The Worst Thing About the “Climate Crisis” Is What It Does To Your Brain

Some years ago, we published an essay in the Breakthrough Journal entitled The Coming Avocado Politics. The term was a play on “watermelon politics”, the idea that a lot of environmentalists were green on the outside but red on the inside and that various environmental claims and demands were really a stalking horse for left wing, redistributive and anti-capitalist politics. In the essay, Nils Gilman argued that standard, catastrophic accounts of climate risk by environmentalists could and would quite easily lend themselves to right wing political ends, from restrictive immigration policies to suppression of economic development and living standards in the developing world. The avocados of the title were green on the outside and brown on the inside, as in brownshirts.

Gilman’s prophecy has proven somewhat prescient on the other side of the Atlantic. Writing in Jacobin earlier this year, David Broder chronicled the rise of far-right environmentalism in France, Italy, and the Netherlands. But on this side of the Atlantic, President Trump and his MAGA supporters have remained steadfast in their hostility toward the climate issue. “America First” has proven more than adequate to justify imposing tariffs, defunding USAID, closing the border, and mass deportations without any need to borrow the “climate crisis” from the Left.

Instead, the call to fortify the border, restrict economic growth and living standards for the global poor, militarize the Arctic, and even use military power to stop poor countries from emitting in the name of combating the climate crisis is now coming from the heart of the Democratic foreign policy establishment. Varun Sivaram, a former US State Department aide to John Kerry, recently launched a major new initiative at the Council on Foreign Relations called Climate Realism, which purports to address the failures of climate policy through hard headed realpolitik.

As a long-standing advocate for climate pragmatism, there is actually quite a lot about the climate realism agenda that I can get behind. I strongly agree with much about the “four fallacies” of climate policy that underpin the climate realism doctrine, including the acknowledgement that climate targets are entirely implausible; that wind, solar and batteries are wholly insufficient; and, that the US is simply never going to compete with China to manufacture cheap commodity solar panels or lithium batteries. I will also happily endorse two of the “three pillars of a climate realism doctrine,” inclusive of investing to build an advanced energy economy in the United States and redoubling efforts to improve resilience to climate extremes.

But then climate realism goes so far off the rails, embracing a hysterical and deeply regressive vision for America’s role in the world and response to climate change, that I not only cannot endorse it but feel a duty to speak out against it.

It is one thing to include among the four fallacies the truism that because the United States only accounts for 5% of global emissions, reducing US emissions won’t matter that much over the course of this century. In this regard, no individual nation's emissions matter that much, even China’s. It is quite another to claim that therefore not only is it not a priority to cut US emissions but that the US should use its economic and military power to impose emissions reductions upon emerging economies.

Yet this is exactly what the climate realism doctrine proposes. Sivaram recognizes the profound unfairness of imposing emissions reductions when the average American is responsible for seven times the emissions as the average Indian, six times as much as the average Indonesian, and twenty-five times the average sub-saharan African. But tough pragmatism, he argues, is necessary because those emissions “endanger the American homeland,” and are functionally the same as “if China or Indonesia were to launch missiles at the United States.”

Despite much that would otherwise recommend “climate realism,” this remedy both represents a wildly inaccurate representation of climate risk and is so insanely over the top, unjust, oppressive, and dangerous that it should disqualify the “climate realism” doctrine for anything other than public condemnation. This is most especially true because this new proposed doctrine comes not from the outer fringes of the climate movement or wild-eyed right wing ecosurvivalists but the Council on Foreign Relations. Who needs brownshirt environmentalists to justify, as Gilman put it, “exclusion, hoarding, and retreating into ever-smaller circles of empathy” when you can get it from the beating heart of America’s center-left foreign policy establishment instead?

This is your brain on climate catastrophism

Underlying the climate realism doctrine is a view of climate risk that strays far from any particularly well established science but is widely held among mainstream Democrats, progressives, and climate advocates. Indeed, the most remarkable thing about the claims that Sivaram makes about climate change is just how unremarkable they have become among mainstream figures on the center-left.

