The Case for Positive-Sum Environmentalism

Zero-sum environmentalism isn't working; we need a new approach

“The Dream” reimagined

From my earliest grade school memories, lessons on the environment were uniformly focused on how humans were destroying the planet. We were driving species to extinction and creating holes in the ozone. 

The environmental stories being taught from grade schools to graduate programs largely haven’t changed in more than sixty years. A student in 1970 would have cited many of the same authors and arguments as a student today. Silent Spring is still taught as a clarion call to address pollution. John Muir’s defeat at Hetch Hetchy remains the classic example of how wilderness and beauty are destroyed in the name of economic advancement. And despite years of empirical evidence disproving their theories, Malthus’ and Erhlich’s warnings that human consumption will outstrip the earth’s ability to provide remain pillars of environmental 101 courses. A student today might learn about the BP oil spill instead of Exxon Valdez and climate change instead of acid rain, but the core message hasn’t changed - humanity’s relationship with nature is fundamentally broken and in our pursuit of progress we have left the natural world a husk of its former self. 

But the world has changed, and environmentalism needs to change with it. In contrast to the traditional narrative, we have actually been remarkably successful at solving environmental challenges. This environmental progress has occurred without requiring a step backwards in human prosperity. In fact, growing wealth and technological advancement are fundamental conditions for environmental progress. We’ve proved it’s possible to decouple emissions and GDP growth in the highest income countries. As Hannah Ritchie says in Not the End of the World, “in rich countries carbon emissions, energy use, deforestation, air pollution and water pollution are falling while these countries continue to get richer.”¹ This is largely because rich countries can afford to care, invest in new, expensive technologies, and bring them down the cost curve. For all the urgency and challenges that remain, there’s good evidence that things are getting better, dramatically better, and we should be much more optimistic about humanity’s relationship with nature.² 

Consider climate change. While we still have a long way to go, considerable headway is being made. In only ten years, the projection for global temperature increase by 2100 has dropped by a full degree. 

Source: Cipher

This rapid improvement in our expected fortunes doesn’t fully account for the exponential growth in clean energy generation and storage. Solar is being installed at a clip that has wildly exceeded expectations. Battery storage is doubling every year. 

Source: The Economist

Improvements aren’t just energy and carbon related. Deforestation peaked in the 1980s, several places around the world have seen reforestation, and there’s been a major bounceback in European mammal populations. As technology allows for increasing crop yields, we need less land for agriculture and can return it to nature.³ Even the switch from horses to cars was a boon for New England forests. 

Yet, no matter how much the evidence suggests otherwise, mainstream environmentalism has been unable to ditch the negative vibes.⁴ It’s time to update our priors. Human and environmental progress are not competing in a zero-sum game. Instead of considering consumption as the fundamental sin responsible for the extraction of earth’s finite resources, environmentalism should focus on progress - and creating a world where both humans and the environment can thrive together. We need a positive-sum environmentalism.⁵ 

In a zero-sum game, players compete over a fixed pool of resources. What one player wins, the other loses. Positive-sum is the opposite. Instead of fighting over a limited pie, in a positive-sum game the pie can grow - each player can end better off. 

It is not an idle distinction. It matters because zero-sum environmentalism has artificially excluded potential solutions. A pernicious example of zero-sum environmental thinking is the pushback against electric vehicles because they will require a significant increase in lithium mining. Classic environmentalism sees limited known reserves, supply constraints, and dirty refining technology and instinctively responds with calls to halt. But as we’ve seen time and time again, economic incentives and technological breakthroughs can address these problems. We’ve already seen this with lithium. Known reserves are up as people are incentivized to find it, investment led to supply exceeding demand by over 10% in 2023, and new technologies are making it cheaper and cleaner to mine. All of these factors have lowered battery prices by 99% over the last thirty years and accelerated the clean energy transition. 

Crucially, zero-sum thinking tends to evaluate solutions on a hyperlocal rather than global scale, overlooking base rates and tradeoffs. Fossil fuels require significantly more mining than critical minerals needed for the energy transition and air pollution from burning fossil fuels kills more than 3 million people per year. Even if lithium isn’t perfect, it’s a heck of a lot better than the alternatives. We can’t let perfect be the enemy of good. 

Positive-sum environmentalism on the other hand offers us expanded possibilities for progress. We could expand the use of genetically modified crops to not only reduce malnutrition and improve subsistence farmer livelihoods, but also return agricultural land to forests or grasslands to benefit biodiversity. We could streamline permitting to build new transmission lines that could connect gigawatts of renewable energy to the grid. That clean, abundant, and cheap energy could be used to desalinate water that pumped up to a river head would eliminate water scarcity as it journeys back down towards the ocean. The list of ways for nature and humanity to thrive together could go on and on, and they aren’t pie in the sky hypotheticals. We don’t need major technological breakthroughs to make them possible. We need an environmentalism that values dynamism over stasis and presents a compelling vision of abundance that people can get behind. 

The next generation of environmentalists can’t be zero-sum thinkers - it leads to a solution set of one. In a word, degrowth. What we need now is an optimistic, positive-sum environmentalism.

Thank you to Rob Tracinski, Steve Newman, Lauren Gilbert, and Brendan Mulligan for their edits and suggestions.

1. Emphasis from the book

2. Do not mistake this as Panglossian. The World is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better. 

3.  Our World in Data is the best website on the internet

4. The “vibecession” seems to be everywhere

5. Some might call this ecomodernism, though I think the philosophy undersells how we can enhance nature. A blog for another day.