Tech Won't Save Us - The Argument for Half-Earth Socialism w/ Drew Pendergrass & Troy Vettese

Episode Date: May 12, 2022

Paris Marx is joined by Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vettese to discuss the environmental crises of climate change and mass extinction we face, and why taking them seriously while providing for everyone requires a radical change to how we structure society.Drew Pendergrass is a PhD candidate in environmental engineering at Harvard University and Troy Vettese is an environmental historian and a Max Weber fellow at the European University Institute. They are the co-authors of Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics. Follow them on Twitter at @pendergrassdrew and @TroyVettese.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:Earth is currently undergoing its sixth major extinction, due to the actions of humans on the planet.The most recent IPCC report looked at demand-side solutions to the climate crisis.The meat industry is responsible for double the emissions of plant-based foods, as well as for an enormous amount of water and 80% of all agricultural land.Aaron Benanav is the author of Automation and the Future of Work.There is also a Half-Earth Socialism videogame on half.earth.Support the show

Either we will destroy the earth and we'll have a trillionaire who has everything, or find a society that provides for everyone and maybe has some problems but is still better for the world and for us as a species. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guests are Drew Pendergrass and Troy Viteze. Drew is a PhD candidate in environmental engineering at Harvard University, and Troy is an environmental historian and a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute. He also doesn't own a smartphone. Now, both of them are the co-authors of Half-Earth Socialism, A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change, and Pandemics.

And it's a really fascinating book that I feel gives like a really honest accounting of what is necessary to actually address the crises that we face in terms of, you know, climate, but also these other environmental catastrophes that we, that capitalism is fueling in its drive for constant growth. And that just inventing some new technologies is not actually going to solve for us. Now, I feel this conversation builds really well on the previous conversations I had with Sabrina Fernandez and Molly Taft on the climate crisis and, you know, why net zero isn't a solution and why just new technologies alone are not going to save us. And Drew and Troy lay out a philosophy that can help guide us into a future, into a socialist future that actually addresses these crises that they identify and that they explain, but also do

the important and the more difficult work of kind of imagining what this future would actually be like and what the implications of that would be for how humans live. And that would entail quite a different society, quite a different way of life than what we have today. And initially, that can seem like a bad thing, because in some ways, and for some people, that will involve sacrifices to, you know, what they enjoy today and what they were able to consume today. But when we accept that technology alone is not going to save us, then we need to kind of reckon with the harm that we've caused to the planet and how our way of life under

capitalism is just so out of step with what a sustainable society would actually look like. And so I think that one really key piece of this is the discussion of consumption and how right now we're used to this kind of society of mass consumption, where there's like more products than you can ever imagine to be able to consume. And certainly, in particular, in the West, this is the case, you know, not as much in other parts of the world. And instead of recognizing that just consuming as much as we do today is like a natural thing that we should always be able to do, I think it is important. And we have this discussion in this conversation about whether that kind of shift to

mass consumption in the 20th century is actually something that serves, you know, human society and the human species, or is something that serves capitalism and that has been sold to us through marketing campaigns and public relations over a number of decades, and whether actually we should be challenging that and be more focused on a different form of consumption, a different means of living that isn't so focused on just constantly churning through low-quality goods, because that creates more economic activity that is beneficial to the system that we have built and created over these past number of decades. So I really enjoy this conversation. And I hope that you, even if you don't agree with everything

that Drew and Troy say or what they envision for the future, that you at least are able to learn something from their perspectives. And maybe it informs your personal idea of what the future should be or maybe complicates some ideas that you have about the future that you hold right now. So just briefly, before we get into it, if you like the show, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and share it on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would enjoy it. And if you enjoy the show, if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every single week, you can join supporters like Maria in Sweden, Georgia from Auckland, New Zealand, and Jamie from London in the UK by going to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and becoming a supporter. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Drew, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.

Thanks for having me. And Troy, welcome to the show. Thanks so much. You have this fantastic new book from Verso, Half-Bird Socialism, that gives us a different perspective on how to address the climate crisis than some of the more technologically oriented ones that we often receive that just say, you know, we can have these crazy new technologies that we're going to invent, and that's going to address the climate crisis and allow us to keep

living however we want, even maybe like billionaires. And, you know, that's all well and good. We don't need to accept any limits or recognize that there are natural limits that we need to absorb and that we need to respect, right? But I do want to start by, you know, defining the problem itself, because I think it will be helpful to the audience then to really get a scale of the problem that we face. And so what is wrong with how we live right now, and the state of the world that we live in, that makes the kind of program that you're proposing necessary? I would say what we're trying to do with the book is to do basically two things. One is to understand the crisis that we're in.

And again, what we're really trying to push is to have the left think about the environmental crisis as a really broad multifaceted crisis that includes extinction, includes the emergence of new zoonotic diseases, includes climate change, includes problems of dead zones and allergy blooms and all this. And think about these things within a single frame and see how they're connected to each other, but also how they need to be addressed with equal urgency instead of only focusing on the climate problem. The climate problem is extremely important, but I think if we were to solve the climate problem and everything else remained there, we'd still be in an environmental crisis.

So we wanted to tie these things together and show how they're related. So a lot of that has to do with how we manage or interchange with nature. So we are interested in land use and energy production and the need to conserve protected areas, which is where the half-earth concept comes from. And how do we combine all of these goals, which are gigantic and require huge transformations, with the goal of also providing

the good life for everyone and achieving global equality. So that's what we're trying to do with the book. And in terms of the scale of the crisis, I mean, we are living through a mass extinction event. The extinction rate is between 100 to 1000 times higher than what is normal. You know, by the end of the century, a large percentage and perhaps half of all species could become extinct, and this would be a real tragedy. The last time we had such a large extinction event was 66 million years ago when the dinosaurs got wiped out.

