A Trojan Horse: Ecomodernism

Ecomodernism is an idea meant to subvert environmental movements that have profound criticisms of continuing growth and productivism, GMO farming and nuclear power. It also sails under the colours of ‘eco-pragmatism’ and ‘post-environmentalism’. These views are now gaining more circulation as can be seen in the decision of the Green Party of Finland to reverse its opposition to nuclear power on 21st May 2022.

Ecomodernism emerged in April 2015 with the publishing of An Ecomodernist Manifesto with 18 signatories. These included Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute, founded by them in 2007. Shellenberger has connections with the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) which self-describes as the policy organisation of the nuclear energy industry. Others associated with the Breakthrough Institute include Roger Pielke Jr. who derides any connection between extreme weather and climate change. Writing for Forbes magazine, Shellenberger claimed to be speaking for environmentalists when he declared: “On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.” He is a persistent and consistent denier of climate change. 1

The funding of the Breakthrough Institute remains opaque. Others associated with the Breakthrough Institute include: the journalist Will Boisvert who wrote “How bad will climate change be? Not very”, in an essay entitled The Conquest of Climate, Julie Kelly, married to a lobbyist for the agribusiness ADM, and described by the French daily newspaper Le Monde as a propagandist for Monsanto, and Tamar Haspel, an enthusiast of GMO agriculture with close links to Ketchum PR, the public relations firm for the agrichemical industry and the Russian oil giant Gazprom. She has defended use of the pesticide glyphosate after it was condemned by IARC, the World Health Organisation’s cancer agency, as a likely cause of cancer in humans.

Recently, Damien Gayle, environment correspondent for the Guardian, wrote favourably on ecomodernism, saying that “Ecomodernism may not, yet, be the most popular idea among those who are campaigning for a solution to planetary crises created by humanity. But it increasingly looks as though it may be the one we will get.” As already mentioned the Finnish Greens reversed their opposition to nuclear energy, thanks to the efforts of ecomodernists like Tea Törmänen. She and others are in the group Finnish Greens for Science and Technology, which has long argued for the use of nuclear power, and she is also chair of Finland’s Ecomodernist Society. The Finnish Greens are now committed to extending the life of current nuclear reactors as well as the addition of new nuclear power plants, which they call “sustainable energy”. In addition, the Greens’ party council agreed to reversing its opposition to GMO crops.

RePlanet

Törmänen recently met up in London with other ecomodernists in the group RePlanet, of which she is the International Coordinator. This organisation as well as enthusiastically supporting nuclear power, is strongly in favour of Genetically Modified (GMO) agriculture. George Monbiot, who originally took a highly critical stance against ecomodernism, introduced a video by RePlanet which called for animal products to be replaced by fake meat produced in genetically modified microbial soup.

In Britain, Replanet is headed up by Joel Scott-Halkes and Emma Smart, who have backgrounds in Extinction Rebellion, Animal Rebellion and Insulate Britain. Alongside them is Mark Lynas, who allegedly reversed his original opposition to GMO crops (which some have questioned) and is one of the co-signatories of An Ecomodernist Manifesto. In a letter signed by GMO experts and campaigners, Lynas’s involvement in anti-GMO activity was questioned: “These claims of Mark Lynas's importance in GM campaigns are not true. Many of those who were involved substantially in the environment movement or GM campaigns during the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, both before and after Lynas's engagement in some anti-GM activism including actions to remove GM crops, have confirmed this. They do not recognise Lynas's contribution as being significant in the ways it is being represented and want to put the record straight on this point of factual accuracy so that there is no further misunderstanding.” 2 Lynas writes for the Cornell Alliance for Science, a group that advocates for GMO and pesticides. Lynas has defended the agrochemical giant Monsanto, describing it as a victim of a witch hunt.

RePlanet reveals its adherence to the preservation of capitalism with their advocacy of development and belief in “the power of the democratic state to take control of technologies, to develop technologies.” George Monbiot, who seems to have become a useful idiot to front Replanet, originally criticised the ecomodernists for their opposition to organic farming and “would wish away almost the entire rural population of the developing world”, and quoted the Ecomodernist Manifesto which stated “roughly half the US population worked the land in 1880. Today, less than 2 percent does.”

