For Climate, It's Wizards vs. Prophets All the Way Down
Paul Kingsnorth, Ezra Klein, and the unresolved question of whether technology will save us or unmake us.
This is a summary of episode #380 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen to the episode in its entirety on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you enjoy your shows.
Also, here’s the full show in video format above.
If you want to hear the episode with Charles C. Mann, it is below.
If you’d like to hear the episode with Paul Kingsnorth, it is right below this text.
🔹 Quick Takeaways
Environmentalism is split by a deep philosophical divide between faith in technological progress (the Wizard) and skepticism rooted in limits, meaning, and restraint (the Prophet).
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance represents the Wizard case: build faster, innovate more, remove bottlenecks, and trust progress.
Paul Kingsnorth embodies the Prophet stance, warning that endless growth corrodes meaning, culture, spirituality, and human belonging.
Technology is not neutral: it carries values, shapes behavior, and quietly defines what kinds of lives feel possible.
Creative destruction cuts both ways, generating material abundance and new polities while also eroding social bonds, traditions, and shared narratives. This can be good if you enjoy how industrialization led to the emancipation of the serfs, or bad if you look to what globalization did to Rust Belt America.
Climate work forces a wager: accept emissions now for theoretical reductions later, or insist on limits today at the risk of stagnation and a dangerous status quo.
AI intensifies the Wizard–Prophet conflict, raising existential questions about control, mortality, and what it means to be human.
Modern culture defaults to Wizard logic: optimism, scale, speed, and engineering are treated as moral goods.
Prophetic critiques feel alien because they question progress itself not just its distribution or governance.
The tension is irresolvable—and may need to remain so.
📝 Two Ways of Being Human
At the heart of this episode is a deceptively simple question: What kind of beings are we meant to be? The climate debate, Ross argues, is downstream of a much older philosophical and theological struggle, one that Charles C. Mann memorably framed as the Wizard and the Prophet.
The Wizard looks at history’s upward curve—life expectancy, wealth, knowledge, power—and projects it forward. Yes, problems exist, but technology created prosperity and can correct its own excesses. Abundance is not naïve optimism; it’s a moral obligation to build a world where suffering is optional.
The Prophet looks at the same curve and recoils. Growth looks less like liberation and more like alienation. More power, fewer limits, and deeper abstraction pull us away from place, community, mortality, and meaning. For the Prophet, the problem isn’t distribution or governance so much as its overall direction.
Neither position is easily dismissed. And neither has ever permanently won.
⚙️ Abundance vs. Limits
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance channels the Wizard impulse with clarity and urgency. America once built boldly; now it litigates, delays, and vetoes itself into scarcity. Housing, energy, transit, healthcare all suffer from a culture that confuses procedural caution with moral seriousness. If climate change is real, then slowing innovation is not neutral. It is harmful.
Paul Kingsnorth’s response is deeper and darker. He doesn’t deny that abundance can ever solve problems. He questions whether the kind of world abundance produces is one humans are meant to inhabit. Technology’s great promise—mastery over nature, death, distance, and scarcity—begins to resemble hubris. Not just ecological hubris, but spiritual overreach.
Kingsnorth’s critique widens beyond climate into AI, capitalism, and transhumanism. What happens when tools no longer serve human ends, but quietly redefine them? When optimization replaces wisdom? When immortality becomes a product, not a mystery?
🕯️ Why the Argument Won’t End
Ross doesn’t pretend to resolve the conflict. In fact, the episode’s thrust comes from its refusal to do so. The Wizard is right: it’s too late to walk away from modernity. Climate stabilization requires massive technological deployment. Returning to Hobbiton now means facing a climate Scouring of the Shire.
But the Prophet is right too: some technologies don’t just solve problems—they change who we are. AI, in particular, raises stakes that abundance frameworks struggle to contain. If progress threatens to outrun human judgment, then speed itself becomes dangerous.
The episode closes not with synthesis, but with recognition. This argument isn’t a policy dispute. It’s a civilizational one. Wizards and Prophets will keep talking past each other because they are answering different questions.
One asks, What can we build?
The other asks, Who should we be?
And climate change ensures we can no longer avoid either.