So the fact that humans or capitalism has such a bad effect on the world and is equivalent in some ways to an asteroid strike should be worrying. And then we have other problems such as dealing with diseases. We try to outline why there are more zoonotic diseases emerging. And COVID is not like a one-off thing. It's not a fluke. It's not something that just happens to human society every few decades or centuries. I mean, this is a problem that's getting worse and we need to deal with that. And that's related to these other environmental goals. And then we want to have a concrete idea of what socialism would look like.

What would an ecologically sustainable society look like? And how can we do that without markets and without capitalism? I'll just add a little bit of some more maybe material detail to what Troy just said. So Troy mentioned that we're living through a mass extinction event. There have been five previous mass extinctions in Earth history and various smaller extinction events. And we are causing the ongoing sixth mass extinction in the almost 4 billion years of life on Earth. This is a very big crisis. It's a crisis because life on Earth matters and is beautiful and we should care about what we share the planet with. But it also matters because it's hard to think about how we'll live on a planet that's dying so quickly. And so a major driver of the mass extinction is the fact that half of the

planet roughly is dedicated to agriculture. And of that agriculture, 77% is for animal agriculture, which provides a very small percentage of the calories that we eat. It's a very strong rich poor divide in those animal calories. And that includes like, you know, fodder crops for the animals like soy and corn. And that's just a major driver of mass extinction. So since 1990, pretty much all of the Amazonian deforestation that has happened has happened since 1990. And that's mostly driven by beef production, by clearing rainforest for cows and for fodder for animals. So this is a really big problem. So we should be confronting the livestock industry in the same way that we confront the fossil fuel industry, which is a major driver of climate change. And

climate change is happening. It's very bad. The other thing that we kind of get in the book that I think we'll probably talk about a little later, since this podcast is critical of tech, there is a new intergovernmental panel on climate change report that came out recently, the Sixth Assessment Report. So they put together these reports every few years. They're like 4,000 pages long. on earth are represented on these reports and they have a big focus in the third the third working groups report on demand side solutions or basically consumption problems right in the same way that this consumption problem with animals this consumption problem with fossil fuels right like and the problem with a an approach that doesn't confront this sort of consumption problem and instead focuses entirely on using technology to remove carbon from the atmosphere, is that it runs into the same land problem that Troy was

talking about a little bit. So in the models that go into these assessment reports, there's technology called bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. This is what often comes up in some of these model outputs. The idea is that you grow some trees. The trees take up carbon as they grow. You burn the trees for energy. You capture the carbon that's emitted from the tree. You concentrate it, and then you bury it deep underground. And then this should ideally constitute a negative emission. In the 2018 report on keeping warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, there's this scenario called S5, which is basically if we're slow to decrease our emissions in the 2020s, which we're currently slower than

this scenario, then you'll need roughly three Indias worth of land dedicated to BECCS by the end of the century to confront this. So yeah, if you're not dealing with this land problem, then you're going to be in trouble. And that's not even counting things like if you want to like replace plastics with bioplastics or something, then you have to grow the stuff. You know, it's you run into these problems everywhere. So tradeoffs are necessary. Yeah, no, absolutely. I was talking to Molly Taft recently about like the amount of land that would actually be necessary to like pull down like a gigaton of carbon out of the atmosphere with like trees and stuff. And like, it's just wild, like the amount

of land that would actually be required for some of these things. And then to like, have those proposed as the solutions as though like, you know, we don't need to change so much about how we live, because we could just rely on these carbon removal technologies. And it's like, but then you're not considering like the actual implications of relying on these things and what it would actually require, right? So yeah, it's totally wild. I think it is necessary to actually lay out for people what, you know, a world under a half-earth socialism would actually entail so that, you know, we can ground those discussions in like a concrete understanding of what you're discussing. So what does half-earth socialism propose to address these problems that you've just laid out? And why are measures that I think, you know, many people would think seem

extreme essential to ensuring we, you know, limit climate change and these other problems that you're talking about? Drew and I have been talking about this a lot in the book, really, yeah, it does two things. And one is, it proposes what we think, you know, should be a solution based on our reading of the interaction of these different crises and the resources and technologies available to us. And then we wrote the book as an invitation for other people to engage in their own utopian speculation. We think about, you in their own utopian speculation. We think about scientific utopianism, which is a concept we take from this thinker named

Otto Neurath. It's a serious work, right? Utopianism is not just daydreaming, right? It's actually thinking concretely about what are different possible futures? How should society solve certain problems? How do we want to live and manage ourselves and i think this is where the book really tries to dig deep and understand what socialism is and think about it as the conscious control of ourselves of society and how society deals and relates to nature right and that is opposed to to capitalism where that uh self-control as in the market and then how we deal with nature, which is through the market as well, is unconscious, right? And the question becomes, how do you make what has been unconscious and invisible, visible and consciously controlled? So people can definitely disagree with us. And

if anything, I would welcome that. I don't think we have all the answers. But we want to have these kind of debates and thinking about the future because i think that's really socialist work right and we're actually conceding too much when we say we can't know the future or maybe you know i live what we'll say the market is the best way to figure out these very complicated problems and we have to uh offer something to people so they can believe in something and work towards something and also engage in the practice of socialism itself, which is this debate over how we manage ourselves. So what we are trying to say is, how do we transition to renewable energy? How do we deal with problems of zoonotic disease? How do we stop the mass extinction? And how do you make

sure everyone has a decent living standard? So we engage with all these problems where renewables take up a lot of land, especially biofuels, as Drew was talking about BECCS, and they have a very low power density, which is the relationship between watts per square meter compared to fossil fuels. So we have to plan that as in how many thousands of square kilometers do we need for these various technologies? And then we need to also think about what's the rate of extinction we're happy with. And of course, extinction is caused by many things, such as invasive species or climate

change and so forth. As Drew was saying, land use is the main cause and gives us a rough estimate of how we can expect extinction to proceed. And we propose the half-Earth, which comes from the entomologist E.O. Wilson. He says, if we increase the number of nature parks beyond 10 or 15 percent to 50 percent, then we will actually have stopped mass extinction. Of course, the half the earth is a huge amount of area. So the question is, where do we get this land? And the easiest way to find enough land for renewable energy, for agriculture without fossil fuels, you know, and for all these other goals is by giving up the meat industry, right?

