Ted Nordhaus is the Founder and Executive Director of The Breakthrough Institute, the world’s first ecomodernist think tank promoting technological solutions to environmental problems. On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Ted joins Ross and Christophe to discuss the fundamentals of ecomodernism, explaining the movement’s idea of decoupling and offering his response to the degrowther argument against it.
Also on this show
Are you a wizard or a prophet? With Charles C. Mann, June 2020
Paul Kingsnorth on the shared roots of climate crisis, transhumanism and immortality, March 2021
Charles C. Mann on the wizards and prophets of climate change, July 2026
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Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast, by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change. Hello, and welcome to the hundredth episode of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. Can you believe it?
Christophe Jospe: I cannot. We did it, Ross. Triple digits.
Ross Kenyon: Triple digits. Yes. Nori is more than just a podcasting company. Check us out at nori.com, follow us on Twitter @nori, subscribe to this podcast if you haven’t already. It’s been quite a journey. It feels like we keep turning the page and leveling up, new chapters ahead. And I feel like such a noob if you go back and listen to the early episodes. This has been responsible for a lot of exploration, intellectual growth.
Christophe Jospe: I know. It’s been a fun, fun trip. We’ve come so far. We can say big words. Like decarbonization? Yeah, not even slur it.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. All right. So how about — well, I guess I should say we’re in Oakland and there are weird ambient sounds coming from outside, which is, I guess, a good sign. So there’s vibes here. [unclear] Yeah, there’s stuff being built. They probably should build some more stuff, so that’s good. We are here in Oakland, as Christophe says, with Ted Nordhaus, founder and executive director of the Breakthrough Institute, author and editor of a bunch of books, and a co-author of An Ecomodernist Manifesto. So we’re going to dive into that. And while you’re a bad person and all sorts of other things — so, ready to defend yourself?
Ted Nordhaus: I’m ready to go, man.
Ross Kenyon: Well, I guess the best place to start is, what is ecomodernism and what do you do here at the Breakthrough Institute?
Ted Nordhaus: Well, that’s a double-barreled question. I’m not sure I should answer — you can.
Christophe Jospe: Let’s make a triple barrel, then: what’s your connection to ecomodernism? And why is that something that you care about? Maybe we start there.
Ted Nordhaus: Great. So, again, I’m founder and executive director of the Breakthrough Institute, and we are the world’s first ecomodernist think tank. And, you know, what is ecomodernism? You know, I think that, you know, we said that Breakthrough, we’re really about focusing on technological solutions to environmental problems. Ecomodernism is really the view — and we say it, we wrote this thing called An Ecomodernist Manifesto, and we say it really, like, in the first paragraph, I think — but basically there are sort of two ideas that have really sort of animated modern environmentalism for a really long time. And one is that we need to sort of shrink the human footprint in order to sort of leave more room for nature, for non-human nature.
And the other is that we need to sort of harmonize human societies with the natural world in order to sort of sustain them and sustain nature. And the argument that really is kind of really at the core of the Ecomodernist Manifesto is that, you know, in a world of seven going on 10 billion people, you can do one of those things or the other, but you can’t actually do both. You can shrink the human footprint, which means you’re actually less dependent on natural systems, ecosystem services, for human well-being — that’s actually what human societies have been doing for thousands of years now. Or you can try to sort of harmonize, or sort of re-harmonize, human societies with sort of natural flows of energy and nutrients and resources. But that actually makes you more dependent on nature.
And we argue that the more dependent you are on nature, actually, the more damage you do to it — that you need to reduce human dependence on nature in order to leave more room for it. And the less we need it for food, for energy, the less space we use, the more space there is for everything else. So we like cities because they’re really dense, and we like nuclear energy because it’s really dense footprint energy, and we like intensive agriculture because we grow more food on less land, and that leaves more land for forests and grasslands and wetlands and things like that.
Ross Kenyon: And in the previous episode that we did earlier today, actually, with Nathanael Johnson of Grist, he is quoting, from his upbringing, Joni Mitchell — got to get ourselves back to the garden. You want to get us out of the garden, it sounds like.
Ted Nordhaus: You know, I’m all for gardening if you like doing it. I like it as a hobby. I don’t like labor-intensive, land-intensive, low-productivity agriculture, because, first of all, most people don’t actually want to do it for a living. It’s a nice thing to do as a hobby. Most of, you know, certainly in rich countries, almost nobody grows their own food, and that’s going to be the case all over the world, increasingly, over the course of this century — fewer and fewer people living in rural contexts, in agrarian contexts, because, like, there’s better things to do and more opportunities off the farm than on the farm. So that’s where we’re heading. So, yeah, garden as a hobby. I don’t want anyone who wants to do it to not be able to do it, but most people, you know, given a reasonable alternative, choose not to spend most of their time doing hard agrarian labor.
Ross Kenyon: We want to dig into what is good about industrial ag, large-scale ag, but I think we should push it till a little bit later. I want to stay with this top-level kind of question set. I’d recently read your book Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility. Did I get that subtitle right?
Ted Nordhaus: You did, you did. I got it. Well, we — you know, it’s funny, we thought environmentalists, we thought it would be really well received when we wrote the book. So that was the subtitle on the hardcover, that was hopeful. The subtitle on the soft cover, that was on the paperback, we changed it, and it was Why We Can’t Leave Saving the Environment to Environmentalists, or Why We Can’t Leave Saving the Planet to Environmentalists.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s antagonistic a little bit, but I like it. And in that book — at Nori, we tend to focus on carrots and not sticks, and economic opportunity and growth, and we think that’s a really good way to not alienate people. Whereas I think the scarcity dynamic that environmentalists tend to stress puts people on a zero-sum sort of mentality, and it sort of — conflict is almost baked into that rhetorical style. So I like that your focus on what are ways that we can design policy to grow the economy and deal with the environment and climate change and not turn everyone off. Is that — yeah?