In the essay introducing the doctrine, Sivaram insists that the threat of climate change must be a national security priority, on par with “averting nuclear war.” The essay claims that the world is on track to warm by at least 3 degrees this century, characterizes 3 degrees of warming as “civilization endangering,” and claims that “the preponderance of available data signals that the global economy will fail to reach net-zero emissions in the twenty-first century.”

Sivaram repeatedly implies that climate change is responsible for worsening natural disasters despite little evidence that climate change has much intensified most climatic extremes and overwhelming evidence that mortality from climate-related events has fallen precipitously and that climate change has not increased the cost of climate-related disasters. He even cites NOAA's debunked billion dollar disaster chart, which in no way implicates climate change at all in the rising cost of disasters, while claiming that climate change risks “entire cities being wiped off the map in this century.”

In all of these regards, climate realism is grounded in center-left conventional wisdom about climate change. Indeed, none of the claims made in the essay would have been unexpected coming from Sivaram’s former boss, John Kerry, or virtually any other prominent Democratic political figure over the last decade or so.

Anyone looking for academic studies, NGO, or government sources to validate these claims will, of course, easily find them, such has been the scale of narrative based evidence making over the last several decades, underwritten by billions of dollars annually in environmental philanthropy. But that literature is shot through with dubious methods, speculative modeling, and wild projections of ostensible correlations between natural climate variations and all sorts of highly overdetermined social outcomes far into the future (hence, the essay confidently asserts that three degrees of warming by the end of the century will lead to “mass migration of at least hundreds of millions of climate refugees”).

This “excess of objectivity” as my occasional collaborator Dan Sarewitz likes to call it, means that every citation of literature showing little trend in the intensification of most extreme climatic phenomena can be parried with a single event attribution study claiming that climate change made one event or another more likely, every study showing dramatic reduction in human vulnerability to climate extremes can be parried with a study showing dramatic increases in deaths due to heat waves or civil conflict or domestic violence in the warmer climate of 2050 or 2100, and so on.

Amidst all that contestation, it can be hard to cut through the peer-reviewed noise. There is, unquestionably, huge uncertainty about the future that all that modeling and projecting simply can’t resolve. But there are also some things that we do know with some confidence.

Increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have assuredly increased global average temperatures by about 1.5 degrees since the industrial revolution. And while we don’t know exactly how sensitive the future climate will be to additional increases in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases or how much more emissions will rise over the course of this century, neither of these uncertainties are unbounded.

There is broad agreement today that the high emissions growth scenarios that underpinned the climate impact literature over the last decade and a half are implausible, verging on impossible. Neither demographic or economic or technological trends can support them. Even assuming high climate sensitivity, the world is not on track to warm 4 or 5 degrees by the end of this century as climate advocates have long insisted.

Even the notion that the world will warm three degrees or more this century requires assuming high-end climate sensitivity, high long-term emissions growth, and probably both. This is technically possible but not particularly likely. A three plus degree warming future should not be the “central planning scenario for US security and economic planners,” as Sivaram suggests. These scenarios, by his own acknowledgment, are not the central estimate.

Could some future disaster wipe an American city off the map? Possibly. It wouldn’t be the first time in our history that such a tragedy has transpired. But if it does happen again, natural climate variability, not global warming, together with a variety of other human factors unrelated to anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases, will be the primary cause. That’s because even with plausible high-end levels of warming, natural variability will remain the primary factor in virtually all extreme climatic events.

Sivaram, I’m pretty sure, knows much of this. Instead, he grounds his argument in the potential of tail risks to impose much greater damages on the United States, a concept that was introduced into the climate discourse by the late Harvard economist Martin Weitzman about 15 years ago. In Weitzman’s original formulation, low probability, high consequence risks that might create a “fat tail” in the climate risk distribution justified the use of a somewhat lower social discount rate than standard economic analyses assume in order to calculate the tradeoffs between present day costs to mitigate climate change and the risks to society from future climate change.