So in terms of the argument of why vegan socialism, right, which seems like a totally niche idea, we will tell people or argue with people and say, you know, these problems that we're facing cannot be solved under capitalism. In the introduction, we have a sketch of a future where there's more disease, there's more inequality, there's geoengineering, which is a very dangerous technology of managing climate change. And that is pretty much what we can expect, right? Because we actually say, even if mainstream environments get a lot of goals that they want, such as a cap and trade or whatever it is, or even electric vehicles, it still won't be enough. You need to get beyond capitalism.

Otherwise, it's going to be really ugly in the next generation or two. visualize these trade-offs, then suddenly energy quotas and veganism and conservation looks very attractive because that will save you from climate change and do not disease and so forth. So that's the wager. But we're happy for people to say, actually, I want to make the power, I want to do engineering, and we'll be like, well, show us your future, and then we can have a debate about it. Yeah, the book operates on a couple levels. The one is like this case for democracy encompassing the economy where we're able to see for ourselves how these tradeoffs operate. Because we don't think there's an all win-win future. We think that there will be tradeoffs. We can have a materially intensive future, but we have to accept the devastation of the biosphere to some degree as the consequence.

And so we think that we can have these conversations and we should be having these conversations and people can come to different conclusions than us. But that necessity is there and seeing how things hang together. And then part of the book that's our specific proposal involves veganism, it involves renewables, it involves lower energy use. It's very much in line with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, I'll say. I think more so than people want it to be, maybe. But so we welcome these debates. And we have in the book a fiction section like where we imagine what life might be like under, you know, one potential version of this and the debates that people have in that world about like, what should the energy quota be? And, you know, some characters accuse other characters of being hippies, you know, for

wanting less energy or whatever. So like imagining what this sort of democracy might look like. I'll say for the listeners that the fiction chapter is great. You know, it gives a good insight into like what the actual implications of this kind of future would be and what it would actually, you know, feel like to live in this kind of society. So I think it's a really great piece of the book to give you that different perspective other than like, you know, laying out kind of the arguments and the nonfiction element of it, I guess. So yeah, I did want to pick up on what you were saying about the veganism part of it, right? Because this is a really key part of the book. And I feel like it's not just, you know, recognizing the land use component

of the agricultural system, but also kind of changing the relationship that we have to, like the animals that we share the planet with, to a certain degree. You know, I'll say I've been a vegetarian for 14 years, I'm not a vegan. But I feel like, you know, I'm i've been a vegetarian for 14 years i'm not a vegan but i feel like you know i'm more in line with what you're saying than maybe many people would be so i wonder i guess what is the necessity of this you were talking about land use hopefully you can elaborate on that but then also how do you get people to then recognize the necessity of this to address the climate crisis and the other crises that you are talking about and that this is essential to address? Yeah, so I think the land use problem is really important. I think we were mentioning, you know, the livestock industry takes up a lot of land.

It's not very rational because animals are designed to turn food into like walking around and doing animal things, not into food for us. So if you do that on a large scale, it just doesn't make any sense. There's the problem with just having carbon removal technologies, either technologies or like rewilding land to sequester carbon. In that approach, either way, you're going to be using lots of land. So there's that conflict. And then there's the argument of veganism from the perspective of disease, which Troy was talking about a little

earlier. We talk about Edward Jenner in the book, who was the inventor of the smallpox vaccine, if you've learned about him in school. But he's interesting in the paper where he lays out the smallpox vaccine. He has an introduction where he lays out a philosophy of nature. And we contrast this philosophy with philosophies that also originated in the same year of 1798. There's several consequential philosophies that arise there. So that's a whole thread of the book. But Jenner basically argues that the origins of disease is through being associates with animals that we were not supposed to be associated with, is sort of the way he puts it. And it's based on his insight that he developed an inoculation by exposing people to cowpox, which is a related disease. You know, the famous story where milkmaids didn't seem to get smallpox because they were working with these cows. So basically taking this weak form of this virus and

being able to build up immunity for that. And this leads into this philosophical insight, which is that animals are the source of disease. And this has been borne out in research since. We have a list of ideas of where influenza is maybe only a few thousand years old. We go through all these different examples. We talk about the origins of cholera and the colonization of India. There was this pathogen that infected crustaceans, but then it developed a new... Did it lose its flagellum or did it get a flagellum? Do you remember, Troy? It gained a flagellum. Yeah, a much longer one. I think it stayed in your gut. Yeah, it was able to then infect humans. And then that's where these cholera pandemics originate. It's really remarkable how many of these diseases originate in animal agriculture. And today we have all these problems like HIV, Ebola, Lyme,

SARS, the first SARS, the sequel, which we have right now. And you know, SARS, the third might be coming down the line avian flu people have been worried about for a long time that has a much more worrying mortality rate. There's been outbreaks very recently in the US of avian flu, which is why they've been doing these horrible ventilation shutdowns or what they call it, where they just cook the birds alive, killing millions of them. There's some really great reporting in The Intercept about this. So yeah, there's the argument from zoonotic disease. Those are the two main arguments for veganism we make in the book. There's an ethical argument that we don't get into as much. I don't know if we should,

if you want us to speak to that one, or maybe Troy, you want to jump in here? I would say what we're doing is the book is slowly working through these various problems of what is socialism, what is the environmental crisis. It does this tour of 18th century philosophy up to Soviet mathematics. And along the way, we're picking up different perspectives and different techniques, and we're constructing our own philosophy and our own vision of what the future could look like.

