By Adam Dorr
For over four decades, the obesity epidemic in the United States seemed intractable. Despite massive public health campaigns, endless lifestyle advice, and increasingly strident moral condemnation of overweight individuals, obesity rates climbed relentlessly upward for 40 years. Then, in 2023, something remarkable happened: the trend finally reversed. This historic turning point didn't come from yet another awareness campaign or renewed push for better personal choices. It came from technology—specifically, new pharmaceuticals like semaglutide (Ozempic) and tirzepatide (Mounjaro) that directly address the biological mechanisms underlying weight gain.
This breakthrough illustrates a crucial lesson that we must apply to other seemingly intractable challenges like climate change: technological innovation consistently succeeds where moralizing and lifestyle policing fail. Yet there remains strong ideological resistance to technological solutions for our biggest problems, often pejoratively termed “technofixes” by those who believe that any solution that doesn’t involve sacrifice and austerity is somehow cheating. This resistance reveals a deeper conflict between two competing visions of how to solve major societal challenges: one based on human ingenuity and progress, the other rooted in moral judgment and behavioral control.
The case of obesity in America offers a compelling example of why the technological approach works where moralizing fails. Since the 1980s, public health officials, medical professionals, and society at large have attempted to combat rising obesity rates through education, awareness campaigns, and increasingly aggressive attempts to modify individual behavior. The American public has been endlessly lectured about diet and exercise, warned about health consequences, and subjected to fat shaming and fitness stigma. None of it has ever worked. Obesity rates continued their steady climb, year after year.
The introduction of effective weight-loss medications changed everything. These drugs don’t require heroic feats of willpower or dramatic lifestyle overhauls. They work with human biology rather than against human nature. And most importantly, they actually deliver results. This stunning success thoroughly discredits the moralistic approach that has dominated obesity treatment for decades—an approach that blamed individuals for lacking the virtue of self-control.
The case of obesity points to a fundamental problem with virtue policing approaches to tackling large-scale problems. There is something fundamentally illiberal and even tyrannical about telling others what choices they ought to make or what lifestyle preferences they should have. Throughout history, we’ve seen how the policing of individual choices in the name of virtue—whether by religious authorities or secular moralists—leads to oppression rather than liberation. When we examine the psychology behind resistance to technological solutions, we often find it stems from a quasi-religious belief that solving problems without sacrifice or suffering is somehow cheating. This mindset, which frames the world in terms of virtue and sin, sees struggle and deprivation as morally necessary components of any legitimate solution to our problems, whether personal or public, individual or collective.
The same pattern is playing out today in debates about climate change. Just as with obesity, we see a strong contingent arguing that the only acceptable solution is one that involves dramatic lifestyle changes, reduced consumption, and general austerity. These advocates often explicitly frame environmental problems in moral terms, casting modern lifestyles as profligate and indulgent, and insisting that salvation can only come through self-sacrifice and behavioral reform.
But this moralizing approach to climate change suffers from the same fatal flaws as moralizing about obesity. First, it simply doesn't work—decades of environmental advocacy focused on lifestyle change have failed to significantly reduce global emissions, just as decades of lifestyle-focused obesity interventions have failed to reduce obesity rates. Second, it represents a fundamentally authoritarian impulse to control how others live, denying them the freedom to make their own choices about material consumption and lifestyle. And third, it ignores the historical reality that technological innovation has consistently proven more effective at solving large-scale problems than attempts to reform human behavior through moral pressure.
The hostility of the doomers and degrowthers who denigrate technofixes is particularly telling. When confronted with promising developments in clean energy, carbon capture, or sustainable food production, they often react not just with skepticism but outright revulsion. This resistance reveals that their real agenda may be as much about enforcing a particular moral vision of how humans ought to live as it is about actually solving environmental problems.
This reflexive opposition to technological solutions is not just misguided—it’s actively harmful. By insisting that the only acceptable solutions are those that require dramatic lifestyle changes and reduced consumption, these ideologues make it harder to build support for practical measures that will genuinely meet our environmental challenges. They also ignore the crucial role that prosperity and technological progress at large play in enabling societies to address environmental concerns. Historical evidence shows that as countries become wealthier and more technologically advanced, they become more capable of and interested in ecological integrity and restoration, not less. Poor people can’t afford to care about the environment. Rich people can. The arrow of logic points unequivocally in one direction here: if we really want to solve environmental problems, we need to make everyone rich.
The superiority of technological solutions lies not just in their effectiveness, but in their preservation of human freedom and dignity. When we develop new technologies that allow people to maintain the lifestyles they prefer while eliminating negative consequences—whether those are health consequences in the case of obesity, or environmental consequences in the case of climate change—we solve problems without restricting human choice. This approach recognizes that the goal should be to expand human possibilities and opportunities, rather than restrict them. As a general rule, the people who want to take freedom of choice away from others are the villains of the story. It is a profoundly tragic irony that so many of my fellow environmentalists who have swallowed the degrowth mythology hook, line, and sinker don’t realize that they are the bad guys here.
We must set aside the failed strategy of trying to solve big problems like climate change through virtue policing and lifestyle restrictions, and instead take the approach that has worked time and time again throughout human history: technological innovation that expands opportunity and liberty. We didn’t solve the problem of tooth decay and gum disease by banning candy or making chocolate abstinence a virtue; we solved it with toothbrushes and dentistry. We didn’t solve the problem of communicable bacterial diseases like gonorrhea and pertussis by banning human interaction or making sexual abstinence a virtue; we solved it with antibiotics and vaccines. And we won’t solve obesity or climate change with prohibitions and virtue policing, either.
There’s an important addendum to the obesity story here too: the new class of pharmaceuticals like semaglutide and tirzepatide look like they are not only effective for weight loss but also potential treatments for other big health problems—including drug addiction, cancer, kidney disease, cardiovascular disease, and Alzheimer’s disease. If we’d stayed stuck on lifestyle change as the only solution to obesity, we would have foregone these other extraordinary benefits of the new technology—and at what terrible cost?
We will solve obesity, climate change, and our other biggest challenges with technological innovation, not only because it is so much more effective but also because it’s ultimately more humane too. After all, the goal shouldn’t be to simply survive with less, but to thrive with more. A brighter future is one with new possibilities, not new restrictions. That’s not a technofix—that’s progress.
Adam Dorr is RethinkX's Director of Research. Adam has has written a book on optimism, progress and the future of environmentalism. Read Brighter here