Do You Even Decarbonize, Bro?

“The next big thing is the planet,” she said. “Without it, there will be no NFTs.”

Aligning profit incentives with doing good for the world is part of what separates the decarb bro from other bros, said Sara Hastings-Simon, a scientist, decarb bro enthusiast and craft beer lover. The decarb bro is “an enlightened bro for climate,” she said.

Isaias Hernandez, an environmental educator and the founder of the Instagram account queerbrownvegan, isn’t so sure. “We can’t frame the ecological crisis as a way to profit,” he said. That incentive structure, he fears, opens up the gates to greenwashing and inequality.

“When you talk to climate tech bros, they’re very obsessed with one solution as the end-all be-all,” he said.

Instead, Mr. Hernandez wants his audience to think about approaching climate change through grass-roots organizing. “When we rely on large technocratic solutions to save our communities, they often don’t really involve the communities,” he said.

Mr. Hernandez is not alone in critically examining the role of business in fighting climate change. The degrowth movement, a segment of the environmentalism movement, holds that economic growth is no longer benefiting humanity and that fighting climate change requires untethering from a focus on gross domestic product.

Still, in the eyes of the decarb bro, money is a powerful motivator for solving the planetary crisis. “There are significant economic opportunities,” Mr. Casagrande said. “I don’t think people should feel guilty about that.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/22/business/decarb-bros-climate-change.html