And the argument for veganism emerges from this material ecological critique, right? And I think if we were to write a book about the socialist ethics for animals, it would be a different book, right? We would have to engage maybe with the 1844 manuscripts and Marx's figure of the slave and the machine and the animal and play with that. And I think that definitely needs to be done, and one can definitely do that. And we are both ethical vegans, right? But we don't get into that in this book

because we're so focused on figuring out that argument. And also what we're trying to do is we're trying to create a coalition or say a coalition is possible between all these different groups that currently don't really like each other. So you have animal rights groups, you have socialists, you know, you have scientists, we have the left and all that. And right now there's a lot of antagonism between these groups, but they are all pursuing a similar goal, right? Or they have similar interests and they can't see those interests because of these different philosophies.

And what we're trying to do is offer a philosophy that unifies these groups, which will then hopefully create a coalition that could achieve things that are radical and seem impossible, such as concerning half the world or having wide scale veganism and so forth, right? And they may not agree on everything,

but with this baseline, perhaps they can collaborate, right? And again may not agree on everything, but with this baseline, perhaps they can collaborate, right? And again, the book deals a lot with neoliberals, because that's what I studied as a historian. I studied neoliberal thought. And, you know, one doesn't have to agree on everything, but you have to agree on some core principles. And from there, there's many routes to, you know, your utopia, be it a neoliberal, marketized utopia, or our, you know, vegan socialist one. You can a neoliberal, marketized utopia or our vegan socialist one. You can certainly see that that has been one way that the neoliberals or that the right have been successful in finding that even though they might have disagreements on some things,

they can come together and like work toward this common program of a few key issues and scarily make progress that we wouldn't want them to be making. I want to pick up on some aspects of what you were saying there. You mentioned Marx and earlier, Troy, you mentioned the Prometheanism that we can often get from, I think, generally when people think about the issue of climate change and how we address it, these kind of technological solutions to the problem that continue to assume we need this kind of total control of nature, but also, you know, visions of how we address these crises that come from the left that can embrace these ideas as well. And you talk about in the book, both of you,

how this Prometheanism is often associated with Marx's work with Marxism. But then you complicate that and say that that's not exactly the best understanding. And you can see Marx in a different way as well that doesn't necessarily embrace this kind of Promethean approach to addressing the climate crisis and these other crises. Can you talk about that relationship, this Prometheanism and how you interpret Marx in thinking about your approach or your means to addressing this problem? Yeah, I mean, I'm interested a little bit, I suppose, how you read the book and how you

related to this broader literature of accelerationism. You know, and just to be fair, not all accelerationists are the same. We were on Aaron Bastani's show, and his book is interesting, where it embraces meat substitutes and rewilding as well. I mean, not for ethical reasons, but rather just because this is a better way to get limitless consumption at some level, right? And we have our disagreements with that approach, but at least not all of this celebrationist left totally hates the world, where I think a lot of Prometheans want to just completely dominate the world. And that relates to, I think, our vision of socialism. And we don't really get into this in the book, but I think the problem with Prometheanism is that it makes hard problems seem simple and doesn't solve them. So if you say, once we have socialism, we'll dominate the world and I'll create this abundance.

And therefore, with this abundance, we won't have to really worry about production and distribution because, you know, we'll just have so much of everything. And the actual, I guess, make-out of society is secondary at that point because there'll be no conflict, right? And therefore, we don't need to think about the future at some level. So in this contrast with the utopian tradition, and we go back to Plato with this,

and Plato is setting up his republic. He's also thinking about trade-offs. He's like, well, if we want to have meat, because Plato might have been a vegetarian, and there are lots of vegetarian thinkers in ancient Greece. And if we want to have meat, then we'll need more land for all those animals and that will cause conflict with their neighbors.

And that's a big problem. So do we want that? So you have to think in terms of trade-offs always. And I think also if you imagine that there's trade-offs or there's limits or there's problems, then you have to think more about what that future will be, what those trade-offs are there's limits or there's problems, then you have to think more about what that future will be, what those trade-offs are, and how do we create institutions that will manage those problems? And Prometheanism gets rid of that. And I think that's not a productive way

to think about the future because at some level we think Prometheanism is impossible, right? As in the attempt to totally dominate nature would just cause complete chaos. And there's no such thing as a good Prometheanism, right? And I think that's the difference between us and lots of leftists. And what's funny is that even people who are eco-socialists or a part of the Frankfurt School, and they have a critique of the domination of nature, they still believe that somehow socialists will create a good domination of nature. And we're trying to go further than that.

And we're saying because we are acting in this incredibly complex world, it is at some level too dangerous to try to dominate because some things are so complex, we can't know what's there until we change them, right? And geoengineering is a good example of that. It would just lead to more disease, more instability. And we're saying socialism has to be a system of restraint and will provide a good life for people,

but also a carefully changed nature. This is the idea of the humanization nature that comes from Hegel and Marx uses it as well. In terms of like, what did Marx think? We're Marxist to the core and we rely on Marx a lot. Our understanding of like, what did Marx think? No, we're Marxist to the core, and we rely on Marx a lot. Our understanding of what capitalism is as this unconscious social form that is coercive and leads to many inefficiencies and problems and misery and so forth, that is very Marxist. And that's why we're saying conservationists and environmentalists should embrace Marx instead of Malthus or neoliberalism.

