Bitch less, build more

Towards a more effective environmentalism

The XP desktop background, “Bliss”, was photographed by Charles O’Rear in the hills of Northern CA.

On a recent North Bay weekend hike, a friend and I stopped to take in the Windows-XP-esque scenery and noticed that we had just spent the last three miles complaining.

That actually, we spend a whole lot of our time complaining.

To our colleagues about institutional inertia. To random Ivy Leaguers in Patagonia vests about the criminal lack of innovation in climate finance. To each other about relationships, politics, whatever fresh hell Twitter is serving up, that one startup that raised nothing in spite of having totally revolutionary tech, that other startup that raised way too much in spite of being super sus (you know the one I mean).

Viewed in a positive light, this is an incredibly useful skill. We’ve developed a level of discernment that allows us to diagnose the dysfunction in various people and systems in exquisite detail. But somewhere between “this is broken” and “here’s what I did about it,” we can tend to get sort of… stuck in loops, either describing the problem ever-more-precisely or waiting for someone else to fix the thing we’re complaining about. Often this happens even if we’re otherwise quite high agency and biased towards action, as Cate Hall astutely points out.

I’ve observed this phenomenon most clearly in climate and environmentalism. In my 10 years as a deeptech operator and investor, I’ve worked with hundreds of technologists who are building companies and moving capital into solutions that might actually fix the planet. Meanwhile, reams of well-meaning environmentalists have either gone full camp (eg throwing soup at a Van Gogh, gluing their heads to a Vermeer) or done their best to completely kneecap viable green infrastructure projects like Diablo Canyon. The theory of change underlying these approaches appears to be that if they complain loudly and disruptively enough it will make other people angry enough to behave differently. The emotional thing we’re all reacting to is ultimately the same: a planet set on fire, sometimes literally, by the negative externalities of human-civilization-building activity.

This is where the similarities between activists and builders mostly ends.

It’s not entirely the activists’ fault; mainstream environmentalism was designed for a differently-shaped problem in a radically different era. After Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962, complaining (aka "raising awareness") was arguably a good intervention. She did original research that synthesized fragmented evidence about DDT and brought material new findings into public view. The movement that later grew up around her insights in the form of protest and moral pressure was correctly calibrated to the problem it faced, because it’s nearly impossible to solve a problem nobody knows exists.

But in the information era, not knowing is no longer our issue. Our issue is that environmentalists built a movement optimized for diagnosis and then forgot to build the part that fixes anything. Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus called out this same issue twenty years ago when we were still arguing about fuel efficiency standards. Len Necefer, writing about the post-2024 wreckage of mainstream environmentalism, put it this way: the movement has become fluent in the rituals of accountability while completely losing its fluency in material impact. Success gets tallied in reports published and petitions signed and the result is that the people who look most like they’re fighting for nature are often doing far less for it than people who don’t look like environmentalists at all.

Brant MacDuff’s The Shotgun Conservationist makes the same case in a way that tends to make heads explode: hunters have done more good for American wildlife than many activist organizations. By supporting financial interventions like the Federal Duck Stamp program and the Pittman-Robertson Act’s excise taxes on firearms and ammunition, hunters and anglers have been lynchpin funders of US habitat preservation and species management for nearly a century. Meanwhile environmental groups have spent decades building influence through litigation and legislation, and the frame they operate from produces bad enough tradeoffs that the very fossil fuel companies the movement exists to oppose have learned to weaponize it.

Take the New England Clean Energy Connect, a transmission line that came online in January which delivers 1,200 megawatts of Canadian hydropower to New England. It cuts approximately three million metric tons of emissions per year and was originally scheduled to kick on in spring 2023. The Sierra Club and allied environmental groups sued to block it and helped campaign for a Maine ballot referendum to kill it outright, acting in parallel with NextEra and the other natural gas companies who were the primary funders of the opposition campaign. The environmental groups were right that there were potential local tradeoffs, but instead of accepting that every relevant regulatory body had approved the project only after extensive environmental impact reviews, they litigated against it on behalf of an outcome that primarily served fossil fuel interests. The referendum passed but was subsequently ruled unconstitutional. When Massachusetts regulators finally tallied the damage, the delays had added >$500 million to ratepayers’ costs, all while New England kept burning natural gas for three additional years.

