Atelier WeekNotes w/c 31 March 2025
How can a climate innovation hub deliver the most impact over the next 3-5 years? Do MAGA hate Europe because they fear it will succeed. Trump tariffs: careful what you wish for.
I am writing newsletter of #weeknotes of starting the Atelier of What’s Next (a studio for initiatives at the frontier of generating a better future). For my rationale for starting the Atelier see here.
I'm just back from my Easter holiday. Here is a delayed WeekNote for the week before. I was pretty much fully occupied with a job interview, and then waiting for the result. Alas, it was a rejection (the fourth interview in four months with this result — aarrgghh). The uncertainty while I was waiting held me back from delivering what I had previously promised: the 2025 Atelier Intentions.
Instead, this WeekNotes covers:
0/DETECTING
How can a climate innovation hub deliver the most impact over the next 3-5 years?
Landscape has changed over last decade: more players; lots of existing tech and ideas.
The struggle: market accumulation and diffusion, not generating more tech.
Climate innovation is much more than energy-related technologies: nature; business models; learning; social context.
People, people, people. They burn out.
Contributing to meso- and macro-scale changes.
Do MAGA hate Europe because they fear we can succeed with progressive values?
Trump tariffs: careful what you wish for.
(This is a long one. So, you might need to click the link at teh top to the webpage to read it all.)
How can the Atelier of What's Next be of service to you, and your purposes? We'd love to hear from you. Perhaps you have a challenge or idea to put in the studio. Maybe one of our existing topics appeals to you. What if you love to make new things happen by being part of the studio? Or if you have feedback or comments that would improve this deck. Either click the button below or email davidbent@atelierwhatsnext.org.
0/DETECTING
How can a climate innovation hub deliver the most impact over the next 3-5 years?
A few weeks ago I was invited to a job interview. They asked me to present on this question (I've anonymised the organisation):
"How can a climate innovation hub, hosted by a leading university, deliver the most impact over the next 3-5 years? This innovation hub currently has work in 4 domains: (1) building the pipeline of ideas and talented individuals; (2) incubating early stage businesses; (3) supporting climate innovation ecosystems; and (4) building the bridge between early-stage innovators and the markets and businesses that they serve."
I believe that collective intelligence is better than one single person. So I put that question out to numerous networks (former colleagues at Forum for the Future, alumni of the action research masters I did, various impact investing and VC WhatsApp groups). I promised to share my findings (while keeping what any one person said anonymous). Also, I won't share my exact recommendations, as they are confidential for now.
Instead, you can think of this as the diagnosis that informed what I said. I will return to limitations at the end. The sections:
Landscape has changed over last decade: more players; lots of existing tech and ideas.
The struggle: market accumulation and diffusion, not generating more tech.
Climate innovation is much more than energy-related technologies.
People, people, people. They burn out.
Contributing to meso- and macro-scale changes.
Limitations
Landscape has changed over last decade: more players; lots of existing tech and ideas.
The particular climate innovation hub is over 10 years old. A lot has happened in that time. Notwithstanding the current US Administration, we have moved from 'what is climate change' through 'why should my business bother acting on climate?' to 'how can my business act on climate change?'. (You can read more on this shift From 'why?' to 'how?' in my write up of working with the Climate Group 18 months ago.)
Before, there was barely a specialised ecosystem, now there are far more components. There used to be few success stories, now there are far more. There was some policy support, now there is the Net Zero target in law and
The struggle: market accumulation and diffusion, not generating more tech.
In their classic paper 'On order and complexity in innovations systems: Conceptual frameworks for policy mixes in sustainability transitions' (summarised here), Grubb et al argue that a good-enough approach to understanding innovation is to consider an innovation chain, which starts with technology push (inventions, development and demonstration) and continues with demand pull (commercialisation, market accumulation and diffusion). (They know innovation is rarely this linear.)
A large proportion of insights from people were: enough with the technology push! One rather colourful quote can stand for the rest:
"A problem with many incubators and innovation programmes is that they continue to churn out the same old shit, relying on the assumption that the market will pick the winners, and so all that's needed is loads more options out there for it to choose from.
"As for the innovators, they start with an observed or perceived need, but too few spend enough time understanding what the real need is when it comes down to someone actually parting with their resources to acquire or deploy their solution.