Ted Nordhaus: I mean, there’s — yeah, I think, you know, there’s a lot of reasons for that. I mean, one is just that these sort of, you know, if it’s a zero-sum kind of choice between sort of human prosperity, modern living standards, and saving the planet, quote-unquote, I can tell you what’s going to win, and it ain’t going to be saving the planet. You know, billions of people who, you know — environmentalism kind of is really, as a movement, of the affluent. People will dispute that, but if you look at the origins of sort of what we call the environmental movement, it’s really in rich developed economies after World War II, and these are the richest people who’ve ever lived on the planet and the most consumptive people who ever lived on the planet.
And so the whole discourse kind of gets focused on, like, people flying, you know, jet travel, and how much meat do you eat? And meanwhile, like, there’s several billion people who need to eat more protein of some sort in their diets, they need to have more mobility, they need to consume more energy. So if your kind of zero-sum trade-off is between sort of economic development and economic growth and protecting and saving the environment, economic growth and development is going to kind of win out sort of pretty much every time.
Ross Kenyon: It seems like part of what the ecomodernist worldview is about is having your cake and eating it too, or this word that comes up is, like, decoupling, right? Decoupling the environmental impact from the economic growth. And you’re saying we can do it. Is that accurate or fair?
Ted Nordhaus: Yeah, it’s true. I mean, I think there’s a, you know — again, there’s been this tendency to see these two things as oppositional, and there’s lots of — and I think that they’re not, actually. So, you know, when you think about decoupling, you know, another word for decoupling is just long-term productivity growth. Land productivity, water productivity, nitrogen productivity, energy productivity, you name it, carbon productivity. Well, it all happens to be that, like, the main driver of long-term economic growth is total factor productivity. It’s productivity growth. It’s the same thing. So when we really think about kind of what, you know, some people call green growth — you know, green growth is just, it’s just productivity growth. It’s resource productivity growth primarily.
And over the long term, it’s also just — when you use things more efficiently and you actually find useful ways to use waste products, things like that, that’s just economic growth. It’s not some sort of magic, you know. It’s not like the cake’s over here but I eat it over here. It’s like, that’s just part of the cake. I don’t know if that’s the right metaphor, but that’s sort of the idea.
Ross Kenyon: I’m so curious about this decoupling as well, because I’ve read some stuff in degrowth economics — tends to think that there’s almost a one-to-one relationship between GDP growth and material throughput. And I’ve also heard other people say, like, that is absolutely not true. I don’t know what to do with that.
Ted Nordhaus: I’ll tell you what to do with it. You know, degrowth is just a troll. The whole idea is that — it’s just a gigantic troll on, like, human prosperity and progress. And so, like, this sort of — there’s no such thing as absolute decoupling. So, first of all, we actually have all sorts of examples of absolute decoupling all over the world, and the only way that the degrowthers can make this claim is that they look at things at a global level and they look at them over a period of time where, like, global population has tripled and we’ve moved billions of people out of, like, abject agrarian poverty, you know, to something that looks like a modern life. And they go, no, see, there’s been no absolute decoupling on a bunch of materials like sand and gravel that we cherry-picked because the numbers, they fit our argument.
And it’s like, how could absolute decoupling conceivably be happening during a time when just population is growing, and not, you know? So the argument goes, well, that population is growing, but, you know, it’s a rebound, this Jevons paradox, you know, all of this efficiency is just, like, creating more demand. And you’re like, well, no, actually, mostly it’s just been population growth. And most of that population growth is not, as Malthus suggested, because people are having more children, because fertility rates are rising — actually, through the entire period fertility rates have been falling. It’s just that, like, we have, like, basic good public health, so people live longer, and we have decent nutrition.
But the thing that happens is people kind of get through that transition, through that sort of bottleneck where population is still growing really fast and incomes are rising really fast. You know, once you get through that bottleneck, you look at the growth rates — just straight-up economic growth rates in developed economies. You know, most of them are struggling to sustain, like, two percent annual growth, and that’s in economies that, you know, are increasingly knowledge and services, you know, economies where there’s just demonstrably lower resource throughput associated with each additional dollar of economic output.
So you put those things together over the long term with continuing improvements in resource productivity, and, you know, we’ve seen absolute decoupling across large economies. And you can’t account for it by saying, well, it just all moved to China. Like, agricultural production in the United States didn’t move to China. We’ve continued to actually increase agricultural production, but land use is flat, water use has fallen, fertilizer use is flat. You know, Europe has seen absolute decoupling in cropland — there’s less cropland. We’ve got forests returning all over the world because we need less land to grow food. And we’re talking about, like, the largest single human impact on the environment.
So, like I said, I think it’s just — I used to try to argue with these guys and I just stopped, because I think the whole thing’s just kind of a troll. It’s a very kind of slippery style of argument that sort of cherry-picks and kind of manipulates. When you even look at their supposedly empirical analyses, when you kind of get down to the bottom of it, the entire sort of research designs are there to actually kind of make a point. It’s not like, let’s go kind of look at the biggest environmental impacts and then look at whether we can find evidence of real absolute decoupling. It’s like finding things that, like, like gravel, where, like, of course you couldn’t. Or, for that matter, like, energy consumption. Like, how could energy consumption have absolutely decoupled during a period when, like, we know — you don’t have to do a fancy analysis, you know, that since 1950 global energy use has quintupled, for good reasons. And energy isn’t even the right metric. It’s sort of — it’s carbon associated with the energy. So, sorry, I went off on a rant.
Ross Kenyon: But epic rant. If you’re listening and you like degrowth economics or steady-state economics, you’ll get your turn. We’ll have you on, you can come say it right here.
Christophe Jospe: And yeah, I like that you rant, Ted, but I don’t know if I agree with everything that you’re saying, so maybe let me —
Ted Nordhaus: All right, let’s hear it. Let’s spar a little bit.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. Well, okay, so let’s talk about agriculture, industrial agriculture. You know, what’s happening across the United States is farms are getting bigger and bigger. They’re consolidating, the small farm’s going out of business. You would say that’s a good thing, that’s fine, because that’s just — we’re becoming more efficient. But might that also actually make us more fragile to certain changes, because the consolidation of farming is usually in a monoculture crop that’s using more and more inputs to try to just eke out a little more yield, but not even looking at, like, the full picture?
