To Be Possible, An Idea Must Seem Inevitable

A Tale of Electric Cars, Food Waste, and Overton Windows

Pop quiz: which is responsible for more greenhouse emissions, gas-powered cars or food waste?

Obviously “food waste”, or else why would I be posing the question. But juxtaposed like that, it sounds funny. Take a moment to think about it: why should this sound funny? After all, it’s not much of a secret, or particularly non-intuitive, that agriculture is responsible for a lot of greenhouse emissions. (The numbers: passenger road travel accounts for 7% of greenhouse emissions, vs. 25% for food production and distribution. Around 1/3 of all food is wasted; producing that food accounts for 1/3 of 25%, or about 8% of emissions. Plus some bonus methane emissions when the wasted food rots.)

I think the reason this sounds funny is that there is a lot of very visible activity around the move to electric cars, but essentially none around food waste. When food waste is discussed at all, it’s in the context of diverting excess food to feed the hungry. Somehow, tailpipe emissions are highly visible as a public issue, agricultural emissions less so, food waste in the context of climate change hardly at all.

What we’re looking at here is an Overton window problem. Recognizing that will help us understand the key factors that drive change, and start thinking about how to speed it up. In brief: sometimes an idea has to seem inevitable before it becomes possible.

Overton Windows

Oxford Languages defines the Overton window as follows:

The spectrum of ideas on public policy and social issues considered acceptable by the general public at a given time.

For any particular topic, there will be a range of ideas generally considered acceptable. Disagreements will mostly fall within that range. Ideas outside the range may exist, but they are considered radical or even unthinkable.

Overton’s point was that politicians will, in general, only support positions within the window. Change is often accomplished by moving the window, rather than by pressuring politicians as individuals. From https://www.mackinac.org/OvertonWindow:

All of this suggests that politicians are more followers than they are leaders — it’s the rest of us who ultimately determine the types of policies they’ll get behind. It also implies that our social institutions — families, workplaces, friends, media, churches, voluntary associations, think tanks, schools, charities, and many other phenomena that establish and reinforce societal norms — are more important to shaping our politics than we typically credit them for.

Or more succinctly, from https://conceptually.org/concepts/overton-window:

If politicians must locate the window, think tanks and social movements must shift the Overton window to succeed in their advocacy. They must convince voters that policies outside the window should be in it.

It seems to me that this concept applies to more than just politics. In January, General Motors CEO Mary Barra announced plans to become carbon neutral by 2040. In effect, this means that GM, a company with “Motors” right there in the name, plans to stop making internal combustion engines. The announcement included some wiggle room around offsets, but Audi has stated that it will quit designing new gasoline or diesel engines in 2026, and go EV-only in 2032, full stop.

GM and Audi are private enterprises, not political entities, but announcements like these would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. Something in the landscape had to shift in order for these moves to become possible.

Shifting Windows: Bad Metaphor, but Important Concept

The key lesson of the Overton window is that in order to accomplish change, you must shift the space of acceptable ideas to include your desired policy (and then, ideally, shift it further to exclude competing policies).

And make no mistake, windows shift all the time. Consider Prohibition: back in 1919, the temperance movement was so strong that it took just 11 months for three quarters of U.S. states to ratify the 18th Amendment, banning “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors”. Despite this overwhelming support, it was repealed just 14 years later, and today the idea of banning alcohol receives no serious attention.

Shifts can occur gradually, or rapidly. Rapid changes are often instigated by outside factors. For instance, the Covid pandemic is leading to a major change in attitudes to remote work.

Often, technological advances are the outside factor that triggers a shift. Consider the recent phenomenon of restaurants dispensing with printed menus, asking patrons to scan a QR code to view the menu. Just 10 years ago, when most people didn’t have smartphones, this might have been viewed as some sort of radical stunt. Ten years from now, who knows, paper menus might seem a wasteful anachronism.

You’re Following Me? I Was Following You!

I’m no sociologist, but it seems to me that these shifts are often a giant creeping game of mutual follow-the-leader. Most people don’t want to get too far ahead of public opinion, but neither do they want to lag too far behind.

When it comes to decarbonizing the economy, this manifests as a tangle of feedback loops between consumer expectations, employee expectations, investor expectations, corporate commitments, regulation, anticipated regulation, and public opinion… all heavily influenced by technological progress. Examples:

• The massive rise of ESG investment, while seemingly not very effectual in terms of directly instigating change in corporate behavior, normalizes the idea that climate change is an issue that has to be addressed.

• A survey found that 56% of professionals in the oil and gas industries are planning to pursue employment in renewables, up from 38.8% last year. Presumably, this is driven by a sense that the writing is on the wall for the long-term future of oil & gas jobs.

• Indiana regulators recently rejected a proposed $900 million gas-fired electricity plant, because of the risk that rapid progress in renewables could render the plant uneconomical. You have to figure that the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission is a conservatively-minded group, and would not take this step unless the idea that renewable energy will soon beat natural gas on price has firmly entered the mainstream.