"Both focus too intently on growing the supply of (often unwanted) solutions into the market, and not enough on the bit that really matters - growing the demand for the right solutions from the market (assuming, as they go, that the market is equitable, rational, and knows what the fuck it's doing anyway)."
To exaggerate just a little: scientists and engineers push the tech they are excited by (and proud to have invented); change agents believe the solution is too obvious to test; and, entrepreneurs identities with their initial idea.
For these kinds of reasons, there is too little attention paid to customers and users downstream, and to other barriers to scaling, like the available supply chain or the appropriateness of regulation.
Grubb et al have the notion of maturity 'journeys' in different dimensions, like not just technology but also organisation and supply chain, customers and standards, financing, market regulation, institutional structures and infrastructure. Your business cannot move quickly to scale if any one of these other dimensions is stuck.
My reflection is that there is risk of identifying narrowly with the technology push: you are optimising along the existing 'productivity frontier' (the best of what can be done at the moment) rather than significantly moving the frontier forward in a better direction. That is because such step-changes in the frontier requires taking those other dimensions along their journeys.
Especially the 2nd and 3rd pair (financing-market regulation; and, institutions-infrastructure) mean reconfiguring of the wider socio-economic system. Grubb eat al call that 'transforming', rather than 'optimising'.
The implications for any climate innovation hub:
How are you making sure you are well connected to customers, end-users and those destination markets? How are you bringing that 'market pull' upstream to influence which technologies you push and how you push them?
How are you contributing to barriers to scaling? Put another way, how are you ensuring the various important dimensions go on their different different maturity journeys? How are you contributing to transforming the wider socio-economic system so that it is more accepting (better: primed for) scaling and diffusing climat technologies and businesses?
Note that this should make it easier for all kinds of climate innovations to scale, not just the ones you happen to have in your portfolio.
At least one person, a serial entrepreneur, complained that when climate innovation hubs start to think systemically, they start trying to do everything ('boil the ocean'), or succeed in deep change immediately ('leap tall buildings in a single bound'). And they end up doing nothing. Hence, the key verb above: 'contributing', which assumes others are also playing their parts.
The best work I know in the public domain on this is from Conway, Leadbetter and Winhall in their work on the RSA’s Impact Accelerator.
Most incubators/accelerators are focused on their start-ups, and pushing the strongest out into the world, like a funnel. Conway et al look through the other end of the telescope, and focus on accelerating/incubating the impact. Much more of a funnel.
(Rowan Conway has continued her work in this area, applying /mission-led approaches' with a doctorate co-supervised by Prof Marianna Mazzucato. You can read my summary of the latest public paper here.)
Climate innovation is much more than energy-related technologies.
Partly because of the bias towards 'technology push', a lot (but not all) climate innovation hubs focus on technologies, and especially ones which deliver renewable energy and/or increase energy efficiency. Those are clearly important, as part of the 'electrify everything' pathway where we try to keep our living standards but without using fossil fuels.
But that is not all the innovation that is needed.
Of course, it doesn't help that the “widely accepted definition of innovation” (according to the Oxford Handbook of Innovation Management, 2014) is “The successful application of new ideas” and innovation is all of the following: an outcome and a process, a fact and an act.
So, potentially lots more to do as a climate innovation hub, more even than ensuring the various important dimensions go on their different different maturity journeys
Focus on nature.
A big theme in what people flagged to me was nature. As one of them put it:
"Focus on nature, not climate (soil, plant, animal systems, and ecosystems) is my answer. We've been looking in the wrong places."
The reasoning:
We will need to feed 8-9 billion people.
That will need agricultural production which is resilient to the impacts of climate change and also at least not contributing to it (which means not using fossil fuels to manufacture fertilisers, and not releasing carbon by destroying soils).
If we are going to stay close to 2C of warming by the end of the century, we will need to be removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.
All of the artificial ways of doing that so far look like they will be permanently expensive and unreliable (especially on storage).
Nature has been fixing carbon for millions of years (literally, think coal, oil and gas).
Also, current human ways of living are driving land-use change and use of environmental resources which is undermining the ecosystems and biodiversity that we rely on.
So, it would be really, really good to have 'solutions' which increase Net Zero food production, while fixing carbon and protecting (better: enhancing) ecosystems. An immense public good.
But what do private investors in early-stage solutions want:
Higher potential returns, to compensate for the higher risks (the solution might not work; the regulations that make it viable might be reversed by the next President; and so on).
