Kurzgesagt’s Neoliberal Stance on the Environment

Image; Internetstiftelsen

Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell is a charming YouTube channel that attempts to demystify complicated topics in a way everyday people can understand. Each episode involves a narrator explaining subjects while adorable little animations help to illuminate the topics as clearly as possible.

When focusing narrowly on science explainers, I think Kurzgesagt does a lot of good things. They have produced hopeful and optimistic content that I believe has been positive for many viewer’s mental health. It is my hope that the criticism given to them now will be treated in that spirit of education and not defensively reframed as an attempt to “knock them down.”

In the past, this blog has accused the Kurzgesagt channel of a "neoliberal bias," by which we mean one that favors innovation through the marketplace over other, more direct options. We have not claimed that they are maliciously plotting with neoliberal actors such as privatization advocate Bill Gates, but rather that there is simply a shared bias between them. As I write in The Inescapable Neoliberal Bias Behind' Kurzgesagt — In a Nutshell':

“To be clear, [Kurzgesagt] CEO Philipp Dettmer and his compatriots are probably not in cahoots with Bill Gates, scheming on ways to enhance this billionaire’s chosen narrative. It’s more than likely that they share a similar philosophical foundation, which creates a positive feedback loop where they are rewarded for advancing views palatable to the very powerful.”

Nowhere do we see this more than in their stance on the environment, where they support technocratic, market-oriented solutions to their millions of followers. In the process, the brand oftentimes dismisses the actions that many committed activists believe are necessary to combat climate change’s worst effects, giving their viewers a drastically incomplete picture.

A bias toward markets

This bias I am referring to is pervasive in their analysis of solutions to the environmental crisis. For example, in their video on nuclear energy titled “Do we Need Nuclear Energy to Stop Climate Change?” the brand argues that we need this power source to electrify the power grid. And in the process, they lean on the concepts of "net zero" (i.e., "the point at which any residual emissions of greenhouse gases are balanced by technologies removing them from the atmosphere") and electrification (i.e., “converting existing industries that rely on fossil fuels to ones that are powered by electricity as the source of energy”).

These concepts sound good, but the underlying logic relies on a bit of techno-optimism where we don't change our behaviors through reducing consumption, changing IP laws, altering housing and transportation on a systemic level, and redistributing land, but adopting technological fixes without having to restructure society significantly. In particular, the concept of "Net Zero" is highly controversial and has often been accused by activists of allowing corporate actors to sidestep the issue of regulation and redistribution by over-relying on technological innovations that do not fully exist yet and cannot be fully implemented through the market alone (see Climate scientists: concept of net zero is a dangerous trap).

Likewise, electrification not only assumes that we keep consuming electricity at our current rates but that every step in electrifying our power grid will likewise not increase our emissions. As activist Tom McBrien of We Power tells my publication After the Storm in an upcoming interview on the future of energy policy:

“First off, why EVs and overall electrification isn’t necessarily the answer?… You need certain materials like lithium or cobalt, which are extremely toxic, just to get out of the earth, and if you see where these minerals are coming from, they’re generally not coming from the US. One of the reasons is that it’s so harmful just to produce them that it’s clearly against a lot of environmental laws.

So what do we do? Of course, we look to countries in the Global South that don’t have as strong protections for their workers and for their environment and communities. In a lot of instances, we’re kind of indirectly trashing these other places and putting people in really hard conditions. And then we feel all good about ourselves because we’re driving an electric vehicle without thinking about the supply chain that led there.”

These criticisms are not significantly addressed in this video or any video they have put out (so far). We see this promotion of net zero and electrification in much of their other content on climate change. In "Is It Too Late To Stop Climate Change? Well, It's Complicated", the narrator argues for a series of policy innovations (e.g., electrification, reducing oil subsidies and funneling them into renewables, etc.) to achieve a "zero CO2" or “net zero” world. As the narrator continues: "Be it from technologies from carbon capture or a new generation of nuclear power plants to new batteries that revolutionize the energy storage from renewables. "

Some of these ideas are fine, but again, what's not mentioned are political innovations that would seek to challenge the current economic system, such as land redistribution, delaying or sabotaging energy-intensive infrastructure (see How to Blow Up a Pipeline), and changing IP laws to reduce incentives at production rather than through tax penalties that corporations can always create loopholes for.

This brand would rather lean on controversial, highly corporatized framings, such as net zero, than argue that we might have to challenge our economic system’s insatiable need to grow indefinitely, which points to some unhelpful priorities on this matter.

Technology is king

It’s very apparent that there is a technological, market-oriented bias to this channel’s framing of climate change, and sometimes the "solutions" they entertain are genuinely off-the-wall and dangerous. In the video "Geoengineering: A Horrible Idea We Might Have to Do," the narrator builds the case for this technology, saying, "In the near future, it might become necessary to try something radical to slow down rapid [climate change]: geoengineering" or the practice of adjusting our atmosphere on a planet-wide scale.

While this video goes over many of the potential negatives of this technology (e.g., changing rain patterns, deteriorating agriculture, widening the hole in the O-Zone layer, temperature shocks, etc.), it ultimately cautions rejecting it entirely, claiming: "But blankly opposing geoengineering is short-sighted. The sad truth is that we are already running a geoengineering experiment…Hopefully, we will never have to use Geoengineering, but if we need to in the future, we better have done the science. We better be prepared, or a panicking humanity might accidentally press the self-destruct button."