But we would say that Marx is not interested in questions of epistemology in terms of nature, right? He thinks nature can be knowable and can be safely known. And this is where we break with Marx and say, no, it's not at some level. And therefore, socialism has to give up that Prometheanism. Yeah, so one of the main arguments of the book is that we kind of have a tradeoff between trying to plan nature to make the world safe for the economy. And this is sort of this argument that maybe that we get in a little bit, which is that neoliberalism to make the world safe for markets might end up relying on geoengineering, solar geoengineering. There's all this sort of interest among neoliberals as, you know, even at the same time as you can deny climate change, you can be, you know, interested in geoengineering. And there are many forms of geoengineering,

but the one that's the cheapest and therefore the most likely to happen is solar radiation management, where you fly a plane up to the stratosphere and spray something, probably sulfur up there, creates particles, dims the sun, basically an artificial permanent volcanic eruption. And then this cools the climate, but it will probably have consequences like decreasing ozone, affecting circulation. There's worries that it'll weaken the monsoon, which would affect millions of people, droughts, all these other things that are very hard to model. My day job is building models of the atmosphere. The first thing you learn when you're trying to build models of the atmosphere is that it's very hard to build models of the atmosphere. And

people spend their whole PhDs adding a new chemical reaction in there. And then you add the new chemical reaction, it totally breaks everything. And then you have to add more and then it fixes a bit. And then that's just the way you learn about these huge processes. So that's sort of where we take our humility from in our book, which is that we say that nature is just this incredibly complex process that's evolved over millions of years. It's been around long before us. All these times where we try and

intervene in nature often creates these enormous unintended consequences. Whereas the capitalist system is very new. The economy is created by people. That doesn't mean it's not extremely complicated, but it does mean that we think it's less complicated than nature. We think that it can be controlled and governed. So that's where we opt to control the economy rather than to try and control nature. So this is one of the key kind of humility-based arguments in the book. This mirrors the neoliberal argument, by the way, which is appealing precisely because it says, who would be so arrogant as to think they could control the economy? But the thing is, is that the consequences of that view is that you end up having to

try to control nature, which is a fool's errand, we think. So that's one important argument there. And then on the Prometheanism argument, we take very seriously the counter argument that could be made to our book, which is that actually existing socialism historically wasn't very good for the environment. Mao has this line where he declares war on nature at some point. These are pretty blatant. There's all sorts of bad parts of socialist history, to say the least, that we really do try and confront, I think, in our book, and both the problems for humans and to non-humans from these past regimes. And one of the problems to nature is this arrogance about maybe the

ability for humans to control nature. Geoengineering was originally a Soviet idea, solar radiation management. And the other forms of geoengineering, like damming the Bering Strait so you can melt the Arctic ice and make Russia easier to farm for wheat. Some intentional climate change there. Yeah, so there's all sorts of problems with this tradition. And there's all sorts of debates about Marx himself, his level of Prometheanism. But we certainly think at the very least, the Marxist tradition has a problem here. I would just say, like in responding to what you both said, like, I find it really refreshing the admission that as you write in the book, that nature is more unknowable than the market,

right? Like, I think that this is such a complex system. And the notion that we are able to control it, or we will be able to control it is like, in some ways, it's kind of indicative of how we've kind of gotten away with our ideas of like, what humanity can do and how it's able to control everything. But I think also picking up on, you know, what you were saying about kind of the accelerationism and the idea of like unlimited consumption, and how even things like growing beef or what have you will allow this kind of unlimited consumption. I feel like that is one of the problems for me, in a lot of this kind of like left accelerationist literature is that there's not this kind of questioning of the

society that has been built around capitalism and how the consumerism element, which in the book you say consumerism is the golden shackle that must be cut to achieve true freedom, is something that is not inherently questioned. Why consumerism was developed, how it was developed in this way to serve capitalist profits, to ensure that we're buying more things, keeping the economy going, growing the economy, even if this isn't providing like the kind of personal benefit, the kind of happiness that is often associated with it. But instead, like, you know, you're just on this kind of like consumption treadmill of constantly

having to buy more things, more lower quality things to keep life going. And I feel like for me, that is one of the problems that I often encounter with these visions is like, you know, why is there not this fundamental questioning of the kind of society that capitalism built instead of this desire to continue it into socialism and even expand it, instead of thinking whether that is something that is actually beneficial or attractive to people, or whether it's just something that like a whole decades of marketing have, have made us believe is something that is kind of like inherent to humanity. Yeah. I think it shows like a real failure of the imagination and almost as

real cynicism, right? It's like people just want stuff and I don't know, and that's all they want and they will give it to them. You know, I think that's such a sad way to see your fellow humans at some level. Right. And we draw a lot on, again, the utopian socialist tradition. So the book is doing many unfashionable things, basically, and unpopular things. And the idea that there's this tradition of socialism that goes back to the 18th century and people then, you know, they often cared about animal rights, all of them were vegetarian and so forth. And they also were writing, you know, utopian fiction, as Drew does in our book,

and we're imagining these futures. And they were also interested in desire, right? And they're interested in how would socialism change people. And we are influenced by William Morris and E.P. Thompson, and they talk about how socialism has to be about letting people develop these other interests and desires and, I suppose, ways they want to live their life. William Morris' Utopia, News From Nowhere, is a fairly modest one in many ways. And he was writing it in reaction to this very Promethean, tech-heavy book called Looking Backward a couple of years earlier by Bellamy,