• Tech giants like Microsoft and Google are making very aggressive commitments to eliminating their carbon footprint. Some of this may represent genuinely selfless motives, but I think there is also a clear aspect of needing to keep up with rising expectations, in particular within the social circles that these companies hire from. It’s worth noting that they are constantly ratcheting up their commitments.

• When industry is already taking action, that gives cover to politicians and regulators. From https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/energy-storage/american-clean-energy-flexes-its-political-muscle: ...[Industry association] American Clean Power recently launched its first targeted multimillion-dollar ad campaign to build support for the clean energy bills, ACP CEO Heather Zichal told me. “We’re business voices, which was critically important against a lot of the naysayers on Build Back Better,” Zichal said. “Half the Cabinet calls on a regular basis to say how much they appreciate what we’ve done.”

• From Bill McKibben: Those crazy climate radicals at, um, Moody’s point out the world’s banks are sitting on $22 trillion in risky assets as the word tries to start decarbonizing. “Banks that adopt a rapid but predictable shift towards climate-friendly finance will best preserve their credit quality,” said Moody’s senior VP Alka Anbarasu.

Each action encourages further actions. When one tech company pledges to become carbon neutral, others are pressured to follow. That in turn raises the general profile of decarbonization, setting expectations for other industries. Increasing corporate moves to decarbonize may make it easier for regulators to impose mandates to reduce emissions. Mandates in some states or countries make investors wary of the long-term future for oil and gas companies, and so forth. And of course external factors, such as technological developments, help all of this along.

About That Wasted Food

We’ve seen that the move to electric cars has taken on an air of inevitability. EVs are still only a few percent of new cars sold, but increasing at a rapid clip, and manufacturers increasingly are acting as if the door is closing on internal combustion. Hooray, well done, promotions for everyone. Can we do the same for food waste?

This may be fundamentally more difficult than electrifying transportation; or not; I honestly wouldn’t know how to evaluate that. Certainly I don’t mean to minimize the breathtaking scope of the accomplishments on the EV front. But what does seem clear is that the energy and resources going into the food waste problem are tiny in comparison. I’m not aware of any major announcements from food producers, nor billion-dollar startups working to address the issue, nor government subsidies for new techniques… pick any sort of activity relating to electric vehicles, and it’s hard to find an equivalent taking place in food waste. To be sure, there is some activity, but not nearly enough.

In Overton terms, the expectations around food waste are not shifting. I think we all have some vague notion that it’s bad to waste food, but most people don’t stress too much about it. No one is holding food producers, distributors or retailers to much pressure to reduce waste. There is no widespread awareness that food waste is a “must solve” issue for climate change. Most importantly, there is no expectation of progress, no financiers downgrading producers who are behind on their food waste plans, no regulators getting ready to mandate improvements, no leading innovators to make the rest of the industry look like laggards.

Why is there so much disparity between expectations around gasoline-power cars and expectations around food waste? I don’t know, but here are a few ideas:

• Gas-powered cars are sort of “obviously polluting” – they smell bad, they’re linked to smog, etc. While a fair amount of food waste takes place in plain view, another large portion happens out of sight (before reaching the consumer).

• We’ve been hearing about the problems with fossil fuels for decades; and oil in particular comes with extra bonus negative geopolitical connotations. Food waste doesn’t have that history of prominence.

• While it has taken an enormous amount of work to get here, there is now a clear technological path to replacing internal combustion engines. Food waste hasn’t had anything like the same level of investment, and the solutions aren’t obviously there.

Note that these factors are mutually reinforcing: much food waste takes place out of sight —> the issue is not on the public agenda —> no impetus to make progress —> no success stories to inspire further calls to change.

Time For a Full Court Press

Technical and business model innovation won’t be sufficient. We need to promote the idea that progress is possible, and preferably, inevitable. The aura of inevitability is self-fulfilling – it drives change, just as we’ve seen for electric vehicles. In other words, we need to shift the Overton window. To be clear, this isn’t just about food waste. We need to instigate change in cement production, steel manufacturing, home heating, and many other areas where progress has been slow.

So how do we go about shifting an Overton window? If you have any good sources, please let me know! Presumably there is much to be learned by studying history. But I expect that it boils down to a long, steady grind, pushing continuously on all fronts:

• Draw attention to the issue; look for ways to make it more visible

• Frame the problem as solvable; no one wants to hear about unsolvable problems

• Create economic incentives to address the issue

• Jump-start technical progress by funding potential solutions; create a trend line of progress

Remember that we’re dealing with a tangle of feedback loops between various constituencies. Most individuals are not going to move too far ahead of the group, and the groups influence one another. So a shift in one area facilitates shifts elsewhere, and once started, the process seems to take on momentum. Focusing on the key factors that drive this process will allow us to speed it up. And if we can make progress seem inevitable, that maximizes the chance of success.