When actually the human economy of bringing farmers, or more people, back to the land, although it may be less efficient from a unit economics perspective, could create greater efficiencies in the human capital, in the knowledge that’s transferred from what they’re doing, in the understanding of maybe their local disasters or weather events, where you now have more people who can handle those things — as opposed to, we’ve pushed ourselves into consolidation, just put robots on farms everywhere. I mean, is there a middle ground, or no?
Ted Nordhaus: No, I mean, I just feel like we’ve been — we’ve been, you know, we’ve been consolidating in this country, you know, for 150 years. You know, people have been leaving agriculture as fast as they could for 150 years. You know, in 1930, in the midst of the Great Depression, there were seven million farms in the United States. Now there’s two million. So this isn’t a new phenomenon. It’s not actually because of a great, you know, a global, you know, or corporate agribusiness conspiracy. It’s because people actually have better things — you know, like, give people something better to do than farm, and most people are going to decide not to farm.
So, you know, the sort of kind of traditional enviro kind of left narrative here, which sort of combines kind of elite power conspiracy with sort of agrarian romanticism, is just — it’s enclosure writ large, right? It’s the story of, like, the enclosure of the English countryside, you know, everywhere. But actually, you know, mostly it’s just agglomeration, it’s not enclosure. It’s people kind of leaving the farm because of better things to do someplace else, because there’s better lives to be had. Like, you look at declining fertility rates — think about things environmentalists like: cities, and declining fertility rates, women’s empowerment. Every one of those things actually associated with people leaving the farm, not staying on the farm. So there’s this sort of counterfactual fabulous world where, like, everyone has, like, one point nine children and a PhD and they’re still working on their small farms. But I’m sorry, that’s just a utopian fantasy. It doesn’t work like that.
Ross Kenyon: In this world we’re all caught — Christophe and I especially — in this dialectic between, you know, love the work of Wendell Berry. I find it poetic and beautiful in lots of ways. But also I love markets, I like modernity, I think that’s the way to go. So we just have these fantasies of being gentleman farmers, but we’re just posers, I think, Christophe.
Christophe Jospe: Not everyone should aspire to that, though. I think that would be a mistake. And the broader point, I think, is well taken. You gotta have some of that scale. Like, I’d love to have a cow in my yard, you know.
Ted Nordhaus: Look, I live in the Berkeley Hills and, like, I wake up every morning to, like, people’s backyard chickens, and they, you know, they think that they’re, like, changing agriculture. But the truth is, like, when the chickens die, they go down to Whole Foods and they buy — you know, forget the sort of supposed, like, label, it’s organic or pasture or whatever. Those eggs, those chickens are being raised on big, you know — even organic is, it’s big agriculture, it’s big farms. That’s what allows — when your chickens get eaten by the fox, like, because you’re actually too crappy, you know, you’re not handy enough to actually, like, build the coop so that the predator stays out, and, like, a weasel or something gets into your chicken coop and kills all the chickens.
You know what you do? You go to Whole Foods and you buy it from some huge farm that’s automated, that’s routinized, that’s highly capitalized, and they know what they’re doing. And this is actually what resilience looks like. It’s not everybody with chickens in their backyard. It’s the fact that there’s a Whole Foods with eggs that came from 400 miles away. So that, like, when sh*t goes down anyways, you know, where you are, you can still go get your eggs and your milk and your flour and all the other things you want to eat. That’s what resilience looks like.
Ross Kenyon: [unclear] I’m surprised the residents of Berkeley haven’t run you out of town.
Ted Nordhaus: Well, you know, they made me move across the line. I live in this weird little part of the Berkeley Hills. It’s not technically Berkeley, but it really is. But, you know, because it’s not Berkeley, they can’t throw me out. I lived in Berkeley for, like, 17 years — but, no, like 25, actually.
Ross Kenyon: So help us out a little bit, Ted. You’ve painted ecomodernism in a certain light, and you’ve also talked about environmentalists writ large, or other schools of thought. But where does it all fit? How might you contrast environmentalism to ecomodernism to other forms of the environmental movement?
Ted Nordhaus: Yeah, I mean, you know, we’ve talked about a couple. We’ve talked about sort of the degrowth, we talked about kind of whatever this sort of romantic agrarian. There’s an older conservation tradition, obviously. There’s, you know, a lot of what we would consider sort of modern environmental ideology, institutions, consciousness, really kind of is born of kind of the New Left in the early ’60s. And, you know, I think that’s sort of an interesting sort of taking-off point, because you kind of go, like, well, when is this happening? You know, and it’s happening — like, literally, this is the first generation to have ever come of age amidst affluence, right? This is the post-war — these are the boomers, this is the post-war generation, kind of raised in the sort of modernity and monotony of the 1950s.
And so it is on one level sort of not surprising that this is the generation that actually kind of sort of loses track of the basic kind of material preconditions for their affluence, for their self-actualized lives, for the fact that they don’t have to get up every morning and haul water, or, you know, literally try to, like, hand-wring dry clothing, or to go out and, like, have to be out, like, you know, trying to do whatever it is you do to a heifer at five in the morning, like, on a farm. Boy. I’m not — I did not, I did not grow up on a farm, I make no bones about it.
I’d like to say that people always, like, have you ever talked to a farmer? You should go talk to a farmer. And this is, like, what I love about that little kind of insult, is that it’s, like, the insult that people use to basically, like, when someone, like, makes a point that they don’t like or they can’t refute it. And it doesn’t matter, it’s, like, ideologically neutral, right? Like, the agribusiness people say it to people they disagree with, like, the regenerative ag people say it to people, the organic people, anyone you disagree with. And you’re like, I’m done arguing with you, so you should just go talk to a farmer — as if that’s sort of, like, you can’t say anything about agriculture unless you’ve talked to a farmer, and anyone who disagrees with you has obviously never talked to a farmer. So, no, I did not grow up on a farm.
Did I derail you in the way that they did? I was making some other point — I wish I could remember what it was, but [unclear] whatever you do with a heifer.
Ross Kenyon: The ’50s being Eisenhower.