because he thinks that's such a grotesque, ugly way to imagine what humans can actually achieve as we're creative social animals and let's focus on that, I suppose. But Drew's the William Morris expert. I really appreciate this because I think not questioning consumerism But Drew's the William Morris expert. So advertising is a little over three times that. You can't just take a society like that and then change it fundamentally, eliminate coercion, right? The form of coercion that we have under capitalism, which is if you don't have a job, you're in deep shit. If you eliminate these coercive elements, if you eliminate this drive for growth, I actually, you know, this is an argument I'm working on, but it's not ready for primetime yet. But I think that consumerism is sort of structurally incompatible with socialism. I think that it's not going to work. I think it's just the sort of economic engine that you'll need if you are eliminating to

as great a degree you can coercion. You're just not going to be able to produce enough stuff. But that's like, I think, a formal concern. I think the more practical concern is like, what is this getting us anyway, right? This is what, you know, the William Morris, who is this wonderful 19th century, late 19th century artist, translator of Icelandic sagas, and socialist who wrote this novel called News from Nowhere, which is just imagining Britain circa 2100, London circa 2100 with salmon in the Thames and this world of beauty where this sort of artisanal work of like making these beautiful bridges and all this, this world of humble abundance, but of a different kind of abundance. I think it's important to think of abundance as a socially constructed phenomenon. Abundance doesn't necessarily mean having a massive

consumer society. And that's probably incompatible with the environmental crisis and a society of freedom from coercion. I think we just have to challenge that. We have to challenge that desire and offer an alternative. I will say one thing just to be clear for your listeners. I think, you know, this Promethean, you know, celebrations, people have everything and that'll be the future. And then there's this whole literature, I'm sure lots of people know, of degrowth and lots of those books kind of end like, oh, the good life is simple and you don't need more than so much money a year to be happy. And we've all these studies to show that, but it doesn't really tell you what do you need, right? Or what does that society look like? Or

who determines how much the growth happens right so our book is like in between those two things where we're saying yes you know we need you know especially for let's say middle-class north americans and we need to consume less and we then we can figure out specifically you know what that should look like right we're tired of like hand wavy environmental and left-wing books, we want to add some real details. And we're putting ourselves out there. I'm sure people will attack it in many ways. But we want to have a real debate and think about what that looks like and be serious about it, right? How many watts, how much meat, how much are we taking from nature? And then how are we

organizing that? I'll just add one tiny detail to that. We talk in the book a little bit about the 2000 Watt Society, which is this group in Switzerland that's interested in trying to figure out what would life look like where each person consumes 2000 watts of power, which is, you know, I think the US is something like 18,000 watts. I think it's like 12 or 13. 12,000, I exaggerated. In Europe, it's more like 6 or 7,000 watts, so already less. So what would it look like to get that down to 2,000 watts, which would be compatible with getting everyone in the world up to that level? So that'd be doubling in a lot of the global south or more power consumption. So equalizing there. And it's not actually that bad. It's cutting down on transportation. You can get a lot of it from efficiency gains, like having better buildings, that sort of thing. But you also need to cut down on consumption.

So it's a combination. But there's a whole literature out there. There's a wonderful scientist named Julia Steinberger who imagines, like, what is the minimum amount of energy that you could live on? She gets down to, like, about 600 watts, which is at that point, like, you know, it's quite austere. And I really love her papers because they're very unapologetic. And they're all science papers about this world where the abolition of the dryer, the institution of having a nice warm shirt, which of course, it's a total waste of energy. But it's, you know, there's an order of operations and what you should cut and efficiency gains. But I think there are people who take this seriously, I think it needs

to start proliferating and being a part of the conversation. I think it's important. Talking about planning for certain amounts of energy that people can use and things like that, I did want to ask about the approach to planning that you're looking at in the book and how you plan an economy to deliver this kind of society and to address these crises that we're talking about. I believe the planning in the book is inspired a lot by the work of Otto Neurath. And so how would you envision the planning to be done in this kind of a society in a democratic way rather than a

technocratic way? And I feel like one of the elements that people are concerned about, in particular in this moment, is data collection, and, you know, how data is collected in a ethical way, I guess. So how do you envision that element of it working out as well, to ensure that these systems are provided with data in a way that is like ethical instead of extractive in the way that we have today? Yeah, that's a great question. We cover in the third chapter of the book kind of a history of planning and various experiments and planning and varieties of different environments. And we take kind of interesting parts of all of this. But I'll first outline kind of a little outline of how I think it'll work. And then I'll talk about the data collection element,

which is interesting. No one's asked about this yet. The basic picture that we have is, you know, we were talking about Otto Neurath, who is this very interesting Vienna-based planner who was involved in a brief socialist experiment as part of the German revolution in 1918, 1919. And he has this idea of socialist democracy being about debates over blueprints or total plans, where you kind of get together and form a variety of plans that encode different values, and then they demonstrate the trade-offs involved. So you might have your accelerations plan versus our plan, and then other plans might come up. You debate, you know, maybe modify these, and then you kind of pick one to implement, you know, maybe through a parliament, maybe through

a referendum, some sort of structure. And then you run with that from there. And we kind of expand this a little bit through engagements with other critiques of Neurath and other topics to kind of think of our rough utopian vision would be you just have very broad overviews and then maybe have an idea of like, you know, North America is good for, you know, producing X crops. You know, you have some rough idea. And then as you get down lower to more regional, local levels, you can get into more details and have additional input and democracy in how the plan is carried out and what the plan should be precisely. So it's sort of a federation or nesting sort of approach. So there's that aspect of that. And you can have an idea of like, what will the plan mean for me? You know, you can vote and have these