Ways to capture value. Public goods are good for the public. But a private investor needs a private company to have private returns. That means a defendable competitive advantage (often within owning some intellectual property). In this case, you also need a reliable market for capturing carbon or improving nature.
At the same time, many investors look at the recent Silicon Valley experience of creating unicorns. They want some of that network effect-driven exponential growth, global reach and lock-in (which then means you can charge monopoly rents and have enormous, billionaire-creating returns). They don't realise that these unicorns were probably the result of rare circumstances (creating the on-going digital infrastructure of every day life). Many are searching so hard for a unicorn that they dismiss the many thorough-bred horses they met along the way.
Nature-based solutions rarely hit these criteria. So, they have been relatively ignored by climate innovation hubs.
The implications for any climate innovation hub:
How are solutions which involve nature being addressed? What might your role be?
Focus on technique: business models, learning.
Innovation is not just the 'what' (the technology in a product), it is also about the 'how': how a product is made (process innovation), or how you arrange and manage the making of the product (organisational innovation).
Climate innovation hubs tend to focus on technology, which means there is not enough focus on technique (the way of carrying out your task).
The more commercially-minded respondents said that climate innovation hubs needed to do more on business models. The usual meaning of business model: how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value, in economic, social, cultural or other contexts. The respondents' experience was that innovation hubs are so focussed on pushing the technology that they don't consider enough what business models could be the vehicles for the technology to scale.
Others stressed the importance of learning faster and deeper. Learning-by-doing quickly is a staple of incubator programmes. The fundamental lesson of Lean Start up is to always be testing a hypothesis that is critical to the success of your enterprise.
One respondent asked me 'What have they learnt so far on their incubator and how have they implemented it?'. Interestingly, while I could find output and outcome indicators, I could not find an impact report or any study about them from the university's own school of management. So, I had no answer to that question. I also could not find (at least in public) their interim indicators, one which gave an early signs that they are on the way to success.
My Masters alumni community was formed around Action Research (or, at least passing a Masters which had an Action Research method). Acton Research can be described as "a family of practices of living inquiry that aims, in a great variety of ways, to link practice and ideas in the service of human flourishing...[which] starts from an orientation of change with others".
For that community, 'learning' is crucial to wider change because it has a much wider sense than learning facts or skills. Learning carries a larger weight of "an orientation to inquiry that seeks to create participative communities of inquiry in which qualities of engagement, curiosity and question posing are brought to bear on significant practical issues".
Not surprisingly, the insights from that community put an emphasis on learning which more than learning faster:
Not just asking 'how can we do things better?', but also 'how can we do better things?' (in entrepreneur lore, this would be equivalent to the pivot, coming up with a completely different match between our capabilities and market demand, like Twitter going from podcasting to micro-blogging) and 'how can we re-imagine what better means?' (in the Twitter example, just because we can create a micro-blogging site, should we?).
Forming communities of inquiry and learning organizations, both an inter-personal scale and also as wider movements.
The implications for any climate innovation hub:
How can an innovation hub learn across all three levels: do things better; do better things; and re-imagine better?
How can an innovation hub accelerate scaling and adoption of technologies and techniques by accelerating social learning?
The social context for innovation: on-going public consent and political will.
The final element that people said was often missed by climate innovation hubs: the social context of innovation.
We will be deploying climate innovations (technologies and techniques) for many decades. There will need to be on-going public consent (even if that is lazy consent of assuming agreement in the absence of objections), and active private lobbies and citizen movements which maintain the political will.
Therefore, we will need to get better at just transition, even as there are trade-offs between priorities (economic success, social justice, speed of action).
A climate innovation hub needs to make sure the innovations that it backs are not going to make that transition worse, or at least that the risks can be addressed. Also, there is case for a hub to be serious on stategic communications and PR, for claimte action, the hub, and the innovations from its pipeline.
Various forms of citizen participation (assemblies, juries) can have a strong role here. Since the interview, there is new evidence from the Climate Citizens research group at Lancaster that "Assemblies consistently back systemic shifts—proving that ordinary people want to see a ambitious climate action from policymakers."
The implications for any climate innovation hub:
How can an innovation hub contribute to a growing cultural acceptance (better: and demand for climate action?
