As Steven F. Hayward lays out in his forum lead this month, the environmental legal and activist movement that started in the 1960s, and which is best known culturally for the first observance of Earth Day in 1970, is rapidly coming to an end in ways that its advocates are just beginning to realize. While the underlying motives for modern environmentalism—primitivism, naturalistic fallacy, power lust, and an atheist/materialist hatred of humanity—will likely always be with us, their combination into an allegedly benevolent political movement is well past its effective peak.
It is, of course, possible to have an environmental movement not based on these unfortunate impulses—the work of the Property and Environment Research Center, American Conservation Coalition, and the Breakthrough Institute comes to mind—but groups like these have historically been in the minority of the wider world of green activism.
The environmental movement as we have known it has peaked for multiple reasons. Hayward says that the movement has specialized in “billion-dollar solutions to million-dollar problems” that “maximize political and legal conflict.” I’ll say that it has inflicted negative externalities that have significantly harmed the standard of living in the wealthy, developed world; caused widespread misery and death in the poor, developing world; produced politically toxic dynamics via the arrogance and overreach of its most celebrated advocates; and generated roadblocks even to its own proclaimed ambitions via its internal contradictions. Perhaps most importantly, though, in the near-to medium-term within Western democracies, a political pivot toward populist-right preferences has severely attenuated the power of progressive, elite, transnational policymaking—all hallmarks of the environmental activist movement.
Over the last several years, center-right and populist political activists across the world have risen in opposition to progressive-left and globalist goals, chief among them international environmental policies that have raised energy prices, constrained economic growth, and threatened national sovereignty. From the success of the Brexit Leave campaign in June 2016 and the unexpected first election of Donald Trump as president in November of that year to the successive victories of center-right and explicitly populist parties against their left-wing opponents in many nations since, most international political observers, whether they celebrate or deplore the development, agree that we are living through an anti-elite turn in world affairs.
A shift to a more populist style of politics, of course, wouldn’t necessarily run counter to environmental objectives if most environmental policy were based on widely held preferences among the electorate. But that has generally not been the case. Environmental policy objectives, and the willingness to sacrifice other social and economic goals to achieve them, have long been the strongly held preference of a relatively small number of voters and policymakers with the most aggressive forms of progressive-left ideology. In the world of environmental economics, we are now seeing a battle between the elite environmental policymaking associated with the Baby Boomer generation and what we could call an emerging “Kuznets populism.”
Higher-income, white-collar workers, who depend much less on industrial jobs, are the ones trading away growth and productivity for environmental amenities.
The work of economist and Nobel laureate Simon Kuznets (1901–85) has remained popular and frequently discussed into the twenty-first century, largely because of two related theoretical premises. First, he theorized, beginning with a paper published in 1955, that there is a predictable relationship between economic growth and inequality: inequality rises as an economy advances, reaches a peak, and then falls as a society becomes more developed and its economy more diversified.
Second, a parallel theory called the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) posits that pollution grows as an economy develops, eventually peaks, and then begins to decline, even as the economy continues to grow. In this dynamic, rising living standards lead the population of any given nation to demand greater environmental amenities as they collectively become willing to sacrifice additional units of economic productivity for cleaner air and water, as well as the conservation of wilderness and wildlife. Research by economist Nemat Shafik (1994), for example, suggested that local air pollutants like sulfur dioxide begin to decline in countries with per-capita incomes in the $3,000 to $4,000 range (in early 1990s dollars). My late colleague Fred L. Smith Jr. captured this dynamic when he wrote:
early societies were poor in both wealth and technology; perforce, they had to extract from Nature the values needed to address human needs. Only wealthy societies can value ecological resources to the degree demanded by today’s environmental establishment … poverty leaves little room for aesthetics.
Many defenders of the market economy have enthusiastically championed Kuznets’s work on both inequality and pollution, arguing that, far from them being problems created by capitalism as their critics suggest, inequality and pollution are effectively problems of not enough capitalism. After all, the only way to avoid inequality and industrial pollution entirely is to stay poor forever. Once these conditions begin to increase significantly, the only way out is through—by pursuing even greater economic growth, which will deliver optimized outcomes on the right side of the curve.
Is this view accurate? Plenty of subsequent economists have critiqued Kuznets’s work on both inequality and pollution in technical detail, but in the case of environmental politics, there is a more basic question to ask: are “the people” of a country actually making the tradeoff described? The measurement of wealth associated with bending the EKC away from greater pollution is generally expressed as a national average of annual income. In a broadly democratic polity, this seems to make sense, since citizens generally elect the people who implement environmental policy and thus the income of the average (or, in some analyses, median) citizen can be associated with the point at which a society adopts more aggressive environmental regulation.
But anyone who knows anything about the actual process of elections and policy implementation in a country like the US knows that average citizens have relatively little knowledge and virtually no direct influence on how such policy is made. Most citizens, as we should expect, are rationally ignorant about most public policy details and even general policy topics. Policy change is led and implemented in an extremely lopsided way by credentialed economic elites, in what an academic from the heyday of Kuznets’s career would likely have called the professional-managerial class (PMC).
It is thus the policy preferences of the PMC that are overrepresented in policymaking, and their preferences, not those of the average citizen of the nation, that trigger the production versus conservation tradeoffs of the EKC. Ironically, there are plenty of left-aligned researchers, pundits, and journalists who make the same point, such as the authors of a much-discussed 2014 study who declared the US political system to be an oligarchy (favoring the wealthy) rather than a true democracy. Such arguments tend to focus on moneyed interests’ alleged selfish desire for policies such as low-income tax rates, while ignoring how the class and ideological interests of the upper-middle class also create and sustain the nation’s staggeringly expensive and complex regulatory state, compliance with which costs Americans over $2 trillion each year.
