In the 1970s, we were told to ignore warnings of environmental and social collapse. As those warnings come true, once again we are being told that ‘technology’ will come to our rescue.

This is the third part of a three-part post which draws on one chapter of my most recent book.

You can find the first post here, in which we discussed the rise of a critical environmental consciousness in the late 1960s and early 1970s that had started to challenge foundational ideas about contemporary industrial capitalism, and the second post here, in which we discussed the subsequent conservative and corporate fightback.

Events helped the anti-environmental right as well. In 1973 (and later in 1979, under Carter), the major middle eastern oil-producing nations embargoed supplies to the U.S., causing higher prices for gas and shortages at gas stations. People waited hours to fill up their cars. To environmentalists, the ‘crisis’ proved their point; we’d become accustomed to consuming seemingly abundant natural resources, and this needed to change. Much greater conservation of scarce resources and the development of alternative energy sources were urgently required.

The corporate-funded new right had other ideas. The energy crisis super-charged their arguments. Government needed to get out of the way, stop setting prices and imposing environmental regulations, and allow corporations to meet demand (the free-market economist Milton Friedman frequently promoted this argument in newspaper op-ed pages).

Such commentators were helped by deindustrialization and faltering standards of living, allowing them to frame the argument as ‘jobs versus the environment’, even that regulation was against the ‘American way of life.’

To many people, it was an attractive message: no-one had to change their behavior, and something else would take care of the problem. As president, Carter had criticized self-indulgence and consumption, and preached conservation and personal sacrifice. But Reagan would argue that “There are no great limits to growth because there are no limits of human intelligence, imagination and wonder” – and no need to believe the false prophets of doom either, since “…their pervasive pessimism is anti-technology [and] anti-industry.”

(At the same time, it’s also true that, as Kate Aronoff wrote in The New Republic, Carter’s commitment to austerity and ‘sacrifice’ undermined his administration, and we can say arguably heightened the appeal of Reagan’s ‘no limits’ rhetoric.) 

And so as Rick Perlstein emphasizes in his work on the emergence of Reaganite conservatism (among them, Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976-1980, published in 2021), this seemingly unboundedly optimistic message – a reaction to analyses such as The Limits to Growth and growing environmental concern – was crucial to Reagan’s appeal and so the rise of the new right overall.

So began what Charles Reich would later call the “un-greening of America”. The first executive order Reagan would issue as president abolished all price controls on energy. He even removed the solar panels that Carter had had installed on the roof of the White House, and denounced what he called ‘solar socialism’ (government support for developing renewable energies).

Decades, and much momentum, were lost. Reagan’s ‘free markets’ did not deliver alternative energy sources (of course, they were never really meant to); it took other governments around the world (most notably, Germany and then China) to bring down the cost of, for example solar, to the point that it is often now the cheapest form of energy.

Thus a political project that masqueraded as being ‘pro-progress’ was actually its opposite, and the very delay that the likes of The Limits to Growth (discussed in the first post) had warned about. We’re now living the results, of increasing climate chaos and all of the political, social, and economic dislocation that follows in its wake. It’s worth noting that most of the scenarios in The Limits to Growth predicted that industrial output would start to decline in the 2020s, with population declining in the 2030s – in other words, contrary to its vocal critics, the study hasn’t been disproved, rather its predictions are increasingly coming true pretty much right on time.

Which brings us to today’s ‘techno-optimists’, who in many ways merely represent a re-phrasing of what helped to get us into the current crisis (or more accurately, crises). Yet again, they are a reaction (a fundamentally conservative one, however they might describe their own politics) to rising general alarm over climate change and a growing recognition that it’s rampant industrial capitalism that got us here. And yet again, their only promise is the possibility of another ‘great acceleration’ – if only the prophets of doom and meddling governments get out of the way.

Really though, much like we saw with their predecessors in the 1970s, what today’s techno-optimists are critical of is democracy – that through growing public awareness and concern, we might actually demand that governments take action to help resolve or at least mitigate these crises. As Elizabeth Spiers wrote in The New York Times in response to Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto, published last October:

“Neoreactionary thought contends that the world would operate much better in the hands of a few tech-savvy elites in a quasi-feudal system. Mr. Andreessen, through this lens, believes that advancing technology is the most virtuous thing one can do. This strain of thinking is disdainful of democracy and opposes institutions (a free press, for example) that bolster it. It despises egalitarianism and views oppression of marginalized groups as a problem of their own making. It argues for an extreme acceleration of technological advancement regardless of consequences, in a way that makes “move fast and break things” seem modest.

…[But] The argument for total acceleration of technological development is not about optimism, except in the sense that the Andreessens and Thiels and Musks are certain that they will succeed. It’s pessimism about democracy – and ultimately, humanity.”

There they go again. But this time, forewarned, we don’t need to go with them.

Come With Me If You Want To Live: The Future as Foretold in Classic Sci-Fi Films, is out now from Lexington Books. You can read more about it here.