And that’s just the “Italy to America in the decades around the turn of the century” thing. You could just go and watch Godfather II if you want to see this played out.¹ That’s not counting all the other tens of millions of people who did this through other ports of call or through other means. So why would I want to spend this time talking about my great-grandfather? It’s because of a guy named Jason Hickel.

I’ve previously linked to this article on eco-socialists, and it includes a quote from this article by Jason Hickel in the oh so bourgeois socialist rag Current Affairs. There, he argues we need to get rid of things “that are ecologically destructive and offer little if any social benefit” including examples such as McMansions and SUVs. The phrase “little if any social benefit” is doing a lot of work there because it’s missing the words “to me” at the end, which it really needs.

Now, I’m with the author on this. Sure, I didn’t attend a prestigious university like the University of Virginia or teach at the London School of Economics or the University of Barcelona (all of which I’m sure he got to via wind powered boats, which is impressive). But I also don’t like McMansions. Or sport utility vehicles. I think they both suck and are the archetypal symbols of the thing that I – as an urbanized country boy – find most viscerally unsettling: suburbia. They add no social benefit to me! Of course, neither does international air travel or tapas, but I feel like Mr. Hickel may have more resistance to banning those.

I may not like international air travel or tapas or McMansions or SUVs. But lots of other people do. Just because I would never own a McMansion or an SUV doesn’t mean there’s no social benefit to their owners to not living in tract housing and packing their kids into a station wagon. But people who write for Current Affairs haven’t interacted with one of those people since the last time they were forced to fly coach. Which means they don’t give a shit about these people’s preferences and substitute their own. And if you asked them to give up the ecologically destructive activities that offer little social benefit that they like, they’d probably change the conversation to China’s emissions real quick.²

What does any of this have to do with my great-grandfather? It’s because he, and his fellow turn of the Century immigrants, were a living riposte to two of our main villains in this series: Degrowthers like Jason Hickel and Status Quoists like, well, half the comments sections on the internet.

As previously discussed in Part I, Status Quoists are the people who endlessly criticize any of the attempts to move forward that we discussed in the last two parts. You know the type. “We’ll never replace coal with solar” or “People will never eat fake cheese” or “EVs overtaking gas vehicles is a pipe dream.” These people are, of course, wrong. They’re so wrong it’s barely worth discussing. Other than eating, shitting, and – well, it’s too early to drop F bombs here but you know where I’m going – everything about human nature is malleable. What makes them interesting is the degree to which they’re right.

When my great-grandfather was a young boy living in the Mezzogiorno, the world was based around horses. When he got to New York City, he never rode a horse again.³ This is another one of those “can you imagine what this was like” moments I like to bring up here. Since about the 4th Millenia B.C.E. Eurasian society was based around three modes of transportation: walking, riding horses (or other beasts), and ships. That’s it. People think we’ll never give up cars, but we gave up something that was – in some civilizations – older than writing.

One of those other forms – a ship – was how he got here. Of course he would. Traveling over large bodies of water had been done via ship since, well, whenever the first group of people ever crossed a large body of water. So, for all intents and purposes, forever. Crossing any other way had, at that point, never been done. The first flight across the Mediterranean was still two years away. It would have been impossible to imagine that – other than the trip his sons made back to fight the fascists – every single one of his progenies would cross the Atlantic by air.

Okay, so people gave up horses for automobiles and boats for airplanes. This seems like I’m rebutting the Status Quoists – even though I just said they have a point – and not the Degrowthers. Maybe Jason Hickel is right? Maybe we’ll all just ditch Escalades for Priuses (Priii?) and suburbs for walkups in San Francisco and cheeseburgers for crickets? Absolutely not. Because the part they’re missing is that they gave up these important technologies for better technologies.

What Status Quoists are right about is that – with the exception of societal collapse – people don’t change by giving up things they like for things they don’t like. We change constantly, and always have. For better things.⁴ For most people, it was a large improvement to go from a horse to an automobile. Except for the wealthy leisure travel class and the fear of flying set, I think everyone would prefer to cross an ocean in a few hours by plane.

The most interesting example from those Italian immigrants is, for me at least, the one that reflects the most important cultural aspect of them all: food. The single best thing I make – a recipe handed down from my grandmother from her mother – is my spaghetti and meatballs.⁵ This is – other than pizza – the most iconic dish of my (and my great-grandfather’s) culture. Of course, it’s an American dish. There just aren’t a lot of cattle wandering around the mezzogiorno. But you know where there is? Texas. Thanks to a plethora of technological advances – from Samuel Colt’s revolver to increased railway lines to refrigerated rail cars to barbed wire – it was easy for Italian immigrants living in big Northeastern American cities to get beef. Back home they had a lot of fish because, well, look at a map. Here, they had beef.