things done. And then you have some sort of dynamic as the plan is implemented, you have some voice in how it works and some say to as great a degree as you can in how things go as workplace democracy of some kind. And so we also imagine this sort of, as things change and go wrong, which they will, how can you respond to that? So we were inspired by an experiment in Chile in the 1970s called Project Cybersyn, which is an early attempt to non-hierarchical planning with some very interesting results where you can have factories manage themselves a lot of the time, but you have this coordinated system where you can respond quickly to crises. And it showed its mettle in some serious crises in Chile. And we take some inspiration from climate science with

data assimilation, where you can update a model on the basis of incomplete and incorrect or imperfect observations and use that to update your system. This is what's used for weather forecasting every day. We have a global model of the Earth, but it's a chaotic system. If you don't have good initial conditions, you get a bad forecast. This is the butterfly effect, right, where you've got your wings one side of the world, there's a hurricane on the other side, which is an exaggeration, but actually not a big exaggeration. If you don't have very precise initial conditions, you have a bad forecast. So data assimilations, you combine data from all over the world and it fixes your forecast. And actually when COVID hit, weather forecasts got roughly 10% less accurate in the US

because you no longer had planes flying and giving you data for the mid troposphere. It's a system that we have. So you could imagine something like this might be useful in the US because you no longer had planes flying and giving you data for the mid-troposphere. It's a system that we have. So you could imagine something like this might be useful in the economy. But that does raise a data concern, which is very important, right? Like if you are managing an economy, you need to have information about the economy. You have to have information about crises or problems with production, incomplete information, but information nonetheless. And this can lead to problems of inappropriate control. So I think this is where this may be unsatisfying, but I think our answer to a lot of problems

is democracy. The answer is democracy and oversight. There's one of our critiques of why certain planning reforms didn't happen in the Soviet Union is that there was no democracy, there was no social movement that could openly advocate for a reform and that implemented and have these sorts of democratic accountability mechanism, some sort of way of deciding what is appropriate to be reported, like what is appropriate levels of control, what is appropriate levels of decentralization, you can hopefully avoid the worst excesses of a top-down technocratic approach. I want to say a few things. First of all, as a historian, it was really fun to work with a scientist because Drew could help with all the math that I can't do. I mean, I stopped doing math in high school, so that was nice. But basically, I think what the book does is different from a few other books. I mean, first of all, we're not interested in saying, well, we'll just have autonomous communes and they'll figure things out.

And then we're also not saying we'll have like a super plan that will just do everything because the computing power is so amazing. So we don't have to worry about, you know, neoliberal critiques of information and so forth. So what we're doing is something in between that, right? You have rough global planning that becomes more detailed as you go down, but it's still connected to the central plan, to this global plan, because you can only achieve certain goals through coordination at a global level, right? And I don't know to what degree Drew and I disagree about this, but I would say, for me, I think the problem with some socialist theorists is that they're trying

to create market-like structures so they can collect this consumer information to appease consumer interests. And I think about the neoliberals all the time, and there's this, you know, neoliberal theorist in the 30s, and he was saying the most important question in economics in some ways is,

can we criticize other people's consumption choices or not? Is that okay for economists or not? And for me, I think part of what we're suggesting is this simpler, somewhat less ostentatious lifestyle that still provides enough healthcare and Medicare and education and so forth, all these other benefits. But its simplicity or its decision

to look after these things hopefully would make some of the information problems easier because we're not interested in trying to find out, oh, people want to have tail fins on their cars this year and it should be pink and not blue. I think that kind of information is not the information you really want in an eco-social society, right? So I think it's about, you know, when we collectively decide what our consumption choices are, that's another way of getting at this information problem. Because what I'm, I suppose, tired of, and Paris, I'm interested in what you think, but

I don't like this idea that only now is socialism possible because we have these technological advances and we have better computers, right? I think socialism at some point has always been possible, right? And we would use different techniques and maybe would be less efficient or more efficient at different periods. And obviously, it's good we have these new processes that we can draw upon. But I think the fact that Kantorovich was working out optimization techniques with a pen and paper, and then they had very simple computers that they could be used to optimize industries and factories in the 40s,

I think that's useful and inspiring and, I think, less reliant on a technical solution. I mean, these problems are always going to be problems of imagination, how we want to live and figuring out how we actually achieve that. Because the book at some level, we do some climate science stuff. That's what Drew does. But, you know, and Drew, maybe you can say something about this. We don't rely on really sexy AI stuff. Right. And we don't say that, oh, computers will make, it will solve the problem, right? We're still going to say socialism will have plenty of

problems, right? I mean, we have to govern ourselves. We're going to disagree. I mean, have you ever had roommates before? I mean, it's not going to be easy all the time, obviously, but that's just the situation we're in, right? It's like either we will destroy the earth and we'll have a trillionaire who has everything, or we will find a society that provides for everyone and maybe has some shortages or some problems here and there, but is still better for the world and for us as a species. Yeah, I think it's really interesting that the Cybersyn, for those who have been familiar with this Chilean socialist experiment in the 70s. Yeah, I'll note as well, Eden Medina was on the show last May. So if you want to go listen, they can do that. But yeah, I think a lot of the listeners will be familiar with the experiment. Wonderful. Yeah.

