Modestly right, not interestingly wrong

The right way to interpret Shellenberger & Nordhaus 10

Matt Yglesias has a review of Shellenberger & Nordhaus' book in the NYT Sunday Book Review. It contains a good insight and a fairly crucial mistake -- albeit a mistake common to those enter S&N's hall of mirrors for the first time.

The insight is twofold. First, that the core and most valuable part of S&N's book is about messaging:

"We know from extensive psychological research," they write, "that presenting frightening disaster scenarios provokes fatalism, paralysis and ... individualistic thoughts of adaptation, not empowerment, hope, creativity and collective action." Insecurity, they argue, is an emotional pillar of reactionary politics, not a building block for the sort of farsighted, progressive thinking that is required to prevent ecological disaster.

And second, that the core mistake of the book is in how that insight gets projected onto the realm of public policy.

Matt's mistake is that he thinks S&N are advocating for big subsidies for clean energy instead of regulations on carbon. Many people who read their book come to the same conclusion and have criticized them along the same lines Matt does, insisting that mandatory caps and efficiency regulations are necessary to make the policy work.

But S&N have insisted many times that they do support mandatory regulations on carbon. Says Nordhaus, "we support regulating carbon, we support doing so now." The call is not for green groups to cease lobbying for carbon regulations, but to ramp up their lobbying for public investment. The idea is to switch the relative priority -- to put large, ambitious public investment demands at the top of the lobbying list, and carbon regulations second.

In S&N's defense, that means they have not made the egregious policy error Matt attributes to them. In Matt's defense, he's not the first to do it. I don't know if S&N willfully create the misimpression that they have a fundamental policy difference with mainstream enviros; suffice to say, it's a common misimpression that has garnered them considerable attention.

Further in Matt's defense, his main point stands: the fatal flaw in the book is the pivot from an important psychosocial insight about language to a concrete recommendation about policy. The pivot is not to a mistaken policy recommendation, as Matt has it, but to a fairly conventional one: "Keep pushing for carbon regulation and public investment, but for way more public investment." It doesn't amount to a policy revolution. It is not significant enough to justify the high-flown philosophical noodling earlier in the book. It's not going to be, as one of the book blurbs has it, the Silent Spring of our generation.

David Roberts is staff writer for Grist. You can follow his Twitter feed at twitter.com/drgrist.

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  1. Jon Rynn's avatar

    Jon Rynn Posted 4:34 am
    13 Jan 2008

    Dave, remember Teague and Navin?You put up a post called "The promise and perils of public investment in energy" which talked about their article, "Global Warming in an Age of Energy Anxiety", which was stronger, I thought, than S & N on public investment, and less in-your-face, even though Navin is a colleague of Shellenberger's at American Environics -- although Teague is with the Nathan Cummings foundation.  
    This is what you said:They argue fairly convincingly that targets and market mechanisms won't be enough to generate the sustained, long-term investments we'll need to transition to a green energy economy.
    Maybe if the discussion had started with their article instead of S&N it would have been more productive, because we would have been talking about public investment beyond just r&d.  In any case, the marketing research seemed to indicate that there was a great deal of support for actually building things like high-speed rail.

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  2. trock Posted 6:35 am
    13 Jan 2008

    S&N's errorWhat S&N fault is they wrote about `the death of environmentalism.'  Can't change that.   Martin Luther King jr. would never have said that his `I have a dream' speech was about the death of civil rights.   They cut the legs out of those who wanted to talk about the hell of a global warming world as if that needed a metaphoric death.  They were not environmentalist uniters, but dividers who said everybody else didn't just need an emphasis in a new direction, but that everybody else was wrong.

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  3. Kit Stolz's avatar

    Kit Stolz Posted 6:52 am
    13 Jan 2008

    if everyone gets it wrong, can S & N be right?If an experienced analyst such as Yglesias misreads an entire book by these two writers, and if as DR says he has lots of company in this mistaking, one must assume that the two writers are at the least inadvertently misleading...if not deliberately.

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  4. Jon Rynn's avatar

    Jon Rynn Posted 8:13 am
    13 Jan 2008

    Actually, King's equivalent speech......was his famous Riverside Church speech, called "Beyond Vietnam -- A time to break silence", which is well worth reading on its own right -- you could just about replace "Vietnam" with "global warming" in several places to great effect.  
    Anyway, in that speech King was trying to expand nonviolence and justice to include both civil rights and peace.  It would have been ridiculous to call the speech "the death of civil rights".
    N&S could have called their article/book "connecting the dots" (I tried to do something like that here and here), or "the birth of multi-issue progressivism" or something a little more poetic, but they chose the negation of a positive instead of the affirmation of several positives, if that makes any sense.