Ted Nordhaus: Yeah. Anyway. So it’s, like — yeah, it’s not surprising that, like, you know, in this moment of sort of, like, really kind of almost unprecedented security and affluence, you know, like, unprecedented kind of in almost the entirety of human history, you know, this whole generation kind of decides that somehow it’s all, you know, it can’t last, right? This is sort of really the kind of beginning of sort of apocalyptic environmentalism, and it comes from the left, because, of course, the left, you know, up until this point, you know, the old Marxist left, it’s sort of dialectical materialism, you know — they like things big. Well, they like things big. You know, it was very much focused on kind of production.
And, you know, the belief was that, you know, the argument, the Marxists believed that capitalism would immiserate the poor. And then you get to, like, you know, 1964, and it’s like the American and, increasingly, the European working classes are, like, the two wealthiest, most prosperous working classes that have, like, ever existed, by a lot. So, of course, it’s at this moment that the left really sort of shifts its critique of capitalism, and it’s environmental. So now capitalism isn’t going to immiserate the poor materially, but it’s going to make them sick, and it’s going to poison us, and it’s going to result in the sort of collapse of civilization, because we’re going to eat our seed corn and, you know, destroy the biocapacity of the planet, and all of that.
And that’s not to say that pollution and environment — but these kind of apocalyptic narratives kind of gained popular purchase at this very particular time, and coming from a very particular kind of political tradition that is sort of — you have to situate in this kind of remarkable period of kind of abundance and prosperity that kind of, like, no one, that mass populations have never experienced prior to, you know, the 1950s, really.
Ross Kenyon: So, I mean, clearly you care about the climate issue, and you get the climate math: there’s too much carbon in the atmosphere, we need to decarbonize as quickly as possible, we need to draw the carbon back out, if you want to avoid catastrophic climate change. No quibbles there?
Ted Nordhaus: I think we’re definitely — I’d quibble with that last part.
Ross Kenyon: You don’t want to draw carbon?
Ted Nordhaus: I’m happy to do it. Okay. I mean, I guess I feel like a big part of what we do here at Breakthrough, and I’ve always done — and it’s actually different than even some, you know, a lot of ecomodernists — is just to make a non-apocalyptic case for climate mitigation. That, like, the future can be better or worse, and probably, you know, all else equal, lower emissions and lower temperature increases will be better than more, higher. There’s just higher climate risk, more disruption, you know, probably greatly simplified ecosystems, that might not, you know, kind of undermine our ability to thrive materially. But, you know, I would like to kind of preserve biodiversity all across the planet, just for kind of — I can’t even exactly give you a good reason why, other than I think we should. I think it’s beautiful. I think it’s, you know, kind of a part of our sort of evolutionary, our sort of deep evolutionary experience.
So, your point is, yes, I care about this stuff, but both on sort of technical grounds, but also in terms of kind of, like, efficacy. I just don’t think that we actually have ever gotten hardly anywhere on any of this stuff by threatening people with apocalypse.
Ross Kenyon: You’ve been around long enough — where have you seen climate policies that are trying to get things right from an atmospheric carbon perspective, where we see them succeed or fail?
Ted Nordhaus: Yeah, I mean, I’m kind of more — and I think I’ve become more and more this way the longer I’ve looked at this stuff — that, like, most of the progress we make, kind of climate benefits come along for the ride. So you can find just very little evidence that any sort of explicit climate policy has much sort of changed the trajectory of emissions just about anywhere. On the other — and we can kind of find better cases, at least where sort of policies that were often motivated for other reasons brought climate benefits. Obviously, like, in recent years especially, clean energy sort of investment and policies to support solar and wind particularly, you know, those are motivated in part by climate concerns, but I think they’re just more motivated by the idea that we should just kind of have sort of continuing innovation towards energy technologies.
If you look at kind of the public support for that stuff, it’s not like, we have to do this because the world is going to end. It’s just kind of like, we like clean energy, it’s better than dirty energy, and we don’t like carbon prices or carbon taxes, but we’re happy to subsidize it. So, you know, I think that’s an interesting example. Or you look at, like, the coal-to-gas transition we’ve seen in the U.S., you know, which was motivated by, like, actually decades — or driven by decades of federal policy that no one paid much attention to. It was really kind of pretty sub rosa stuff, but it’s had big climate benefits. There’s people who contest it. I don’t think it’s — a strong case for a bunch of the claims that are made, that, like, gas is as bad as coal, it’s kind of basically nonsense.
But, you know, obviously it’s not going to get you to zero by 2050, or 1.5, or even two C of warming. But then, I don’t think any of this stuff is. I’ve focused very much on, like, you know, let’s kind of pick good and not hold out for the perfect. And a lot of that good is going to happen for other reasons. It’s clean air. You know, we just published a thing just demonstrating that, you know, the economic benefits just from the public health benefits of, like, the energy transition, at least in the sort of short and probably medium term, actually outweigh the climate benefits. People not dying, [unclear]. Yeah, yeah. And all of the kind of economic costs, both public and private, that come with that.
And the truth is that, like, you know — and it’s still the case that, like, actually, like, you know, we talked about, you know, maybe the public concern and willingness to do something about climate change has finally tipped, and whatever. But, you know, you go back — and I was a pollster before I did this — and, like, any poll you ever did, like, people still care way more about clean air and water than they do about climate change. So, you know, as a sort of basic political proposition, like, I’d much rather just bring the climate stuff along for the ride and kind of do the thing that delivers just much more immediate benefits for people.
Ross Kenyon: Now, you mentioned this in your book Break Through, which, by the way, that aged very well. It was written — which administration was it? It was, it was with the end of the second Bush.
Ted Nordhaus: Yeah, it was published in 2007.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. And a lot of the themes have just carried on, seemingly. And you have a great section there about why not to threaten people with apocalypse. And I think it sort of inspires some of the worst qualities of humans. They’ll start denying that it actually is a problem. They won’t take it nearly as seriously. They start worrying about, like, protecting what they already have and not being as generous as they might otherwise be. And so your proposal that I saw on this is a line that Ramez Naam, who’s a Nori advisor and a friend of ours, he’s been stressing the need for Apollo-style or, like, Marshall Plan-style, like, make clean energy so cheap that it just can compete on its own sake, and everything else will sort of go along for the ride. Is that still broadly how you think about it, as a jobs and technology [unclear]?
Ted Nordhaus: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, I mean, if I was going to kind of sort of — well, I have kind of chastised myself, or my earlier, younger self, for some things I said.
