Hey it’s Richard Delevan. Welcome back to Wicked Problems.
If historians look back at this period – if there are still historians – will they pick a key moment when the world moved from optimism to defeatism?
From optimism, since 2015 – after the Paris Agreement, Laudato Sì, solar and battery crushing the cost curve - that climate change could be addressed with win/wins involving innovations in tech, in finance, in global diplomacy.
To defeatism – or ‘pragmatism’ or ‘realism’ - meaning that we’re too late and we’re headed into some Hobbesian hellscape of a world where we hoard what we can and shoot at anyone trying to climb in our lifeboat.
Was it when Tony Blair came out to say Net Zero was ‘doomed’? Donald Trump won re-election promising drill baby drill? The data that 1.5C was exceeded for a full year? When ‘overshoot’ went so mainstream in the discourse that Andreas Malm made it the title of his 2024 book on the subject? A more recent contender would be the “Climate Realism” initiative at the Council on Foreign Relations – rivalled only by Chatham House as one of the most august and influential think tanks.
One expert finally had enough. Jeremy Wallace, expert on China and climate policy and a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) unloaded on the Climate Realism Initiative. In an essay for Heatmap, Jeremy just systematically took apart the case. His essay went viral and I keep seeing it in Discord chats, social media feeds, and WhatsApp groups of people who discuss such things. Reasonable to believe it got traction because I think he was saying what a lot of people were thinking.
We wanted to bring him back on Wicked Problems to talk about it. He does not hold back.
Not only do we discuss the CFR’s initative but some of the dark underpinnings it nods at - like a “lifeboat ethics” tracing back at least to an influential 1974 essay by Garret Hardin. Kind of an anti-Laudato Sì: “Lifeboat Ethics: the Case Against Helping the Poor” [sic - that’s really the title]
A few years earlier Hardin became an an environmentalist cause celebre after writing an essay that brought back (and distorted) the Ancient Greek philosophical notion of “the tragedy of the commons”. The subhed of a piece in Scientific American marking the 50th anniversary pithily put it thus: “The man who wrote one of environmentalism’s most-cited essays was a racist, eugenicist, nativist and Islamaphobe—plus his argument was wrong”. This was an age when Western discourse embraced scarcity and limits and revived Malthusian panic about overpopulation (but mainly concerned at the population growth among wrong-hued-persons) and what happens if they want to come “here” and take “our” stuff? Think Enoch Powell, or the race-baiting novel Camp of the Saints (beloved by MAGA ‘intellectuals’), or the Club of Rome’s “Limits to Growth”. And how the oil crisis of 1973 revived this perennial Western fear of civilisational decline at the hands of a “peril” of a non-white hue - you can still hear echoes of that reaction in comments from otherwise sensible people about Trump’s Gulf trip to Saudi, UAE and especially Qatar. 1
And it’s undeniably present in the Euro-American China panic.
Set against this “shit’s about to go sideways so let’s you and me get in this lifeboat and stop anyone else getting on board” instinct - which Jeremy argues is the animating spirit behind the Climate Realism initative2 is the “abundance discourse”.
As I confess on the episode, I’ve spilled a stupid amount of pixels trying to get my head around the roots of that discourse and noting the strange bedfellows it creates between people as seemingly antithetical as Elon Musk, Ezra Klein, and AOC who nonetheless share similar [stated] objectives.
The CFR has, I’d say regrettably, weighed in on what I would say is the opposing train of thought - “scarcity discourse”. In this camp, if it is one, you could count another set of strange bedfellows, I will argue in the next part of the above series of stupidly long essays, including a weird spectrum from your hardiest degrowthers to Peter Thiel to “two dolls, one 747” Donald Trump to, I guess - now, the Council on Foreign Relations. What a world.
We also get into Jeremy’s Jan 2025 co-authored piece (and related podcast ep) in the Journal of Democracy warning “Resisting the Authoritarian Temptation” - which is in some ways a challenge to future climate-action-friendly people in power who may see the current authoritarian binge in the US and say ‘well if they can so can we, because we’re the good guys’; and his 2022 essay that undergirds his Heatmap piece, well worth checking out:
But indulge me for a couple of notes.
First, thanks for being here. We appreciate your time and attention and want to know how we can serve you better – drop in the comments or send me a note on BlueSky or LinkedIn – and if you like what we’re trying to do here with our approach to covering all the things that go into climate solutions, you can support us by becoming a member at wickedproblems.earth, subscribe to the youtube feed, buy books from authors we’ve had on via our bookshop.org page and maybe share this with a friend.
We will keep doing this as long as we’re able because it’s important to get past the surface trends and to try and get at what’s really going on.
Second, you might have noticed the upgrade to our intro tune, Eye for an Eye from our friends at Suncharmer.
Normally we use a different piece of music for the outro and we add it to our Spotify playlist. But today we’re bringing you the whole tune because, I think I’m correct in saying, it’s not out yet. So you lucky ducks get to hear one of the UK’s best up and coming indie rock outfits with Big Drum Energy provided by our pal Dan Turtle.
So stick around for that. And we’ll add to our Spotify playlist when it’s out on Spotify because for now you can hear it hear first!
Extra 1
If you haven’t read the Peter Gleick “Running Blind” essay at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists about how the US dismantling of its own capacity to surveil threats because they involve the word “climate” is essential to read in order to understand the level of self-harm the US government has achieved.
Immediately after the inauguration of President Donald Trump in January 2025, his administration began purging these reports from the public record: removing environmental security studies from government websites or disabling those pages, cutting funding for environmental security studies, and requiring military and intelligence communities to suppress and censor references to climate change. Trump also rescinded Biden’s executive order 14008 that said, “climate considerations shall be an essential element of United States foreign policy and national security.” This censorship was not limited to military and intelligence work; the administration ordered other federal agencies to “archive or unpublish” materials related to climate change as well.
These actions will not reduce the actual risk that environmental problems pose for national security or the military—the physical reality of those threats will be unchanged. Instead, they will blind the country to environmental instability and real-world conflict risks that jeopardize our military and national security.
Extra 2
Friend of the show Tasmin Lockwood has a new gig at Digital Frontier, after leaving Insider and writing a book whilst travelling across Latin America. You should subscribe to her new newsletter, CTRL-ALT-BTTR. It is awesome.
Extra 3
Seriously, this new version of Eye for an Eye from Suncharmer, which we were delighted to have had a small part in supporting, just slaps:
We may come back to this topic but if you’re a centre-left pod/poaster and find yourself approvingly quoting Laura effing Loomer re Qataris being “Jihadis in suits”, you might usefully ask yourself if you should feel comfortable with that. Because you should not.
It’s likely the CFR folk don’t see it that way. We play their intro video in the episode, in its entirety, to ensure you get their best version of their case for context.
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