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  5. Kristina & Jason Makansi Posted 10:52 am
    13 Jan 2008

    Just a thought...Connecting the Dots (or something similar) isn't nearly as dramatic as Death of Environmentalism. Speaking from experience, it is often the publisher who determines a book's title--even over the author's objection. It isn't a stretch to imagine that Death of Environmentalism was chosen (either by S&N or by the publisher) simply because it is more sensational and would likely lead to more sales than other more conciliatory titles.
    -K

    Pearl Street::Jason and Kristina Makansi

    Read Lights Out reviews

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  6. Jon Rynn's avatar

    Jon Rynn Posted 11:53 am
    13 Jan 2008

    K, that certainly sounds plausible......and one gets the impression that S&N, who work from a marketing firm, are fully aware of this dynamic.  I must say I sometimes seem to get a bigger reaction if I turn more "snarky", or pissy, or whatever you want to call it -- criticism, especially sharp criticism, can be much more fun to read, as drama critics will tell you.  It's a thin line to travel, staying interesting without being too staid -- for instance, Dave Roberts seems to try to push the envelope quite a bit, much to my reading amusement.

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  7. Delay And Deny's avatar

    Delay And Deny Posted 3:53 pm
    13 Jan 2008

    How Not To ReactIf you want to read an interesting book about the response of Public Officials to a crises, then read "The Ghost Map" by Steve Johnson.   It's a story about a cholera outbreak in 18th century London in the SoHo district.
    http://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Map-Steven-Johnson/dp/1594489 ...
    It has a lot to say about science, as done by individuals and organizations, bureacracies (good and bad) and the change in perception about what causes what and what people should or should not do about it.
    Above all it seems to emphasize that one person, working hard, and trying to document and perceive the truth can sometimes be in the right.



    My Log

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  8. MikeB Posted 5:32 am
    14 Jan 2008

    John SnowJohn Snow spent many years trying to convince politicians and the public at large (never mind his own profession) that the miasma theory was wrong.  Unfortunately, having published a paper on his theory in 1849, and then a very convincing explaination for the 1854 outbreak in 1855, his explaination was still being resisted in the 1860's.  Alas he died of a stroke in 1858, arguably bought on by the stress of his campaign.  One man can make a difference, but its very hard work.
    As for S & N - I suspect that they wrote a book for the reviewers of the NY Times, rather than a one for environmental action.  Simply not very interesting, or useful, other than to those who would rather us all simply fry.

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  9. lorna salzman Posted 8:56 am
    14 Jan 2008

    Nordhaus/Shellenberger NY Times reviewReviews of N&S' Break Through have missed the central points by a wide margin. The book is another compendium of "psychographics": public polling conducted for their company, Environics, by Roper polls. This poll of 2004 interviewed about 1600 people and without telling readers, N&S put the results in book form, promoting it as new ideas and approaches for our environmental future. Their failure to level with the public means their book is fraudulent. Nor did Yglesias and other reviewers note The Answer to our problems that N&S promote: Prosperity.  But the real question was never asked: how can we fend off the worst impacts of global warming? N&S are the Good News Years, telling Americans that we don't have to change our behavior or our consumption and that technology, the World Trade Organization, and the IMF, and globalization in general, will provide the solutions. N&S show absymal ignorance of the roots and objectives of the environmental movement, which goes back to the 19th century. As a result of their complete lack of hands-on experience and insight, their book is both ahistorical and anti-ecological; the word ecology is never used. Their opinion of what will save us is indistinguishable from the prescriptions of the neo-conservatives, the American Enterprise Institute and Pres. Bush himself: no hardship, no sacrifice, no fundamental changes, just globalize, technologize, and become prosperous....as if American overconsumption and its wasteful polluting way of life should -or could - be imitated by the rest of the world. This book is a scam in every  way, and those who think it  has anything new or worthwhile to say probably agree with the authors: that there really AREN"T any environmental problems, just  a few annoying things that more technology and globalization will solve. After all, if the pollsters say this, it must be true, they reasons. Who else believes this utter nonsense? No clothes on these deceptive emperors, folks. You've been conned. Read my review at http://www.lornasalzman.com if you want more details that you won't find elsewhere.

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  10. Arjuna Posted 10:37 am
    14 Jan 2008

    Demonizing S&NI don't see why some people feel compelled to demonize S&N.  They completely acknowledge the terrific challenge and terrible problems we face.
    They have performed a valuable service by asking the movement to examine it's strategies and accurately note that the environmental movement is tilted towards motivating people based on fear rather than inspiration.  This assessment genuinely is a problem.

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