Underpants Elites

"Children of a Modest Star" Reviewed

By Alex Trembath

I have a review at City Journal of a new book by Jonathan Blake and Nils Gilman, who both work at the Berggruen Institute.  

I know Gilman is fond of the “Underpants Gnome” theory of social change. The theory, which comes from an episode of “South Park,” handwaves the essential second phase in a three-step order of operations. The canonical underpants gnomes’ business plan is as follows:

1. Collect underpants

2. ?

3. Profit

Alas, I fear there is a gnome-shaped question mark lurking in this latest work. In Children of a Modest Star, Blake and Gilman argue that nation states have failed at climate action and pandemic response, necessitating “planetary governance” institutions operating with authority over national governments. 

The book is lucid, provocative, and engaging. But as I argue in my recent review of the book at City Journal, I found their reports of the death of the nation state to be greatly exaggerated. More importantly, I worry that the levers of planetary governing bodies would be seized by precisely those elite figures who have elsewhere yearned for that type of influence: degrowther earth system scientists and secretive gain-of-function bioengineers. As I write in City Journal:

If, on the other hand, Covid leaked from research at a lab in Wuhan (as Gilman, for what it’s worth, believes it probably did), then the planetary proposal rests on even shakier ground. If the lab leak theory holds, then an opaque, global network of elite scientists pursued risky gain-of-function research and then deliberately misled policymakers and the public about these activities. 

…

Other experts have used these atmospheric aspirations to advance political claims in the past. Will Steffen, an architect of the influential “Planetary Boundaries” hypothesis on which these temperature targets rest, argued in 2011 that the world needs “an institution (or institutions) operating, with authority, above the level of individual countries to ensure that the planetary boundaries are respected.” Such institutions would work “to limit continued growth of the material economy on a finite planet.” More recently, the entire American environmental movement supported a lawsuit against the U.S. government on the grounds that atmospheric concentrations of carbon above 350 parts per million (today, they are approximately 423 ppm) are unconstitutional, insisting that the entire national energy system be shut down. (That lawsuit was recently dismissed.) 

Identifying trustworthy elites who would want this kind of power, and designing institutions to constrain them from exceeding democratic grasp, seems to me the critical second step between proposing planetary governance and expecting to profit from it. 

You can read my full review at City Journal.