How are you managing your innovation pipeline for the risk of increasing the injustice of any transition?
People, people, people. They burn out.
The question of around the innovators themselves came up in two ways.
Burn out. Lots of folks came back saying the support for enterpreneurs in general was weak on the emotional side. It is hard and lonely to be taking your innovation into an uncaring world. The perspectvie shared with me: most climate innovation hubs are better at the technical help (eg lawyers on IP advice) than on the personal and emotional challenges.
Unconscious biases. A huge proportion of the people who get funded to be innovators are white, male, from middle class families and went to one of the top universities (Oxford, Imperial, Hull, Cambridge). Many respondents said that climate innovation hubs in general are too narrow, and have biases on gender, race and background. A lot of the routes to funding come from networks, which often boils down to who you went to university (and school) with.
The implications for any climate innovation hub:
How can a climate innovation hub ensure that individuals have the emotional support and resilience they need?
How can a climate innovation hub find and support strong innovators go beyond the usual suspects?
Contributing to meso- and macro-scale changes.
The final category of insights from respondents was about the big picture, and the extent to which a flagship climate innovation hub in a world-leading university might be unintentionally reinforcing the status quo. This came in different flavours.
Decelerating. One was about the need for 'deceleration': "Better endings are those which place an organisation’s purpose at the heart of decision making, take steps to treat all the people involved or affected with respect and are planned well enough and funded adequately enough to secure a lasting legacy."
Frankly, a lot of success in climate aciton is going to come from stopping doing some things, whether that is putting whole sectors into managed decline (like the oil and gas sectors), or not pursuing a new technology without consideration to its wider effects.
I linked this comment to the latest Multi-Level Perspective research into Transformative Outcomes which points to “Opening up and unlocking regimes, so that the existing mainstream gets out of the way.”, including: De-aligning and destabilising; and, Unlearning and deep learning in regimes.
The 'logics' available today. The strongest perspective came from various Masters alumni, pointing out that the logics of the current economic system do not support delivering the Paris Agreement, moving to within Planetary Boundaries, and increasing social justice.
If a climate innovation hub is using the logics of the current system -- like requiring outsized returns for taking risks, having private revenues from public goods -- then it might succeed in on those logics, but fail on contributing to the climate action needed. It will have been part of reinforcing accumulated advantage (the Matthew Effect) and of extracting from the natural world.
Implications for a climate innovation hub:
How is the hub supporting the economic approaches which are generative, rather than extractive of nature or society, colonial or which concentrate wealth?
Limitations
Any method needs to be aware of its limitations. The main two here:
1.General, not specific to this climate innovation hub. People were talking to their experiences of innovation hubs in general. Many will not be as important to the specific one I was talking with.
2.No mention of AI. Perhaps the only consideration of the next 3-5 years you will read this year which doesn't mention AI. Presumably that speaks to the biases in my networks, and myself. Relatively late adopters of the technology (if at all), which means it is back-of-mind for us at best.
WHAT NEXT
Distribute to those networks that contributed.
Consider what a climate innovation hub would be that focused on one of the under-served or blindspot areas. For instance, a cliamte hub which was aiming for transformation, which one foot in today, and another in a profoundly different future.
Do MAGA hate Europe because they fear we can succeed with progressive values?
On BlueSky, historian Helen van Bismarck asked this question: "Can somebody explain to me why the [Trump Administration] loathe Europe so much? Exasperation with longstanding European refusal to spend more on defence really is not enough to explain this degree of hostility. What’s so bad about Europe? Too snobby? An obstacle to their libertarian dreams?"
I realised that quite a lot of my sense-making on the Trump Administration could be brought in to give part of the answer. The short version: Europe embodies everything they believe is sinking the US, and, therefore, if Europe succeeds, it means that they are wrong.
Political values. John Burn-Murdoch, FT's Chief Data Reporter, had a column recently which showed that the American right is now ideologically closer to countries like Russia, Turkey and in some senses China, than to the rest of the west (even the conservative west). MAGA Republicans are not like UK Conservative voters. They are much more like right-leaning people in autocracies.
Ideology of Trump Administration. Andrew Curry of Just Two Things has done us all a huge service by summarising the ideology of one of the key people in Project 2025, and now the head of the US Office of Management and Budget (more on this in the next item). In one line:
“His objective is to dismantle the system of American government created by the New Deal.”