Ross Kenyon: I want to hear some of that.
Ted Nordhaus: And, you know, one of them, you know, frankly, I think we sort of sold a lot of this, you know, as a bit of a bill of goods. You know, we promised that there was going to be this kind of clean energy industrial policy that was going to put, like, millions of people back to work, like, making solar panels and wind turbines. And frankly, that didn’t happen, and frankly it could never have happened. Because, like, if you really understand kind of the way that energy works in modern economies — I mean, the benefits of, like, cheap clean energy just ramify across the entire economy. So those economic benefits were never going to be concentrated in, like, solar manufacturing.
I mean, if you look at, like, natural gas, you know, the shale gas revolution, you know, created a fair number of jobs in, like, the oil and gas sector, but it created way, way more jobs just across the entire economy, because energy — and, you know, both natural gas as an input to manufacturing, and things just a bit cheaper because it’s more — it’s cheaper, it’s more available. Like, we actually had a whole lot of energy-intensive industries come back to the U.S. because of the cheap — because it was just cheap gas available. Refining, chemical, stuff like that.
So, to your point, I think that actually kind of makes the broader point, which I think is still 100% correct, which is that we’re going to deal with climate change by making clean energy cheap. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be cheaper than the carbon-based alternatives, but it needs to be pretty darn close, so that, like, you know — it’s not that you can do all this without some sort of regulatory or pricing or other set of policies, but the sort of economic and political lift necessary for those policies has to be modest. You’ve got to get close, and then whether it’s a low carbon tax or it’s a, you know, clean energy standard or something else, you know, it’s not a big deal.
You know, you look at these various analyses on, like, you know, we have this huge debate around, like, what’s the right, like, social discount rate in somebody’s model for, like, whether we should have — we should be starting with, like, a 30 dollar price on carbon or a two hundred dollar per tonne price on carbon. That’s, like, you know what, guys? Like, we can’t even, like — even in the best of circumstances, we can’t sustain, like, eight dollars a tonne. So, like, this is just a completely academic argument. And practically, when you look at and understand how real political economies function — and that doesn’t just mean corporate power, it just means that, like, all sorts of people’s sort of short-term economic interests are often quite well aligned with what the fossil fuel industry is — that, you know, you’ve got to figure out how you do this with sort of fairly modest pricing and regulatory policies. And that means you have to make clean energy and low-carbon technology close to, if not cheaper than, the incumbent technology.
Ross Kenyon: Why hasn’t that happened with nuclear energy? Is it a failure of policy? Is it market-driven?
Ted Nordhaus: Both, right. It’s a little bit of both. I mean, it’s policy, it’s institutions, and it’s technology, kind of all together. I think we kind of, you know — one of the things, one of the problems with these kind of climate policy and environmental policy debates is that there’s this idea that kind of, like, technologies are over here and, like, policies are over here. And really, like, different technologies work in different sort of socio-institutional, technological contexts. So, you know, frankly, even today, you know, if we were, like, let’s just go be France, or even China or Korea, and just, like, we’re going to have a sort of pretty top-down centralized economy, we’re going to have, like, a state-owned enterprise that’s going to, like, build and operate the nuclear plants, and we’re going to have a nationalized power sector, and we’re going to finance it with long-term, low-interest-rate public finance — nuclear would still be the cheapest way to fully decarbonize the energy sector, based on, like, the technologies we have now, even though, like, the first five or ten plants you built would be really, really expensive. But they last for 80 years.
Ross Kenyon: I don’t think this guy saw Chernobyl, Christophe.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. [unclear] Oh yeah, it’s really good. But I’m sure, like, a lot of people — I’m sure a lot of your listeners are like, dude, did you see Chernobyl? It comes up every podcast that nuclear comes up on. I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but you’re progressively inclined, and your writing, your audience seems to be other progressives, saying, hey, this is something that you should take seriously.
Ted Nordhaus: Well, I — should they? I mean, my point is, like, so we can get into this endless debate about Chernobyl. I mean, the science is actually really clear that, like, it didn’t kill a million people. You know, it’s like four to nine thousand ultimately premature deaths over the entire lifetime of the exposed population, from thyroid cancers. That’s basically it, besides, like, the, like, 50 guys who — like, that’s the one part of the movie, that we — the series, that was right. Like, they literally had these guys, they didn’t even have, like, radiation suits, and they’re, like, shoveling, you know, throwing, like, parts of the reactor core back into the hole, you know? I mean, it was — yeah, and that’s Soviet. Like, lots of other things went really, really badly under that system too. It wasn’t just nuclear energy.
But, you know, and I would say that, like, you know, my view, I just said, like, it would still be, like — even the technology we have, if you just, like, want to fully decarbonize really, really fast, but just do it, like, forget markets, forget all of that, we don’t have time for that, you know? We actually have to stop trying to, like, bribe private actors to sort of do the right thing for the climate. It’s like an asteroid, we have 12 years — then just nationalize the whole thing and build the plants. And, like, yeah, we might even have a meltdown or two, and it would be better than catastrophic climate change. I mean, if that’s, like, what you think about climate change, and then you’re like, no, we can’t do that because Fukushima, you know, which killed nobody and will kill nobody — then I’m sorry, you know, that’s not a particularly convincing answer to me.
Now, I am of the view that it’s not like an asteroid, it’s like diabetes, as I argued recently. We’re not going to rapidly decarbonize the global economy, we’re going to slowly decarbonize the global economy. And most places, like the United States, Europe, increasing places around the world, we’re just not willing to, like, lend authority to anybody to tell us, like, what to do, or to nationalize energy, you know, big sectors of our economy. So it’s going to be this kind of kludgy sort of market, sort of regulation. You know, people talking about degrowth, need to end capitalism, and then getting on a plane and flying halfway around the world to go to the next conference where they’re going to say that — like, that’s actually the world we live in. And I think in that world, these big, basically public works projects, we’re not going to do it. We just won’t actually allow enough social authority, you know, invest centralized institutions with enough power to do that.