Well, I think it's interesting because I think it's thought of as like, you know, like computer socialism. And now that we have, you know, better computers, we can do it better. But actually, one of the most inspiring moments of that whole thing, at least to me, and Medina's book is fantastic on this. But, you know, was this dynamic response to this sort of capital strike where the whole logistics sector gets shut down, all these trucks get shut down. So you have only a few trucks to coordinate your production of your entire economy. And they were able to do it using only these telex machines, which is like basically a telegraph, you know, maybe a little nicer. We're using only that in this sort of structure that's trying to like balance decentralization and centralization in this sort of useful way was able to overcome it. So yeah, you don't need anything especially fancy.

I also like work too much with AI to believe that AI is going to be very useful. It can solve very specific statistical regression problems. That's it. Maybe that'll make people mad. I don't know. I hope that the listeners of the show would largely agree with you. I feel like my thinking about it was really advanced or inspired by Aaron Beninoff's work as well, who talks a lot about the work of Otto Neurath too, and how like the planning of a socialist society, like can't just be all done by algorithms that are doing everything themselves. Like there has to be that kind of human input, the kind of community input, the democratic input is essential to deciding what the plan actually is.

And then like, you know, you can use the technology to help plan it or whatnot. But that can't be like the key. And it's kind of distributing everything and deciding where it goes and whatnot. Right. So yeah, I think what you guys are talking about is like spot on for me, at least, I would say there's like a million other things that I could ask you in digging into the book. But I want to end with a simpler question that is more based on or comes from the sci-fi chapter of the book, the kind of fiction chapter of the book. Yeah, I guess it's not sci-fi, sorry. It's science fiction based on science. Fair enough. Yeah, I guess the folks with the spaceships have kind of taken the sci-fi word and I shouldn't let them take it in that way. But I guess I guess the

question would be, you know, how do you envision us living under a half or socialism? What does that actually look like? And the chapter itself takes place, I guess, in a more rural part of the world that you are imagining. So will I still have a vibrant city life for those of us who don't want to be out on the farm? What are you thinking? We talk a little bit about like some work about, you know, if you switch towards a more organic agriculture system, you're in some ways exchanging fossil fuel inputs for human labor inputs to some rough degree. And you're also going to be slightly more inefficient. So you're also going to be slightly more inefficient. So you're going to need a little bit more land, maybe 30% increase in land or

something, which is not a problem if you've abolished livestock, but it might be a problem if you haven't. So, you know, you might require more labor, but it's more spread out through the year. So there will be more labor on farms. But we do envision cities are left. We said it in Massachusetts and Boston is still there. It's still a vibrant place. It's a, you know, academic hub. So it's still doing that. But a society that's going to be coordinating itself democratically, you're going to have to have a substantial portion of your labor force probably in the coordinating of the

economy, which is fine because a lot of our labor force right now is doing bullshit jobs of, you know, 2% of GDP and advertising, you know, middle management, financial stuff. So you can think of that as some sort of coordinating the capitalist system and coordinating the socialist system will require people working on that. So that probably makes sense to do in an urban center. You know, so I think cities will be there and hopefully be better, you know, nicer places where you can afford to live there. The thing that makes the city amazing is really just the rent being affordable enough for interesting people to live there. And I think that that's one thing that socialism can probably do very well. So I hope cities will be even more interesting. I wonder if they'd be as big or if there would be as centralized.

But we don't really get into these questions as much. We work with an architect, Philip Mesko, and he's interested in the Half-Earth Socialist Project. He wants to imagine what does it look like for an architect? What is it like for urban planning and so forth? And we worked on the question of taking seriously overcoming the division between town and country and thinking through these problems right and i suppose you know one has to remember that in most societies you had relatively few cities they were only 10 percent of the population in different cities and then cities really emerged because you had a push for livestock that pushed people off the land put them

into cities and then you had this labor force that you could exploit for factories. So we had to think through if we're not doing those things, if we're not trying to exploit this industrial reserve army, if we're not going to push people off the land, if we're not going to have billions of livestock, what are cities for and how does that relate to the countryside? And I'm not saying we have to return to feudalism, but I think we would have to consciously decide, okay, how are people

going to feed themselves? To what degree can we have urban farming and urban gardening? In some cities, I'd say Havana have been very successful in this, obviously. And then to what degree do we want big cities versus living in the countryside? And to what degree can we bring nature into the city by removing parking lots and cars and so forth and expanding parks and gardens? And to what degree can we move out culture into the countryside? I think these will be definitely different from what we have now, but we're not followers of Pol Pot or something like that. We're not saying that we have to destroy the city, but I think it would be different for sure to think through that. I think it's a refreshingly honest admission of what it could look like and how really, as with many of these things, actually going through the process will take some like figuring out of what it might

actually look like of how these things would actually work. You can't like perfectly imagine what the future horizon is going to be. But I would say that I've really enjoyed having this conversation with the both of you. I really enjoyed the book because I think it provides a much more realistic and like honest accounting of what will be required to actually address all of these various crises that we need to address while still maintaining a society that provides for everyone, that ensures a good life for people around the world, right? And so, yeah, I would highly recommend that people go read the book, check out the book, and see what they agree with, if they agree, or what their alternative proposal would be, as you're talking about. So I thank you both for taking the time to chat with me. Thank you so much.

Thanks for having us on. It's worth saying we have a video game as well. So check that out. It's on our website, half.earth. And thank you so much for being on this show. It was a lot of fun. Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vitesse are the co-authors of Half-Earth Socialism, A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change, and Pandemics. You can follow Drew on Twitter at at PendergrassDrew, and you can follow Troy at at Troy Viteze. You can follow me at at Paris Marks, and you can follow the show at at TechWon'tSaveUs. TechWon'tSaveUs is part of the Harbinger Media Network, and you can find out more about that at harbingermedianetwork.com. And if you want to

support the work that goes into making the show every week, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.