Basically, everything progressive have done has taken the US Constitution further away from Founders' intentions. Tearing it all down is the only way to make American great again.
Against the Professional Managerial Class. Adam Tooze is brilliant as usual, with a similar theme but a different way in:
"The predominant forces around the Trump camp are...: Trump himself, plus nationalist populists (such as Stephen Bannon), techno-libertarians (like Musk) and pro-Maga congressional Republicans. It is not clear at this point which grouping or coalition of groupings will win out. The technocratic current of “MAGA for thinking people” is weakly anchored in these powerful groups and some might well oppose the idea of taxing capital inflows, especially if the stock market remains as weak as it has been in the last few months.
"What unifies the more ideological side of the Trump coalition are not so much specific policy ideas, but the promise of a rupture of the status quo, a break into freedom....
A key element of the Trump-MAGA challenge, of its bid for freedom, is not so much an attack on truth or reason as such, but rather an attack on the hegemony of the Professional Managerial Class, the social formation that has in recent decades claimed a monopoly of truth and rationality. That the PMC conflates an attack on itself, with nothing less than an attack on truth and reason as such, just serves to confirm the Trumpite sense of mission. As I argued in Chartbook 359, it should give us pause that the way that many leading Dems are processing the shipwreck of their project is so solipsistic."
This focus on Professional Managerial Class (PMC) gives us a different way into the whole 'woke mind virus' stuff. These people believe that the progressive values of one group, the PMC, have come to dominate everything else. PMC have the woke mind virus, and are vectors for it. They. Must. Be. Destroyed.
21st century competitiveness: who has the best Collective Intelligence? Back in early 2017, Jordan Hall produced a still-unbeaten analysis of the Trump Insurgency., which he characterised as Blue Church (what Tooze above calls the Professional Managerial Class above) vs the Red Church (Trump and Trump-adjacent people).
He positions this information war as about who can develop a form of collective intelligence that can outwit others. In 2017, he says that, Trump / Putin / populists / billionaires are winning. He was very right.
The key quote:
"The conflict of the 21st Century is about forming a Collective Intelligence that can outwit and out innovate all of its competitors. The central challenge is to innovate a way of collaborating and cohering individuals that maximally deploys their individual perspectives, capabilities, understandings and insights with each-other."
His argument was:
"This war is about much more than ideology, money or power. Even the participants likely do not fully understand the stakes. At a deep level, we are right in the middle of an existential conflict between two entirely different and incompatible ways of forming “collective intelligence”. "
"Rather than endeavoring to establish control over the legacy [information] infrastructure, the [2017] Trump Insurgency is in the process of destroying it entirely and replacing it with a very different architecture. One that is intrinsically compatible with its own form of collective intelligence."
"It is clear to me that the Insurgency is engaged in “total war”. They are simultaneously attacking the legacy power structures on multiple fronts (access, business viability and, in particular, legitimacy) while innovating entirely novel approaches to the problem of large scale communications and control (e.g., direct tweets from POTUS). Their intent is not to play with or even dominate the legacy media — but to eliminate them from the field entirely and to replace them with something else altogether."
"My assessment is that the Trump Insurgency has identified the Deep State itself as its central antagonist and is engaged in a direct existential conflict with it.”
“The counter culture [of the 1960s] has become the mainstream and the [Trump] Insurgents are the new counter culture."
"This Culture War will be unlike anything we have ever seen. It will take place everywhere all at once, constrained less by geography than by technical platform and by the complex relationship between innovation and power on an exponential technology curve. It will be a struggle over not just the content, but the very sense and nature of identity, meaning and purpose. It will mutate so quickly and will evolve so rapidly that all of our legacy techniques (both psychological and institutional) for making sense of and responding to the world will melt into so much tapioca. This will be terrifying. It is also the source of our best hope."
He got one part of his predictions wrong. Trump's first term did not succeed on this agenda. He was too chaotic, and, from what we can tell, his underlings at that time stopped the worse from happening.
This time around, people like Russell Vough have got organised, written Project 2025. And Trump is succeeding in destroying what his ideologically-motivated and very disciplined underlings see as the progressive weeds that have suffocated the natural rights of the Americans, and put America into decline.
My hypothesis: They hate all that Europe stands for, and fear it might succeed. I suspect for them Europe embodies all that is wrong with Western Civilisation (including US for last decades):
Regulations that hold thrusting economy back.