So in that future, which I think is the future we’re heading to, you know, I think that you need kind of pretty radically different nuclear technologies that look more like sort of smaller-scale solar, wind. You know, we’re going to figure out how to kind of bolt carbon capture things onto the existing power plants in some places. It’s going to be, like I said, it’s going to be this really kind of kludgy, slow, muddled decarbonization. And in that future, like, we need, like, Gen IV nuclear plants that are, like, you know, three megawatts or 50 megawatts and not a gigawatt. Like, if nuclear is going to have a future, that’s what it’s going to look like. And those technologies will be manufactured, will get really — I don’t even know if they’ll be cheaper over, like, the full 80-year lifetime of a nuclear plant that’s financed with public money, but we’re not going to do that, and they’ll be a lot cheaper than trying to build big nuclear plants in the sort of socio-economic and political economies that we’re going to have.
Ross Kenyon: So that’s a tough one, especially — so, because you document this quite well in The Empty Radicalism of the Climate Apocalypse, which is, if you think that climate change is an impending apocalypse and there’s something about, like, a decade left to act or we’re really screwed, I would think they would be much more radical and much more willing to entertain, how many nuclear meltdowns is it worth to avoid climate change? I want to — I want to get into that calculation. That’s right. Is it three? Is it 100? Like, how bad do you think climate change is? Because at some point it should be worth it to do this, but I don’t see a lot of those serious trade-offs being discussed or even being entertained. I like your focus on the numbers and details, even though sometimes you push against things that I believe, and it hurts my feelings.
Ted Nordhaus: Well, which — it’s not, I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings about, like — I really like people.
Christophe Jospe: We just want to help you get a Breakthrough, Ross.
Ross Kenyon: Well, yes, it’s tough love, man. No, no, it’s true. And I try not to be emotionally invested in any of these things either. So you could talk me out of — or I try to be able to be talked out of any position I hold, because if you don’t do that, you’re just sort of already trapped in, you’re on the losing side. So thanks for —
Ted Nordhaus: And I’ll tell you what, you know, like, I just — to be, like, call bullsh*t on myself, like, for all my, like, all of this organic regenerative, it’s all bullsh*t, I still can’t quite help myself, like, going down to my nice, like, Monterey Market in Berkeley, or my farmers market, and buying that sh*t, and I’m thinking that it’s better, even when, like, why, I’m not even sure, you know? Like, sometimes — yeah, like, you know, when you pet the cows to death, man, they probably do taste kind of better. But, like, I can’t — like, I can’t quite — it’s hard for me even to sort of separate my kind of social class, and all of the kind of social capital and cultural capital that’s tied up in my consumption, from all the things that I actually know about sort of environment, you know, the numbers and the math and the environmental issues.
Ross Kenyon: So you’re just a bullsh*tter.
Ted Nordhaus: I’m kind of a bullsh*tter like everybody else. You know, environmentalism is really good for one thing, and that’s for just the kind of production of bullsh*t and discourse. Like, that’s really like — it’s a whole cottage industry.
Ross Kenyon: I can’t name this episode — but maybe I should. Ted, we have a tradition that we’ve done for a long time and we’re trying to make it catch on more. Given that you have such strong feelings that, I’m sure, our audience — some of you may even be angry right now, some of you may feel attacked. So, Ted, in order to turn the scales back a bit: who do you think is your best critic? Who’s, like, the smartest person that you’re like, damn it, they got a point?
Ted Nordhaus: So there’s people who I, like, really, really like even though I, like, really disagree with them. So I put, like, Bill McKibben in that — you know, like, I know, like, kind of Bill. I wouldn’t say he was exactly a champion of The Death of Environmentalism, but Bill was, like, one of the first, like, really important environmental sort of people, you know, thought leaders, who was, like, hey, we gotta pay attention to this, this is important. And so, like, I kind of — I criticize Bill a lot, a bunch of the stuff he’s done over the last decade or so, kind of, I find increasingly problematic intellectually. But I really love Bill. I really, you know, I just think he’s kind of one of the loveliest people I’ve ever met.
Another example, like David Wallace-Wells. Like, you know, his book is beautiful, but if you don’t think that apocalypse is nigh, it’s not going to do much. And I have, like, I’ve had a great kind of email correspondence with David for quite a while now, just kind of, like, quite respectfully kind of arguing with him. And, you know, and I think, you know, kind of I feel like he has a point, you know, like, there’s a key thing in there, which is that there are just sort of — there are catastrophic risks tied up with this stuff that, like, no one can actually quantify. And I think David sometimes kind of goes sort of, you know, too far in kind of taking these what are really worst-case scenarios and suggesting that this is, like, our future if we don’t do something.
Ross Kenyon: A lot of people were mad about this too. I saw there was a lot of takes. They were mad about just sort of stressing this imminency, and, like, these are almost guaranteed to happen. Right, he wasn’t saying this is, like, if you run the probabilities out, this is 0.3 or whatever.
Ted Nordhaus: Yeah, yeah. It’s sort of like — how do you deal — you know, I think there’s a real question about how to deal with sort of low-probability but kind of catastrophic, if not existential, threats. So, I, you know, I really like David and I respect him, even though I disagree with sort of how he’s deployed some of the stuff. And I was going to give — there’s one other example, and I’m just more generally, as outside of a person — like, you know, I think if the degrowthers were more honest, they would have a stronger critique, which is that, like, I can show you different ways that, like, you know, absolute decoupling in fact has happened, and that, you know, it’s not very difficult to see how, you know, over the long term all these trends that right now are what we call relative decoupling will become absolute decoupling.
Just, you look at the population trajectories, you look at slowing growth rates as economies get richer. It’s not that far, but it ain’t happening soon. And so I think the more kind of serious critique of, like, ecomodernism and decoupling is, you know, in the future we’re all dead, as John Maynard Keynes famously said. Like, if you have a kind of particularly catastrophic view of climate risk, if you think the emergency is right here, well, then, like, this long-term, slow decoupling of human well-being, material well-being, from ecological impacts doesn’t do us much good, because, like, everything’s going to fall apart and collapse long before we get there.
