Vivek Ramaswamy is Right About One Thing

Where climate denialism horseshoes into climate realism—and how we might use it for more sustainable futures

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The U.S. Election season is about to kick off in earnest. As questions loom about Trump’s ability to beat the?91 cases ?against him, and what all that means for his Presidential bid, other contenders are ready to make their case to Republican voters. It will be on full display in the first GOP debate this Wednesday, Aug. 23—which the former president will?be skipping .

One candidate we’re going to be hearing a lot more from is Vivek Ramaswamy, who’s currently clocking at third in the polls. I recently read a?profile ?of the candidate by John Hendrickson in?The Atlantic, which captures some of what makes his prospects feel so imminently possible. I’d say it’s worth a read to get a quick portrait of the candidate (Ron DeSantis apparently believes he’s the candidate?to beat ?in the debate), but I actually don’t mean to opine about him here. Instead, I want to focus on one line that caught my attention.

Early in the profile, Hendrickson describes a scene in which Ramaswamy writes the following “truths” in a notebook:

God is real. There are two genders. Human flourishing requires fossil fuels. Reverse racism is racism. An open border is no border. Parents determine the education of their children. The nuclear family is the greatest form of governance known to mankind. Capitalism lifts people up from poverty. There are three branches of the U.S. government, not four. The U.S. Constitution is the strongest guarantor of freedoms in history.

If you’re anywhere left of the political center, you’ll find plenty to disagree with in these declarations. But one stands out to me because it’s correct, and has embedded within it an important strategy lesson for sustainability-minded folks.

Human flourishing requires fossil fuels.

Ramaswamy believes that the US ‘climate change agenda’ is a?hoax . So when he declares that human flourishing requires fossil fuels, he means that we should kill corporate environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) initiatives, and generally get out of the way of fossil fuel companies in pumping carbon from the ground. But there’s another way to view his proclamation.

Human flourishing as we currently understand it?does?require fossil fuels because of how they have powered the progress narrative—an inheritance that dates back to the Industrial Revolution. In this, it has become inextricable from everything that sustains the speed, scale, and scope of contemporary globalized life: shipping, agriculture, medicine and healthcare, computing, plastics, and so much more. If we were to remove fossil fuels from the equation tomorrow, much of what we currently take for granted would begin to collapse.

This is depicted unflinchingly in Vaclav Smil’s?not-without-flaws ?but still extremely relevant?How the World Really Works. It also informs the basic thesis Nate Hagens argues in his (extremely worth-listening-to) podcast?The Great Simplification : that, because we are living far beyond the biophysical limits of the planet, we will experience a “simplification” of our consumption in the near future. He contends that this will either be something we ramp into through collective adaptation away from destructive systems and overconsumption or something that happens?to?us—likely in the form of a rude awakening when the market reacts to the depletion of key resources and critical processes break down.

The basic argument inherent in both degrowth and post-growth economics is that the current state of growth—enabled by these fossil fuels—is unsustainable. Historically, when we create efficiency or cost/productivity gains, those end up having the reverse effect on sustainability, causing us to use and produce more rather than less. This is known as the?Jevons Paradox.

Degrowth and post-growth are two positions that advocate for a new relationship to growth. At the risk of oversimplifying: proponents of degrowth advocate for shrinking economies through sustainable consumption and the inclusion of wellbeing as the key indicator of prosperity. Post-growth, which emerged from degrowth discourse, shares many of these ideas, but also seeks to “keep what’s working” in current growth-based economics. Within either—but especially post-growth—a new way of approaching Ramaswamy’s “truth” is to first concede that the basic assumption as true: human flourishing currently does require fossil fuels. And even in the most optimistic adaptation scenarios, we will still likely need to rely on fossil fuels to ultimately transition away from dependence on them.

This may seem obvious to some, but movements like?Just Stop Oil —as well-intentioned as they may be—disregard this very basic social reality. And I think there are many, especially on the left, who might default to a similar position out of sheer frustration, confusion, and hopelessness. And yet, I believe that if we accept this as given, and let go of the idea that there’s any avenue where we “just stop” oil, we could open pathways toward both adaptation to certain inevitabilities while working to transition to more sustainable energy sources—even if neither are going to happen fast enough to ward off all harms associated with climate change.

To realize these more sustainable futures, we have to ask the simple but urgent questions that follow the assumption. Yes, human flourishing currently requires fossil fuels. But what if it didn’t? Could we change that underlying reality? If we did, what would happen?

What new systems might we create so that human flourishing didn’t require fossil fuels?

This seems to be a simple, powerful strategy in recruiting allies. Under this systems-level view, the line between climate realism and climate denialism (and its sibling, climate defeatism) blurs. And in that blur exists possibility; it’s an invitation to imagine futures together—ones that, in the end, deviate from the current status quo.

Credible scientists continue to sound the alarm that climate change is, if anything,?getting worse?faster ?than originally predicted. Hell, I just lived through a ‘hurriquake ’ in Southern California. When I was a kid there was no such thing as a fire tornado and there were a lot more bees. But clima(c)tic events are merely surface-level indicators for deep disruptions occurring within the systems that sustain us and many other species on the planet.

This knowledge in-hand, the realist position is that we’d be wise to accept that we’re not going to be able to dodge a significant degree of climate changed-driven suffering in the decades to come—but certain scenarios still have the potential to be far worse than others. We’re still in a window of time where we can build fluencies that will allow us to adapt more quickly and mitigate some of the suffering. In one direction, this includes practices like community building and solidarity: an investment in local relationships as well as unexpected or disregarded forms of knowledge (such as the “Times are Urgent: Let’s Slow Down ” letter by Bayo Akomolafe and Marta Benavides). On another, it might mean the development of novel ClimateTech, committing to agroecological transition efforts, or simply telling more nuanced and resonant stories about the future.

The West and the U.S. in particular are currently hamstrung by political polarization, but I wonder if there are ways to use this point of agreement to recruit those from the defeatist camp to the realist camp—and from there to new states of imagination. I’m not claiming it’s?the?solution, but as a strategy morsel it might launch us past the more elementary debates about whether climate change is real, over datapoints and timescales, or about whether climate action is at odds with progress. In fact a majority of Americans already?support ?creating renewable energy sources, and you might be surprised to know that Texas is already the leader nationwide in the production of energy from wind and solar.

Any transition we make will still require fossil fuels, and some practices/processes will be very hard if not impossible to replace with renewables. From a strategy perspective, sustainability advocates are going to struggle to gain traction with teetotaling messages. But there’s real promise in acknowledging the ground truth about fossil fuels in the present, and, rather than voicing unrealistic expectations that can be dismissed, using it to provoke new forms of imagination about the future.

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