The progressives are right that there is a distinct strain of affluent-favoring oligarchy in the political economy of the United States, but it does not tend toward smaller government, less regulation, or less spending and debt. All of the federal government’s current statistics in those areas make this clear.
The dynamic of elites having excess influence could be said to accurately describe public policymaking in general, but it is true of environmental policy in particular. Preferences of economic and professional elites are wildly overrepresented in environmental policy, as both public opinion polling and revealed preference make clear. Even when survey data finds general concern for an environmental issue with the public, such as when a majority of respondents agree that “the federal government is doing too little to protect key areas of the environment,” more detailed polling yields a very different impression.
When my colleagues at the Competitive Enterprise Institute commissioned a poll in 2021 on the costs of climate policy, they found that a strong majority of respondents, 71 percent, said they are either somewhat or very concerned about climate change. Those same respondents, however, also made clear that they were not willing to pay for mitigation policies out of pocket.
Thirty-nine percent said they would not spend one dollar more than they already spend annually on gas or electricity to mitigate the effects of climate change. A further nine percent said they would spend as much as $10 more per year on gas and electricity on account of policies to mitigate climate change. Four in ten Americans were unwilling to spend more than $1 annually on higher gas and electricity prices to mitigate the effects of climate change.
People will often express a preference for goods, services, and public policies that are delivered at no cost to them. When the price for those goods rises above zero, however, enthusiasm for them rapidly contracts. This relationship expands, in a relative sense, with income. The smaller a share of income something costs, the more affordable it will seem. Thus, environmental policies that would incur significant costs are always going to see higher demand among wealthier individuals and households. Those individuals just happen to also be disproportionately influential in the political process. That preference, as a signal of affluence, thus becomes a kind of luxury consumption good for the upper-middle class in wealthy countries.
Advocates for prosperity and abundance should leverage the populist revolution’s current hostility to progressive environmentalism for all it is worth.
This recasts the political economy of Kuznets’s work significantly. The underlying dynamic remains, but suggests that the actual EKC is shifted significantly to the right of what we originally imagined—that higher-income, white-collar workers, who depend much less on industrial jobs, are the ones trading away growth and productivity (via their political and economic influence) for environmental amenities. If you hear someone say, “We, as a society, can afford to transition away from coal,” that person is almost certainly a member of the PMC laptop class, not a coal miner or steel worker.
This dynamic, by which high-status, economically privileged progressives trade away the affordable economic amenities of modern life for higher-preference environmental goods, has sparked no small amount of concern, ire, and activist fury throughout the developed world. While not schooled in the subtleties of Simon Kuznets’s academic work, many center-right policy advocates have intuitively understood that their own economic aspirations are being throttled by an in-group of elites with a very different value hierarchy. Hayward points out that even some left-leaning critics diagnosed as early as the 1970s that, for many people, the “ecology craze” was a self-serving fad that distracted from more important issues. Somehow, it has taken us half a century to catch up to the common sense of the Nixon-era staff writers of the New Republic.
A NIMBY homeowner living in a $2 million house in the San Francisco Bay Area will have no compunction about campaigning to stop new housing construction nearby in order to preserve their view of undeveloped land. They will also likely have enough knowledge of and leverage over the local planning and zoning process to do something about that preference. The working-class people who would have otherwise been their future neighbors, unfortunately, will have no such resources. They will likely never become aware that someone they’ve never met has made it impossible to live in the new housing that would have otherwise been constructed. Some populists, angry about the high cost of housing, have recently blamed bogeymen like private equity investment funds for high housing costs, but the distributed actions of millions of PMC environmentalists over the last half-century are almost certainly far more to blame.
All of this creates a compelling tension for those of us who are skeptical of the environmental activist movement but still support a classical liberal political framework. Central government control of environmental policy, much like central control of public health policy during the Covid-19 pandemic, has inspired many small-government activists to oppose the specter of totalitarian “whole-of-government” approaches. This is a form of governance under which policymakers presume to manage for citizens both how much energy they will use and which medications they are allowed—or required—to take. Growing opposition to this administrative state of plenary powers should be nurtured.
But the populist turn could also significantly empower the state in other areas: to tax imports by arbitrary and capricious means, to micro-manage corporate behavior, to censor broadcast speech critical of politicians, and even strip citizenship from Americans accused of unpatriotic conduct. These are alarming trends and proposals that everyone who believes in limited government principles should resist.
Given that we are already in such a populist moment, however, it is the responsibility of each of us as policy advocates to go to war with the army we have, not, a la Donald Rumsfeld, with the one we wish we had. Environmental policy maximalists on the left, if not sufficiently countered, could easily implement policies that would cause the disintegration of human society and a collapse of material prosperity around the world. Their presumptive control over energy use alone, propelled by their climate anxieties, would knock out the support that the master resource gives to industrial modernity.
Advocates for prosperity and abundance should leverage the populist revolution’s current hostility to progressive environmentalism for all it is worth, even as those same individuals and organizations vigorously counter illiberal policy recommendations on other topics. Hayward is almost certainly correct that the “rigidly statist and adversarial” era of environmentalism is coming to a close—we just need to make sure a different flavor of central control doesn’t take its place.