And, like, I don’t actually kind of have that — I don’t think it actually is going to work that way, but I think that is a very, very fair critique. If you are much more worried about catastrophic impacts, then, like, why are you arguing about whether absolute decoupling can ever happen, versus just, like, there’s these planetary boundaries and we’ve already crossed them, and we’re about to cross them, and once we cross them, the end is nigh? Then, like, the ecomodernist vision of sort of absolute decoupling with a prosperous population of 8 or 9 billion people doesn’t much matter, because we’re never going to get there. So, you know, I think there’s lots of kind of fair critiques of that.
Ross Kenyon: But George Monbiot says — well, I can’t remember which critique it was, but it’s in The Guardian, of course. But what does it — I mean, it basically came out a couple days after the release of An Ecomodernist Manifesto. This was the thing where he says, like, this is not true, you know, small farms —
Ted Nordhaus: I mean, we actually wrote a response to that. You know, I’ve met George and he’s a very smart guy. You know, he’s — honestly, he’s very ideological. So, you know, George goes — and his entire argument is based on this evidence that really, really small farms in poor countries have higher, you know — and really it’s kind of marginally higher yield than somewhat larger, really small farms. And that’s because, like, basically they have free labor, like, in these sort of really subsistence, very small farms, like, women and children are basically chattel and they’re free labor. And because you can sort of put more labor into the agricultural sort of system, you get a higher yield than, like, when you move to, like, a slightly larger farm where you’re much more in a kind of cash economy and you have to pay for your labor, and the labor’s gone to the city because, like, they can live a better life, and you actually get a somewhat lower yield.
Now, the reality is, you know, when you go from, like, a two-acre farm to a 100-acre farm, the yields are much higher. So this is actually, you know — again, it’s a little bit of a kind of cherry-picked claim that is sort of dependent on talking about only, basically, sort of that very immediate short-term move, really true absolute subsistence, where, like, you have lots of children and they don’t go to school, they, like, work on the farm, and that’s how you get your somewhat higher yield than, like, when you go to, like, a bigger farm and most of the women and children have moved to the city or are in school. That’s actually pretty much the entirety of his critique.
Ross Kenyon: Do you think we can bait George Monbiot and David Wallace-Wells onto the show? We’re coming for you guys.
Ted Nordhaus: I think so. You get ready. Gotta go, gotta go in the [unclear].
Ross Kenyon: Bill McKibben precedes you, but I think by three or four hours. All right, so he came on and he was — he was very gracious, wonderful episode too. We should definitely link that in the show notes. I was a little bit surprised by what he had to say. It showed that he was more malleable than you might have painted.
Ted Nordhaus: What are you — what did he say?
Ross Kenyon: Well, he said — people have to go listen to the podcast, obviously, right?
Ted Nordhaus: Give me the Reader’s Digest, for — I’m kind of old, so I don’t, I don’t really get the podcast thing. I like when you guys listen to all these podcasts, you know, you can actually [unclear], so it just, like, sounds like a bunch of chipmunks. How do you do it, though? Like, where it’s like — I think it must be that, like, you know, I’m, like, Gen X, and I think once you get kind of more kind of late Gen X to millennial, like, everybody is so much better at multitasking. I see, I walk around my office, my staff, they have their AirPods in and they’re, like, listening to a podcast and tweeting and, like, running, like, R on, like, a data set and writing a blog post all at the same time, and I’m just like, oh boy, I cannot do that.
Ross Kenyon: Well, who knows if they’re any good anyway. So, so the shorter version? So the short version — I mean, you just, I just, you know, what Bill’s about: he’s going after the systems and institutions that are responsible for dumping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, fossil-based carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and he wants to see fossil fuel executives in prison, because he thinks that they’ve lied and misled us. And I can’t say I entirely disagree with him. But what was interesting, he came to terms that he would say they would not need to go to prison if they actually were willing to pay more than the externality of what they previously had dumped into the atmosphere.
Go to prison unless you support a carbon — unless not only you support a carbon tax, unless you pay to remove the excess carbon that you’ve already added, and then you’re good, you’re off the hook. And I actually found that to be a very gracious and important compromise, and in a day and age where it’s just so many echo chambers and angry people on the internet, that when you can find that common ground, it gives me just a little bit of hope that we can get this right.
Ted Nordhaus: Let me tell you, in this future where we sort of start sending people to prison for their, like, political beliefs, I’m really, really concerned that is not going to be the fossil fuel executives that are going to get locked away. I think it’s going to be us.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it flashes out that French Revolution in there — [unclear] and the kangaroo court, gonna be like — I don’t know. That, I love it.
Ted Nordhaus: Avocado politics — have you heard that term?
Ross Kenyon: I have not.
Ted Nordhaus: Yeah, so it was coined by a friend of mine, Nils Gilman. He — we did a panel on sort of populism and the environment, and Nils goes, like, be careful what you wish for when, like, the right wing really starts to kind of get apocalyptic about climate change. It’s going to be a Green New Deal — we’re going to get, we’re gonna get, like, just really kind of pretty rad Mussolini, restrict — yeah, we’re gonna get restrictive immigration. We’re going to get — it’s going to be very ugly. It’s going to be, to your earlier point, going to be very zero-sum.
So this is obviously kind of part of my concern about sort of these apocalyptic narratives, is that they do not — the idea that, like, everyone’s going to freak out about climate change and we’re going to have a climate emergency and it’s going to be, like, a Green New Deal, happy, get to work together, international coordination of carbon policy. No, it’s going to be like concentration camps and walls and resource wars. So this is really, like, the thing that I’m, like, guys, like, this, like, happy progressive future that comes when everyone signs up — you know, it’s like, you think you’re going to be, like, sending the fossil fuel executives to jail, but no, actually it’s going to be, like, you and your civil liberties that, you know, are getting marched away.
Ross Kenyon: So, to read back what I’m hearing you say is, we should not be afraid of apocalyptic climate change, we should be afraid of the apocalypse that comes with humanity’s [unclear].
Ted Nordhaus: I am, actually. I’m much more afraid of the apocalyptic response to climate change than I am of the apocalyptic consequences of climate change. Now, I will grant you that you can’t necessarily pull those things apart, right? Like, you know, it might not take too many, like, really bad hurricanes and droughts and floods to kind of get, like, Trump to be like, I’ve changed my mind, I believe in climate change, and we’re going to deport all of those illegal immigrants, but maybe not to this earth, you know? Like, you could just see pretty horrible things happening.
