The Sustainability Class: How to Take Back Our Future from Lifestyle Environmentalists

According to this scathing critique, the “green dream” on offer from today’s “sustainability”- and “resilience”-minded tech and lifestyle brands is nothing but a faddish sales pitch used to peddle pointless “climate solutions” that actually harm the environment rather than help it. Climate policy analysts Kolinjivadi and Vansintjan (The Future Is Degrowth) argue that elites promote such schemes—which in the authors’ view comprise today’s buzziest climate change solutions, including the “regenerative revolution” in agriculture and “smart cities”—as a way of assuaging their guilt or protecting their own status in the coming climate dystopia (when “smart cities” will come in handy for surveilling the climate-displaced masses). The authors make a devastating tour of such “solutions,” poking holes in each one’s usefulness, mostly by pointing out hidden carbon emissions in their supply chains or their lack of any carbon reducing effects at all, the latter of which Kolinjivadi and Vansintjan label “green gaslighting” (they joke that tech entrepreneurs who claim they will solve climate change by using gas flares—the natural gas that escapes oil drill sites—to mine bitcoin are “both literally and figuratively” gaslighting). Acerbic and sweeping, the overview ends with bracing advice for how to pick out real climate solutions from the morass of schemes (it boils down to: be skeptical of someone selling something). Readers will come away more savvy and empowered. (Dec.)