During the Italian diaspora, Italian immigrants to America didn’t just leave one culture to come to a different culture. They imported their culture here. Sure, a lot of names got changed and a new language was learned. But they imported this new culture and grafted it onto the tree of America, creating a new branch: Italian-Americans. And because America was operating from a vastly different technological standpoint than southern Italy, they changed a whole lot about their culture, including the most important part of Italian culture: the food. Instead of stubbornly sticking to their old ways, they changed, because beef is better than fish.⁶

Better can mean a lot of things. English is probably not a better language than Italian, but for communicating with people in an English-speaking country, it is. Plant-based meats may not be better to you, but for me they are, because when I switch to eating them, my heart doesn’t hurt (not a metaphor for animal cruelty, I’m referring to literal chest pain). For all the flaws of current gen EVs, for some people they are better – either because of the fuel economy or the types of trips they make or maybe just to signal to people they’re the kind of person who owns a Tesla. If something is better, you’ll switch to it, you’ll even abandon something you’ve used for years.⁷ But it has to be better.

The problem with the Degrowthers is that they are basing their plan for fighting climate change on the ludicrously wrong assumption that enough people to make a difference – so tens or hundreds of millions, if not billions – will voluntarily abandon ways of life not for something better but for something worse. Please, give me your examples of this. I’ll go ahead and tell you they don’t exist on a large scale outside of societal collapse. The entire planet won’t embrace asceticism. This tells me you either haven’t thought out your plan or you’re secretly wishing for overwhelming governmental intervention which, well, that’s not going to work either for multiple reasons. It’s a stupid plan. If the Jason Hickels of the world really wanted to make a difference – instead of just looking like they are because it’s beneficial to them socially and professionally – they would get started on making better options for people. You don’t want SUVs anymore? Cool, give people a better option, because unless you’re an upper income urban professional without kids, a Tesla ain’t it. You don’t want people living in McMansions? Cool, half the Degrowthers already live in the Bay Area, maybe expend your energy on this on getting changes so that people can build housing there. Because it seems like your “solution” is “why don’t people live like me?” which makes your whole outlook a marriage of Malthusianism and the most cartoonish version of Horatio Alger conservatism someone could dream up.

The astounding part is that Degrowtherism is that it portrays itself as the serious side of all this. It is not. It is a completely unserious movement. We’ve seen the sources of greenhouse gas emissions, we know what we’d have to cut out of our lives to be able to achieve their fantasies. It is never happening. Yes, people change, cultures change, societies change. But they only change towards what they consider – rightly or wrongly – better. Which means your plan is to either spur unprecedented mass human action through, well, I’ve seen your powers of persuasion, so it won’t be that. Or to engage in widespread eco-terrorism, which seems unlikely. So, I guess the Steven Chus and Greta Thunbergs and Jason Hickels really want the government to take away people’s SUVs and McMansions. Is that a viable plan? We’ll find out next week.⁸

1. And frankly, why are you reading this when you could be watching Godfather II right now? Just smash that like button, share with your friends, then go watch the movie.

2. Originally, this piece then featured about three paragraphs just relentlessly shitting on Degrowthers. Perhaps if this Substack ends up being successful I’ll devote the time into trying to break the current model and make these all Choose Your Own Adventure. “If you want to read an uplifting view, click here. If you want to read Dan be an unmitigated asshole, click here.”

3. This is probably not true, by the way, and I would assume somewhere along the line he rode a horse. But I doubt it was for transportation, so you’ll forgive me eschewing my lawyerly ways for some poetic license.

4. I should note that everything here should probably be phrased in the more precisely but unwieldy “for things we perceive as being better at the time.” For example, I know that many people argue agriculture was inferior to being hunter-gatherers. But clearly, many people at the time didn’t agree. Likewise, in many ways the technologies I’m discussing were inferior. The Industrial Revolution had some nasty side effects, and maybe in the end cars were worse than horses. But at the time, it was easy to perceive it the other way.

5. Full disclosure: I prefer to pair meatballs with rigatoni. Or ziti. Or penne if I’m feeling feisty. Some find this blasphemous, but I prefer a tubular pasta with any tomato-based sauce. And yes, this Substack is just a Trojan Horse to eventually launching my own cooking YouTube show.

6. Sorry but this is completely true. I almost never eat beef anymore – due to health reasons – but it’s orders of magnitude better than fish. All fish tastes the same and if you think otherwise, you’re lying to yourself. If you’re feeling resistance to this it just proves my point.

7. This is me and e-readers. For years I hated the idea of them. When I moved to Texas, I had dozens of boxes of books shipped at great cost and great pain. My next time moving after that I decided I wasn’t crazy about this idea, so I bought a Kindle. I never touch a physical book now unless I’m gifted one. I gave up physical books – one of the core products of my life for over three decades – in an instant because I had a better option.

8. The answer is no, it won’t. The United States government will not be sending troops to seize Chevy Tahoes and lockdown Golden Corrals. I wanted a good teaser for next week, but it would’ve been rude to make you wait. It will be a look at the political element of all this but more based on the impediments to technological progress.