Ross Kenyon: We’ve been trying to do an episode about this for a while with a national security expert, because the — the [unclear] that we get hung up on the most are not, New York might go underwater, and they’ll build physical infrastructure, they will deal with it. I’m more worried about what happens when you have water shortages, or, yeah, there’s a massive food shortage and famine in some place and they’re all flooding into the country as migration. Yeah. And then there’s, like, a populist reaction against that. That’s what scares me quite a lot more so than just, like, the polar bears.
Ted Nordhaus: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s a flip side to it also. I’ve been wanting, at some point I want to do this, to do kind of, like, a scenario visioning exercise where it’s kind of, like, what would it look like for human societies to adapt really well to, like, four degrees of warming? And I think what would be really interesting, because I think when you think that through, like, it actually undermines a lot of the kind of the politics of a lot of the adaptationist arguments. In other words, like, the things that would be required to, like, adapt well would be kind of, like, open borders, or, you know, allowing people to migrate across borders, like, super-integrated sort of institutions and trade, and things like that.
And, like, a lot of the people who are like, no, no, no, human societies are great at adapting, we’re going to adapt really well to this, are folks who, like, opposed all of that stuff, who are like, you know, we don’t want open immigration and we don’t want globally traded, you know, true free trade, we don’t want any of that. So I think it’s an interesting — like, when you really think about, you know, how you adapt well, it’s like, yeah, you know, everyone’s kind of — societies all over the world are, like, prosperous enough that, like, you know, everybody has air conditioning, and, like, when people need to kind of leave because the place that they live is sort of, like, you can’t grow food there anymore, they can go, you know, to a different country and live in that country.
You know, I think that that’s a plausible — you know, you look at the United States and, you know, like, certainly, like, a third of the country, over about 50 years, from, like, the Northeast to the Southwest, you know, in search of a better climate among other things, and more economic opportunity, and that was possible because, you know, it was within national borders. And, like, I could see that being a good way to adapt to climate change, if people can move across borders. But if they can’t —
Ross Kenyon: That’s a lot of the libertarians I know who are concerned about climate change. They just tend to be very distrustful of the people who do support climate solutions. Like, they’re like, these environmentalists, like, I’ve never met a policy or a tax or regulation that they haven’t liked, and even when they don’t work. So I just — they have no credibility that this is going to happen in the way that they think it’s going to. But as long as goods and people can cross borders, I trust that a lot, and I think we’ll be okay for that reason. And you can dispute whether or not, you know, if the magnitude of the change is extremely great, maybe we won’t be able to adapt as quickly as they think, but maybe not. But that’s at least the case, and I think people don’t put enough trust in these decentralized processes driving movement.
And back — a lot of, a lot of the way there. Let’s put it back to Ted. So, you’ve laid some wonderful bait — maybe this represents your views and not those of the Breakthrough Institute, such a provocative — maybe it does. But if our listeners are interested and want to get more involved with your work, what can they do?
Ted Nordhaus: Well, you know, you can check us out at thebreakthrough.org, you can sign up for our newsletters, you can ask to come to one of our events. They’re generally invitation only, but we actually kind of — we pay a lot of attention to people who kind of want to be engaged with us.
Ross Kenyon: How’d we do? We do okay?
Ted Nordhaus: You guys seem great.
Ross Kenyon: This is an audition.
Ted Nordhaus: Yeah, you guys can come. You guys, you guys, man, you guys are in the [unclear], that you’re not part of the ecomodernist crowd.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Well, don’t, don’t put us in any camp, because we’re weird thinkers that just put ourselves in all the camps. That’s why we like everybody.
Ted Nordhaus: That’s, that’s the kind of — that’s why we’re having such a good conversation, right? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, you should come. You guys should come to the Breakthrough Dialogue sometime. We’ll do a podcast. They’re cool.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we’d love to. If people want to follow your work and keep up with what you’re doing, how should they do it?
Ted Nordhaus: So you can follow us on — obviously, you know, we do the Twitter like everybody else. You can follow us on Twitter. Yeah, I’m just @TedNordhaus. You can follow Alex Trembath at [unclear], or just the BTI account. You can sign up — we have a weekly kind of newsletter, you know, email kind of update thing that goes out. I guess that’s how you kind of follow people these days. We have an Instagram account, it has like three hundred followers, so that’s, like, ours. Yeah, apparently, apparently supposed to do that these days. You can listen to the Break — we have our own podcast, Breakthrough Dialogues. So you can sign up, you can listen to our podcast, which my colleague Alex Trembath hosts. We had some great, we got some really fun folks. Charles Mann.
Ross Kenyon: He’s on my wish list.
Ted Nordhaus: David Roberts.
Ross Kenyon: We had, like, a Seattle [unclear]. Hasn’t come on? Yeah, we gotta do that, that’s crazy.
Ted Nordhaus: Well, you know, I — Dave, Dave and I have sort of had a fairly adversarial relationship for a long time, but he and Alex managed to sort of make up.
Ross Kenyon: That’s nice.
Ted Nordhaus: Yeah, there was a more colorful version of that that I won’t —
Ross Kenyon: Okay, I’m gonna put on your cosplay podcast. We’ve already got to have an explicit tag on this. Excellent. We’re still wearing the — x-rated, x-rated, R-rated. All right, let’s — let’s get it together. Great. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show today, it was a lot of fun.
Ted Nordhaus: That’s fun — conversation, I enjoyed it. You guys are good. You guys do do a good podcast.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Oh, thank you.
Ted Nordhaus: It’s good chatter, but not too much.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, we didn’t, we didn’t ruin it like the [unclear]. Yeah, that’s good. Thank you. And if you like the show, please rate and review us on iTunes or Stitcher, tell your friends, help get the conversation out there. If you didn’t like any of the things that Ted said — well, we try to be fair, and we’ll have those people on too and they can make their cases. So if you know of anyone who would be a good balance, that’s a big part of what we try to do here. So feel free to reach out to podcast@nori.com. You can send us your nasty letters there too, if we didn’t, we didn’t satisfy you in that correct kind of way. So thank you so much for listening. Thank you.