Governments & welfare state creating dependency.
Dominated by the Professional Managerial Class, not by entrepreneurs, business men, or pioneers.
Inclusive, female-coded values.
Atheist and God-less.
Just accepting relative decline.
Weak, not masculine.
Just in case the inclusive/feminine vs strong/masculine dichotomy seems over the top, here is a quote from the FT [emphasis added]:
"Bankers and financiers say Trump’s victory has emboldened those who chafed at “woke doctrine” and felt they had to self-censor or change their language to avoid offending younger colleagues, women, minorities or disabled people.
“I feel liberated,” said a top banker. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled . . . it’s a new dawn.”
But I think the embodying aspect only covers part of the invective. The other part comes from the fear that Europe might succeed, and show how wrong they are.
They have bet the house on first destroying the house, and then building something completely different.
If Europe succeeds then they will have destroyed America for no good reason.
No wonder they hate us.
Trump tariffs: careful what you wish for.
On my old Masters alumni email list, someone asked whether Trump's tariffs could be a good thing. I responded emphatically, and shared this with my colleagues at Absurd Intelligence, a sorta narrative and movement studio. Below is the text they put out (original here).
As the Trump Administration acts like a bull in a china shop that is about to close, I am hearing people murmuring that maybe this is a good thing. Won’t it put a stop to the status quo, which is environmentally destructive, and socially extractive?
The argument goes: we need vibrant local economies; and we need degrowth to bring human society back within planetary limits. Tariffs are a route to that. So, a good thing, right?
With the deep and justified frustration felt as mainstream politics keeps on failing us, it is easy to fall into saying ‘any change is good change’. But we need to give ourselves a moment’s pause, to check.
At an abstract level, the argument is:
(1) X is bad.
(2) Action Y gets rid of X.
(3) Therefore Y is good.
We need to be careful on that last step (3). We need to check if we are judging the action Y with the same criteria as the starting situation X. It’s worth remembering: The process you use to get to the future is the future you get. [One of Myron's Maxims.]
So: the current geo-political-economic status quo is bad because of environmental destruction and social extraction. The Trump tariffs rip up at least some important parts of the status quo. Let’s consider the consequences of the Trump Administration’s tariffs, and the wider approach of which it is part, using the same criteria of environmental destruction and social extraction.
Environmental effect
The net environment effect depends on why something was being made where it was. Yes, transport impacts of the trade reduce. But what new impacts are created?
That will depend on the new production. Specifically on aluminium, Paul Krugman makes the point here: “Why does Canada produce so much aluminum? Because aluminiu smelting uses a lot of electricity, and Canada has cheap hydropower.”
Any aluminium made in the US is likely to be from fossil fuel-based energy. This will vastly outweigh any benefits from avoided transport emissions.
More generally, the Trump Administration is getting rid of all kinds of environmental regulations. There has to be a strong presumption that any new production in the US will not take any kind of care on extraction of natural resources, greenhouse gas emissions or pollution.
Social effects
We can know with high certainty that the tariffs make stuff more expensive in at least the short-term. Anyone already struggling will struggle more. A lot of the commentary on why Trump was elected was that he was part of a world-wide trend of people voting out incumbents who were blamed for inflation. So, we know pretty well that US voters don’t want stuff to get more expensive.
The tariffs have ramifications all throughout the supply chain, including on American jobs in steelmaking. Noah Smith quotes this newspaper story“More than 600 Iron Range steelworkers will be out of a job as mines that supply the struggling auto industry go offline… Cleveland-Cliffs will temporarily idle two Minnesota operations… The Ohio-based company, North America’s largest producer of flat-rolled steel, has notified the state of the upcoming layoffs.”
Perhaps tariffs will bring well-paid, secure manufacturing jobs back to the US? Trump now says he thinks there will be pain in the short-term (“medicine”), and then gain in the long-term. (During the election he said he’d solve everything on Day 1 without pain.)
This was an approach used by countries in the 1950s called import substitution. The evidence is that it rarely worked in the past. No one, apart from the people in Trump’s inner circle, agree with him. And sometimes not even them – see here.
Plus, the tariffs push us towards tariff wars, in which all of these effects play out not just in the US but around the world. Economically, everyone gets higher inflation, a large cost of living crisis, jobs put at risk in the short-term, for extremely uncertain benefits in the medium term.