Since that time, the concept has been abused by the climate movement as a kind of get out of jail free card to waive away any and all social and economic costs associated with various schemes to radically overhaul the global energy economy. This, to be clear, is not at all what Weitzman had in mind. I didn’t know Weitzman personally. But I’d guess that he would have been aghast at the specter of credentialed foreign policy professionals at the Council on Foreign Relations proposing not only to center these very low probability and speculative climate risks in US climate policy but to use them as justification for the American military to enforce climate austerity on the global poor.

When Good Climate Hawks Advocate Bad Things

Over the years, I’ve taken flack from a lot of fellow travelers on the center-left for pushing back against catastrophic framings of climate risk and related efforts to center climate change and maximalist climate and clean energy policies in Democratic politics. Why, many demand, am I so focused on the exaggerations and misrepresentations of the Left on these matters and not the climate denialist Right? What could be the harm in turning up the volume and the stakes in the climate debate? That’s just politics. It’s advocates being advocates.

Gilman offered one response to that objection back in 2020:

For a generation, it has been an article of faith among many progressives that climate denial is a tactic adopted by the Right because to accept the reality of climate science would force them to embrace policies they otherwise loathe… This understanding of climate denialism has led to a specific political and rhetorical strategy… to do everything possible to convince the general public of the reality of anthropogenic climate change on the assumption that anyone convinced of its reality would have to embrace “progressive” climate policies…”

As he argued then, if and when the right-wing embraced the catastrophic claims of the environmental left, the results would be profoundly regressive, leading to “not only seawalls to hold back the rising tides, but also border walls to hold back the flood of humans fleeing the consequences of climate change, restricting economic development opportunities to white people, or perhaps even outright advocacy of genocide.”

What the climate realism doctrine demonstrates, though, is that the climate catastrophism that the Left has spent the last generation manufacturing is entirely capable of producing zero-sum, lifeboat ethics on the Left. This is what happens when you spend a decade or more smoking your own supply—blocking, cancelling, investigating, demonizing, and otherwise marginalizing any and all objections to the overheated claims of a climate crisis.

Climate realism represents the logical end point of these efforts, or to borrow from Gilman’s essay, the sort of “inevitable surprise” that scenario planners often expect, “a possibility largely off the radar, that in fact is almost certain to happen at some point.” For years, climate advocates have hinted darkly that the failure to heed their warnings would necessarily lead to an authoritarian or militaristic reaction. Now the Council on Foreign Relations has proposed just such a response.

The key innovation here, ironically given Gilman’s concerns, has been to borrow a key talking point long used by opponents of US climate action—the fact that the US, now and in the future, will only account for a small share of global emissions, and hence need not take significant action to reduce its emissions—and repurpose it to justify what can only be characterized as bald-faced green imperialism.

In the essay, Sivaram briefly discusses the value of advanced developed economies forming a “climate club,” a coalition of the willing among major economies that would make shared commitments to reduce domestic emissions and then use access to their collective markets as a cudgel to force other nations to reduce their emissions as well, eliminating the free-rider effect that many economic and international relations experts believe to be the primary obstacle to global climate action. In subsequent correspondence, he made clear to me that while he would support this if it helped solve “international coordination problems,” he was skeptical that this would work or make much difference because advanced developed economies account for such a small share of global emissions.

So effectively, rather than eliminate the free-rider effect, the climate realism doctrine leans into it. Whether or not the US made any real commitment to cut its emissions, the US would become the world’s climate policeman, imposing emissions constraints upon the rest of the world, through military means if necessary, to protect the American homeland from future climate catastrophes. Every coal plant in China or Indonesia or India would constitute a climate WMD, with the difference being that while it was only a matter of months before it became clear that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, the entirely speculative climate catastrophes that developing country emissions would purportedly visit upon the American homeland can only be proven or falsified decades into the future.