This pattern is replicating itself right now on what is arguably the highest-stakes climate problem we face. Heatwaves killed roughly 178,000 people globally in 2023, and the trendline on that is up and to the right. Meanwhile the math on cooling the planet back down through emissions cuts alone simply does not work on a timescale relevant to humans who are alive today. Even if we hit net zero by 2050 (which we should still do!) temperatures would plateau at whatever level we’d cooked the atmosphere to and stay there for decades while carbon removal slowly does its work. Fortunately there’s an intervention that can actually lower the global temperature on a timescale shorter than several human lifespans, and it works by reflecting a small fraction of incoming sunlight back into space before it becomes heat.

Solar radiation management (SRM) is the technical name for that obvious idea. We know the underlying atmospheric science because we learned stratospheric chemistry the hard way in the 1980s after we accidentally punched a hole in the ozone layer with our refrigerators and aerosol cans and a generation of atmospheric chemists had to figure out what the hell was going on up there. That work ultimately produced the Montreal Protocol, arguably the most successful piece of international environmental governance ever created. The same chemical companies that caused the problem were the ones required to deploy the replacement compounds that fixed it, and as a result the ozone layer is now measurably healing. We have, in other words, already done an intentional planetary-scale stratospheric intervention once, aided by regulatory measures that supported action rather than blocking it. The institutional and scientific memory for doing this on purpose is sitting right there. But while nonprofit research organizations like Reflective are taking a constructive posture on SRM, the strongest response from much of the established environmental coalition has been a letter calling for an international ban on the technology.

This is still the infuriatingly dominant environmental protection frame among the legacy groups that shape policy and public opinion. There are endless examples of these folks working against their own stated interests, with the constant refrain of “someone has to do something!” followed by “wait not that!”. I’ve personally sat across the table from so many people who have chosen to oppose and complain – about nuclear power, GMOs, geoengineering, cloud seeding, carbon removal, you name it – all in the name of protecting the environment. The same people who would (correctly!) excoriate an oil executive for ignoring the science of climate change will turn around and ignore the science of nuclear safety or the evidence base for sunlight reflection. The positions rhyme aesthetically (”natural good, industrial bad” or “collectivism good, capitalism bad”) but they can’t cohere as a strategy for actually solving anything and therefore land at learned helplessness with a side order of old-man-yells-at-cloud, often while making the problem worse.

So… how do we fix this? I believe we have to let go of the idea that our job is to freeze time and keep nature totally separate from humans. This approach made some sense when the problem was concentrated around localized toxins and charismatic endangered fauna. It doesn’t make sense as a response to a civilizational-scale coordination failure playing out simultaneously across atmospheric chemistry, ocean acidification, and biodiversity collapse. We’re pumping roughly 31 million metric tons of acid per day into the furthest reaches of the ocean, places no human has ever physically been. Every dam is an act of terraforming. The baseline is shifting constantly whether we touch it on purpose or not. The question has never been whether to intervene in Earth systems; we’ve been doing that since we learned to farm. The question is whether to do it intentionally, with measurable feedback loops and finish lines, or to keep doing it blindly while standing in the way of the interventions that might actually unfuck the planet.

We’ve done versions of this before. In the era of DDT and CFCs we had substitutes ready at roughly cost parity, so diagnosis and awareness was most of the work; once people knew about the problem, the switch was relatively straightforward. The problems we face now don't have cheap substitutes sitting on a shelf. The good news is, they’re still solvable! We’ll just need major investment in frontier science and new technologies that enable a faster loop from diagnosis to deployment and back, until acting on planetary systems becomes routine work instead of a heroic act.

The non-incremental solutions that actually match the scale of the problem won't come from the 47th panel discussion at COP. Instead they’ll come from ambitious environmental interventions like robots that repair the oceans, drones that bring abundant water back to the American west, nontoxic particles that reflect sunlight, and injection wells that put the carbon right back where we got it from.¹ None of these are silver bullets but all of them together could remake the material basis of industrial civilization, which is what “direct action” looks like if you define action as intervening directly on the problem rather than performing outrage in its general vicinity.

Most activists have been stuck complaining on mile three for decades. All the while the trail keeps going, and the movement that wins the next century will be built by people who would rather be effective than self-righteous.²³

1. These are all companies I invested in during my time as a partner at Lowercarbon Capital. If you feel like Actually Doing Something About The Climate™️, they’re all awesome and they’re all hiring.

2. Thanks to Clay Dumas, Marty Odlin, Ryan Orbuch, Arram Sabeti and Sarah Sclarsic for listening to me complain across many conversations that helped refine these ideas.

3. For more general reading on these topics that I like, check out The Heat Will Kill You First by Jeff Goodell or Jason Crawford’s Techno-Humanist Manifesto series in Roots Of Progress.