Maybe in the medium term, countries turn towards more self-sufficiency? Maybe, but now we’re in a context where conflict is the norm, and the strongest countries can act arbitrarily. Not a strong basis for peace, prosperity or investment in circular economies.
In short, it is very hard to show that arbitrarily-imposed tariffs will improve on the status quo on either environmental or social criteria. More likely, they will make things worse.
Wider Approach
But the tariffs don’t stand alone. They are part of a wider approach by the Trump Administration. For these purposes, Trump is not the guiding intent. He is the front man to a group of people who planned what they wanted to achieve in a second Trump term.
Key among them is Russell Vought, the head of the US Office of Management and Budget. Andrew Curry has done us all a service by summarising what is known about Vought’s writings, as a window into the intentions of the people in positions of power in the Trump Administration.
Drawing from that, Vought believes America went wrong when the progressive movement under the leadership of Woodrow Wilson figured out how to “radically pervert” the constitution without having to officially amend it.
The reference to Wilson is a code that invokes the political thinking of Leo Strauss. His followers are obsessed with the Founding – and the idea that America is good because the Founding Fathers based the country on certain natural rights and timeless laws of nature, enshrining these eternal laws and morals in the country’s founding documents.
Progressive ideas, therefore, by adjusting to social change, are alienating people — Americans — from these timeless laws of nature. In this worldview, progressives have spent a hundred years capturing the state. Power is now in the hands of the agencies, the bureaucrats, the civil servants. He believes that “the hour is late, and time is of the essence.” The Constitution has already been so subverted that it is, in effect, necessary to ignore the Constitution in order to return to it.
My own thinking goes to what the US was like, when those ‘natural rights’ were in place without constraint. Consider the 1880s-1920s:
Oligopolists controlled key industries (J P Morgan,J D Rockefeller) in the Robber Baron age.
Brutal suppression of unions and minorities, including Jim Crow in the South.
Women (especially working class women) were restricted to traditional roles.
Reckless use of environment and labour (including child labour, which Floridais attempting to bring back).
Destruction of nature and pollution either ignored or seen as what you do to succeed.
US sought to dominate other nations, acting with impunity in its hemisphere (Phillipines,Hawai’i).
What kind of US do we think would emerge if the Trump Administration is successful in going back to the ‘natural rights and timeless laws of nature’, as understood by the Founding Fathers in 1780s?
One orientated towards deliberate change in the economy so there are vast reductions of environmental impact while still ensuring everyone has the capabilities they need for their version of a good life? Seems… unlikely to me.
Instead, more likely is an attitude that all growth is good growth, all of nature is a thing to be used, people too, and any damage along the way is the price to be paid for strength.
In which case, the Trump Administration path, including their use of tariffs, takes us to a brutalised world of international competition and local authoritarianism
Any and every resource that can be used to win that competition will be used. Any part of nature that can help the US win will be treated as a strategic resource that can and should be used. Grabbing other strategic resources (for instance, critical minerals in Greenland or Ukraine) will be justified. People will also be treated as resources that should be used to win.
If you think the form of capitalism we have had for the last few decades was bad – hyper-globalised, hyper-financialised – then I agree.
But, if the Trump Administration succeeds, there will be no rules, no constraint, no norms which they are willing to keep to. Everything, every part of nature, every person outside the inner circle, will be treated as a resource to use in order to dominate, nationally and internationally.
If the Trump Administration succeeds in their approach, then it will massively increase the environmental and social extraction, compared even to our deeply, deeply flawed status quo.
Drawing it all together
Our current economic and geopolitical system is deeply, deeply flawed. But that does not mean every or anyway of ripping it up is a good thing.
To go back to the most abstract version of the argument:
(1) X is bad.
(2) Action Y gets rid of X.
(3) But that does not automatically mean that Y is good.
It’s worth restating: The process you use to get to the future is the future you get. Trump lying and acting vindictively and without constraints – that leads to a brutal future.
On how we respond, personally, I am still working through what I can be and do. My instinct is that it will be about: generosity and tolerance; meeting people where they are and giving them agency in their lives; and, creating a sense of security through renewal (rather than by treating others as enemies to dominate).
Others will have other ideas. Now is the time to gather and experiment together, oriented towards a future of care and freedom.