When I first read the essay, I hoped that I might be reading too much into it. But my correspondence with Sivaram confirms that my reading is correct. He told me that tail risks, in his view “rival or exceed the damages from other profound national security threats” including the risk of nuclear warfare and that “5+ percentile tail risks of climate tipping points” threatened “the continued existence of US society as we know it in the second half of the 21st century.”

Sivaram emphasized that military force would not be “a first resort to reduce emerging economy greenhouse gas emissions in the near term.” He also told me that he personally believes “it's immoral for advanced economies to coerce, punish, or otherwise influence emerging economies to decarbonize faster than is economically optimal for their development, thereby taking scarce resources away from other development priorities such as health and other infrastructure. But the mandate of the U.S. foreign policymaker is clear: pursue the interests of the United States of America.”

This construction of US interests is, bluntly, science fiction, not science. Catastrophic risks from climate change that might begin to rival pandemics or nuclear war are little more than wild speculations about changes to the earth system and human societies many decades in the future. Economic coercion, much less the use of American military power, to prevent energy development in developing economies in response to these speculative risks would be wildly disproportionate and irresponsible.

Thankfully, it seems unlikely that the climate realism doctrine will gain much purchase on either side of the aisle anytime soon. The Trump Administration, to its credit, has demanded that the World Bank and other development institutions drop restrictions on both fossil development and nuclear energy imposed by Democrats and environmentalists over the last decade. New Energy Secretary Chris Wright, meanwhile, has very vocally advocated for all of the above energy abundance for poor countries as key to assuring their development. Nor do Democrats, when and if they regain control of the Presidency and Congress, seem likely to commence bombings of coal plants in China or India.

But the decade-long embargo of development finance for fossil energy projects in poor countries clearly suggests that Democrats, in the future, will increasingly use economic means to prevent energy development in poor countries, whether or not the US makes much progress on its own emissions. This, by Sivaram’s own reckoning, is immoral.

That is the problem for a generation of otherwise pragmatic and fair-minded climate hawks. Once you sign up for the climate crisis, it takes you places that you never wanted to go. After a while, you stop being able to tell the difference between the claims that are real (climate change is caused by humans) and the embellishments (extreme weather is caused by climate change), between the tails of the risk distribution and the central estimate, between being a metaphorical hawk who cares a lot about climate change and an actual military hawk who wants to use the full suite of tools at America’s disposal - diplomatic, economic, and military - to coerce other countries to stop emitting. Worse, you stop caring. It’s all in service of a righteous cause. Before you know it, you’re advocating for the establishment of an American climate imperium, dedicated to limiting living standards for the global poor in order to assuage the ecoapocalyptic fantasies and anxieties of western, liberal elites, and calling it climate realism.

An Afternote:

This was a really difficult essay to write because Varun Sivaram is a long-time colleague. As noted above, I agree with him about a lot that is in his essay. I've published Varun in the Breakthrough Journal. He's been a long time participant in the Breakthrough Dialogue. He even served on our board for a time. My real beef here is with CFR and the center-left political establishment, which allowed itself, over the last decade, to get captured by the climate movement. Varun, unfortunately, is collateral damage to that. And I'm actually quite grateful to Varun for making the entailments of the center-left's climate catastrophism more explicit. If you really believe 2 or 3 degrees of warming is civilization endangering, and that developing economy emissions are equivalent to "missiles" aimed at the American homeland that threaten the survival of American society, then bombing emerging economies back to the stone age would be a rational response. But because so many activists, journalists, Democratic politicians, and other thought leaders on the Left have so demonized any challenge to catastrophic climate framings as science denial, there hasn't been much debate on the Left about either what is actually particularly well established scientifically or the risks of over-indexing on those exaggerated risks. This has allowed an endemic and lazy catastrophism to take hold, justified by poorly specified arguments about tail risks, planetary boundaries, and similar precautionary claims. Varun's intent was to open up a conversation about what the US might need to do to protect itself from these existential risks. But his contribution here is best viewed, in my opinion, as a provocation. Here's hoping that we can have a more open conversation on the Left about the many substantial risks of overstating climate risk.