The ecomodernists are opposed to small scale farming which they regard as unproductive. Yet Amartya Sen in her study of agriculture in 1962 revealed that small scale farms have a much higher yield than large farms. The ecomodernists believe that “a growing manufacturing base has long been a crucial way to integrate a large, low skilled population into the formal economy, and increase labour productivity. To grow more food on less land, farming becomes mechanised, relieving agricultural workers of a lifetime of hard physical labour.” In fact, the uprooting of rural populations has resulted in many living a precarious and marginal existence based around informal economies.

Monbiot is not the only pundit to join the rush to climb on the ecomodernist bandwagon. We also have James Hansen, the NASA climate scientist, and Eric Holthaus, the meteorologist and climate journalist, as new champions of the use of nuclear power.

Support for Nuclear Power

As Dr Doug Parr, policy director of Greenpeace has pointed out, what is needed is clean and alternative sources of energy, quick and cheap to deploy and that “Nuclear is the opposite…The new plant at Hinkley C is over a decade behind schedule and billions over budget. The next one in line, at Sizewell C, may not even start generating energy until today’s newborns turn teenagers. Crucially, we don’t need new nuclear. Solar and wind technologies are a much cheaper and quicker way to cut carbon emissions, and studies show we can keep the lights on with a wholly renewable energy system. All we need is the political will to make it happen.” The French power company owns Hinkley and has agreed a price to sell the electricity produced there at £92.50 per megawatt. Meanwhile, alternative energies like wind and solar are becoming more efficient and are cheaper.

The most antiquated nuclear power stations are in the UK. It would cost £100 billion of investment to upgrade them. The grid network system is as antiquated and nuclear power plants and coal power plants are being decommissioned and shut down. The ecomodernists, rather than arguing for energy efficiency schemes to be realised mainly through a massive insulation scheme, adhere to the idea of nuclear power, which is archaic and dangerous, as we can see from the examples of Chernobyl and Fukushima. Nuclear power requires a centralised power grid and experts to manage them. They require a round the clock security regime, and above all a centralised maximum-security state. This is to say nothing of the problems of disposing of nuclear waste which has a life span of at least 10,000 years. Do we want a world full of nuclear power stations which is a world of centralised power?

Decoupling People from Nature

One of the obsessions of the ecomodernists is the decoupling of humanity from nature via substitution and intensification. That means in the case of substitution, moving to fully synthetic production. In the case of intensification it means denser human settlement and greater agricultural yields. Environmentalists when they talk about decoupling from nature mean that material living standards can be increased whilst environmental impact is lowered at the same time. For the ecomodernists however it means an actual physical decoupling from nature. Such a divorce, in their eyes, would save nature. This takes no account of the great mental and physical benefits of being in nature as was illustrated by the recent pandemic and lockdown.

The Ecomodernist Manifesto envisages an increase in production which will benefit all the world’s populations, so that consumption is equal throughout the world, both in the North and South, before it peaks and falls. But can the life systems of Earth take such a change before such a transition is reached? It seems very doubtful.

Humans should be decoupled from nature via a rapid urbanisation, according to the Ecomodernist Manifesto. They weep crocodile tears over this saying: “We write this document out of deep love and emotional connection to the natural world. By appreciating, exploring, seeking to understand, and cultivating nature, many people get outside themselves. They connect with their deep evolutionary history. Even when people never experience these wild natures directly, they affirm their existence as important for their psychological and spiritual well-being. Humans will always materially depend on nature to some degree.” So the ecomodernists whilst mourning for having a break from nature are impelled to do so for the sake of modernisation and progress. Nature must be saved by not relating to it.

So ecomodernists deny the fact that humans are inextricably linked with the web of life, with nature itself of which they are a part.

Another obsession of the ecomodernists is with the very concepts of modernisation and modernity. For them, modernisation means “The long-term evolution of social, economic, political, and technological arrangements in human societies toward vastly improved material well-being, public health, resource productivity, economic integration, shared infrastructure, and personal freedom.” However, the development of capitalism indicates that in the real world this is not the case, with immiseration, the widening of the gap between rich and poor, the increasing authoritarianism and development of surveillance societies and increasing environmental devastation. Modernisation has increased the gaps between rich and poor, so that billions are disenfranchised.

