[POST] Environmental isolationism

Going it alone on the world's most collective good

This is a reader-supported publication. I give it all away for free but could really use your support if you want me to keep doing this.

There is this American tendency to view climate change as a solely scientific or technological problem, separate from real-world factors (economic, social, political, security). The purposeful intellectual distancing of that set-up is required to deliver the punchline: It’s not our fault! By taking an inward-looking, nationalistic approach, this perspective disavows the interconnectedness of environmental issues — much like how our current angry populism disavows the interconnectedness of the global economy.

Trump is the Pull-Out King: he’s never seen a deal or responsibility he didn’t want to wriggle out of in the manner of a tantrumic toddler. On some levels, that makes him the perfect vessel for what needs to be done: transforming America from globalization’s sole market-maker to just another competing economic power in a system about to be transformed by AGI and the looming Singularity.

The problem, of course, is that he’s too American. As far as public fears are concerned, he’s a pure amplifier versus a modulator (somebody like FDR), which makes this implied negotiation between America and the world entirely antagonistic: I’m taking my ball and going home!

So we get Trump’s mega-BREXIT from the liberal international trade order: Everybody must pay more for access to my economy and don’t you dare pass along that cost to my consumers! Sure, the most vulnerable are lining up to take their Trumpian haircuts as the lesser of two evils. This is a pure waiting-him-out play. Meanwhile, all those trade partners who feel abused are just that much more incentivized to seek other, more stable trade patterns to the best of their ability.

In similar terms, we get Trump’s mega-BREXIT from the coalescing global response to climate change: Drill baby drill! Screw any and all mitigation efforts (there’re just for suckers and losers!)! Everybody who didn’t vote for me is on their own from now on with any resulting natural disasters! Make all the plans and agreements you want, world, but I ain’t signing any of them!

The EPA is no longer in the business of combating the harms of climate change. That takes care of that bullshit problem!

---

NYT: In Game-Changing Climate Rollback, E.P.A. Aims to Kill a Bedrock Scientific Finding

---

America is just going to suck it up and play hurt while the rest of the world moves on to the Renewable Energy revolution — certain now to be dominated solely by China.

---

YALE ENVIRONMENT 360: How China Became the World’s Leader on Renewable Energy

---

Worse, we’re trying to spread our bad behavior to others.

---

CNBC: Trump’s EU trade deal is based on massive energy purchases that are unlikely to materialize, analysts say

---

More petulantly, we’re even refusing to discuss this subject with the world.

---

CNN: The US is sitting out the most consequential climate summit in a decade. It may offer a victory to China

---

There is a sort of unilateral disarmament dynamic here: fingers stuck in our ears, we bleat WAA, WAA, WAA, WAA! to drown out the global chorus on this subject, declaring in effect: I refuse to lead! I refuse to follow! I refuse the entire subject!

The business world knows this to be madness on our part, and so continues its far-more rational approach — just more quietly so as to avoid Trump’s wrath.

---

ECONOMIST: The remarkable rise of “greenhushing”

---

It’s a sort of do-what-we-must-but-pretend-otherwise approach that evokes the behavior of a checked-out population pretending to listen to, and obey, its autocratic rulers — i.e., a very late Soviet vibe.

Once firms were accused of “greenwashing”: making nonsense promises, and doing nothing to achieve them. Now they seem to be “greenhushing”—getting on with the job of decarbonisation, without making a fuss.

Spot the tortuous logic:

If they can no longer boast about their targets, then some firms might start to question whether setting them is worthwhile. Already companies that hoped their green credentials would give them a share-price boost as money flooded into sustainable-investment funds have been disappointed. Yet the fact that many are quietly persevering with decarbonisation points to a more comforting conclusion: that they realise that taking action is beneficial to their bottom lines, no matter what politicians say or do. If the worst accusation that environmentalists can level at a company is its tendency to greenhush, then that is surely a sign of progress.

This is Trump’s version of leadership: he naturally creates insurgencies in his wake. Why? Because nobody in their right mind thinks America can maintain this F-U approach to the world on a permanent basis, thus anyone thinking seriously about the future knows that we’ll eventually be forced back into some accommodation of that wider world — the global community.

The problem will be the cost of re-admittance. That’s what the Brits found out with their BREXIT: revealed to be a smaller player than they themselves imagine, they now must accept lesser deals, lesser access, lesser say.

---

NYT: U.K. Trade Deals Bare the Reality: It’s a Midsize Economy Among Giants

---

Brexit has clarified the true cost of the UK’s departure from the EU, not only in economic terms but also in loss of global influence and diminished leverage. Post-Brexit, the UK discovered it was a medium-rank economy with far less power than it wielded as a member of the EU. That reality results in Britain having to accept reduced access, limited say in rules, and deals less favorable than when it was an EU member.

That’s what “winning” has looked like for London. It will be no different for Washington.

The long-term trends here are clear: America is no longer the great driver of global economic growth — China and others are. This leverage that Trump wields now only grows smaller by the day. Again, you can say, then get it done now man, while we can! That part I get; the walking away from it all part (middle finger raised) I do not.

On one level, the grand strategist in me, knowing as I do our need to shift from market-maker to market-player, welcomes this no-going-back-demotion — however self-inflicted. In the simplest terms, it needed to be done and it was going to unfold anyway, so why not rip off the bandaid, Trump style?

Because there is a finality here that involves embracing the loss of former privileges as a clear, irreversible shift that forces the US to redefine itself from within. America under Trump does not accept that follow-on logic. Instead, in our culture wars, we seek a self-deluding return to the 1950s.

Detachment from the world combined with the fantasy of a back-to-the-future domestic renewal — that’s so just perfectly Trumpian in its narcissism and arrogance.

A Trumpian BREXIT with a clear vision of what America must change internally to become the market-player we all want to be … that I would welcome. But I’m just not seeing it in the cluster of destructive actions this administration is undertaking.

The more we walk away from the global community and our global future, the longer the distance we’ll need to cover when we seek to rejoin the former and reshape the latter. Trump may well believe that America would be happy just hanging out in its Mar-a-Lago-like isolation, playing golf with our billionaire buddies, but that’s a recipe for America’s retirement as a superpower, something Trump is fine with so long as he and his get to play king over the shrinking empire.

Look at whom he admires in this world: Putin and Kim. In both instances, they rule with an iron hand and behave atrociously to preserve the nation’s racial identity, paying for that privilege the price of economic and diplomatic and even technological isolation.

Is that what America truly seeks? Because that’s where we’re headed.

To me, this vision of an America that goes it alone will not appeal over the long term to generations who follow the Boomers but who do not seek its brand of self-satisfied retirement amidst conspicuous consumption. America as gated community-cum-gated Union is no basis for a vibrant nationalism capable of sustaining long-term growth and vitality. It is an overly emotional, generational surrender on the part of the Boomers who cannot bear facing mortality without trying to take the rest of us down with them.

Trumpism, in the end, cannot make America “great again” but it can most certainly disassemble our Union, ending our magnificent experiment and ceding global leadership to anybody but us.

I reject Trumpism because I reject that future as the worst form of surrender — the kind where you don’t even pretend to compete.

---

---