It cannot be stated how harmful such a mentality is. When it comes to technology as complicated as geoengineering, we will never be able to anticipate all the potential harms of such an action. We could destabilize our ecosystem in far quicker and more powerful ways and not realize so until well after the fact. As Aaron Fernando writes in the speculative fiction The Visible Hand:

“…our world changes at a breakneck speed and on industrial scales. Harm is done on massive scales, rapidly. Ecologies get destroyed quickly, but they take generations to heal. There must be something else. A complementary mechanism — one that foresees harm and stops it before it happens”

It seems truly unhinged to suggest the idea of this technology, even as a "last result" (note it's already being tried in the real world), when there are far more straightforward, less unpredictable social technologies (e.g., land redistribution, IP reform, Degrowth, etc.) that do not involve the potential destruction of our ecosystem — innovations that this channel has never seriously considered.

It highlights a bias on this channel, where they would rather promote the "careful consideration" of such a genuinely catastrophic technology than even to begin to challenge their basic assumptions surrounding politics and economics.

The dismissal of corporate harm and activist solutions

Even when these videos are not promoting such dangerous solutions, sometimes what’s noticeable is not the content itself but what is absent from it — i.e., a total refusal to criticize the systems at play. In "Who Is Responsible For Climate Change? — Who Needs To Fix It?" the narrator focuses exclusively on emissions coming from individuals and countries. This not only sidesteps the exploitation from imperialism that created (and continues to reinforce) this divide but ignores the conversation about corporate harm, often the vehicle for that imperialism, altogether. It’s not that the data here is wrong, but it’s missing a vital part of the context.

Whether we are talking about fossil fuel companies, agriculture, car production, or more, many greenhouse gas emissions come from firms creating products and services. Some policy experts will often try to counter that even more emissions are produced by things such as consumers driving vehicles or heating their homes, but this is, in many ways, a sleight of hand. It’s referencing a type of agency that most people do not have. We didn't wake up one day and decide that cars are the most effective way to get around or that we love throwing out our clothes after ten or twelve uses.

Most companies twist our laws to kill more sustainable, convenient alternatives, forcing us to purchase and use those goods and services to survive. We do not have such large amounts of consumption because consumers "love their stuff," but rather through a combination of suppressing alternatives and practices such as planned and perceived obsolescence, where products are designed by many firms to be used a couple of times and then discarded.

Furthermore, companies routinely weaponize their influence to bypass "green" regulations. In one example, hundreds of companies in Germany used a loophole in the Renewable Energy Act to pass their costs onto the German taxpayer, who suffered higher energy bills as a result.

When many companies cannot bypass these regulations, they switch their emissions to countries abroad and, in the process, further exploit the Global South. Countries with weak environmental policies, such as Trinidad and Tobago, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Slovakia, consistently receive more “exports of direct CO2 emissions relative to their GDP.”

To collapse that context and make emissions a matter of what happens when countries accrue wealth ignores how, under capitalism, most firms try to externalize their costs onto larger society. They often don't care about the lines on a map when doing so. In a world where the reach of corporate firms expands across borders, it makes Kurzgesagt's analysis very superficial (note: outside of general remarks toward the fossil fuel industry, I have yet to see a serious effort to examine the causes I have addressed here, which is strange given how in the weeds they have been willing to go in other areas).

Rather than focus on how maybe our economic system is a problem in and of itself, this brand is routinely dismissive about any such challenges, often handwaving "radical" climate activists' concerns as unserious. For example, in their video Can YOU Fix Climate Change? the narrator says:

“Some argue that a move away from capitalism is the only solution to this mess. Others insist that markets should be freer without any interventions like subsidies. And some suggest that we need what’s referred to as ‘degrowth’ and to cut back as a species overall. But the truth is, at least as of now, no political system is doing an impressive job of becoming truly sustainable and none have really done so in the past.”

Sidestepping the contentious issue of how countries such as the US have often overthrown economic alternatives, you would expect that with such a framing, they might go into the specifics of Degrowth or what anti-capitalist environmental policy even means. But no, there is no attempt even to begin to understand these policies in this or any other video.

Instead, Can YOU Fix Climate Change? ends by telling viewers to "vote at the ballot, and vote with your wallet." That is a neoliberal framing because it avoids collective actions, such as working with protests to interfere with carbon-emitting equipment directly or weaponizing labor power to halt production. Instead, it prioritizes individual steps taken in the marketplace of finance and ideas. That is a strange approach for a video that claims to eschew individual action as a solution to climate change.

The only call to collective action I can find in that “Can YOU Fix Climate Change?” video is a sign to unionize in the background — something that the narrator does not comment on and that you could blink and very much miss. When they address what society can do in their companion video (We WILL Fix Climate Change!), they focus on the work of technology and policies constructed from the top-down by engineers and entrepreneurs, not work that activists, urban planners, and laypeople can do from the bottom-up to achieve that future.

It’s a type of philosophy that claims change must be begged for from those at the top rather than made from all of us at the bottom.

Conclusion

Now I want to still stress that I don’t think this channel is evil. From what I can tell from these videos, Kurzgesagt has given many viewers hope about the future, and with a depressing topic such as climate change, that is a beautiful thing. Doomerism is not a philosophical outlook that I find helpful. I reject the claim that everything is hopeless and love that this educational channel promotes a positive outlook.

Yet when we narrow solutions to climate change to market-based and technocratic ones, claiming the problem is "the fossil fuel sector' and not intrinsic to our destructive economic system, we become blind to how corporations capture solutions and externalize costs. The future Kurzgesagt paints is a rose-tinted optimism, ignoring the work of activists at best and refusing to acknowledge more effective solutions at worst. If we want to mitigate the worst aspects of climate change, not just for those who can afford to do so, but for those on the frontlines in both the Global South and at home, then, in a nutshell, it means embracing radical solutions that are a little outside of our comfort zones.