Capitalism and class society is not even remarked upon by the so-called ecomodernists. As Chris Smaje noted in an essay, “A word you won’t find in the Ecomodernist Manifesto is inequality. So there is no mention here of the vast literatures on the changing and varied economic fortunes of the many civilisations that have come and gone, or the changing and varied ideas they’ve had about themselves. There is no sense that processes of modernisation cause any poverty. The ecomodernist solution to poverty is simply more modernisation. And you then begin to understand why the improvement in material wellbeing needs to be ‘vast’. Every year, for example, US citizens each eat 100kg of meat on average, whereas the rest of the world makes do with 31kg. Since ecomodernism lacks any critique of consumption, instead choosing to equate increased consumption with increased wellbeing, its only feasible solution to this maldistribution of meat must be to raise up global meat consumption. If global levels equated with US levels, we would need to conjure something like another half billion tonnes of meat from global agriculture annually, and that probably would require the impressive breakthroughs in technology and resource use efficiency that the ecomodernists crave.”

There is a ‘left’ version of ecomodernism which can be found in the writings of people like Matt Huber, author of Climate Change as Class War. He attacks the idea of limits and of degrowth as “almost as austere as Pol Pot’s”. He bases his ideas on 19th century ideas of progress as promoted by Engels and Marx. It can also be found in the ideas of the group around Novara Media, whose concept of Fully Automated Luxury Communism owes much to the ideas of ecomodernism. It can also be found in writers associated with the US left magazine Jacobin, for example with Christian Parenti, who calls for increased use of energy, and with Angela Nagle, who sees the environmental concern with limits as “green austerity”.

There is little that is ecological in ecomodernism. Technology that has emerged in the present system isn’t neutral, as the ecomodernists believe. Andreas Malm showed that capitalism was built on coal and oil, and is intimately connected with them, as is the use of nuclear power. Technology is not just a tool, it is inextricably linked to the systems of hierarchy and exploitation developed under capitalism. Sticking on ‘eco’ in front of ‘modernism’ does not change that.

As Aaron Vansintjan notes in his article Where’s the ‘eco’ in ecomodernism?: “Being an ecologist today certainly doesn’t mean refusing to improve humanity’s lot, but it also means having a real conversation about the limits we face. And if an alternative system is to be at all ecological, it would mean democratically weighing the costs and benefits of different technologies: which ones we want, and which ones we don’t. That’s not anti-modern, that’s a basic requirement for a better world.”

Chris Smaje’s trenchant criticisms of ecomodernism brought angry replies from Michael Shellenberger and others. In one of his ripostes he wrote:

“I tweeted to Mike that I see ecomodernism as neoliberalism with a green veneer. No doubt there are different shades of opinion within the movement, but I’ve not yet seen anything to persuade me otherwise. Ecomodernists offer no solutions to contemporary problems other than technical innovation and further integration into private markets which are structured systematically by centralized state power in favour of the wealthy, in the vain if undoubtedly often sincere belief that this will somehow help alleviate global poverty. They profess to love humanity, and perhaps they do, but the love seems to curdle towards those who don’t fit with its narratives of economic, technological and urban progress. And, more than humanity, what they seem to love most of all is certain favoured technologies, such as nuclear power.”

Further reading:

Damien Gayle. A long overdue moment? The UK Greens pushing for the nuclear option: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/09/a-long-overdue-moment-the-uk-greens-pushing-for-the-nuclear-option

Matt Huber. Mish-mash ecologism: https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/mish-mash-ecologism

Timothée Parrique. A response to Matt Huber: facts and logic in support of degrowth: https://timotheeparrique.com/a-response-to-matt-huber-facts-and-logic-in-support-of-degrowth/

Chris Smaje. Dark Thoughts on Ecomodernism: https://dark-mountain.net/dark-thoughts-on-ecomodernism-2/

Chris Smaje. Ecomodernism. A response to critics: https://smallfarmfuture.org.uk/p=854

Aaron Vantsintjan. Where’s the ‘eco’ in ecomodernism?: https://climateandcapitalism.com/2018/04/16/wheres-the-eco-in-ecomodernism/