Mr Nordhaus’s article ‘The Empty Radicalism of the Climate Apocalypse‘ is challenging and interesting. Any summary of it will probably not do it justice, but hopefully I’m not distorting it too much.
Ted Nodhaus hails from the Breakthrough Institute (not to be confused with Breakthrough: National Centre for Climate Restoration), that is generally pro-corporate, anti-carbon price and pro-nuclear in its approach to climate change, so his argument that mainstream ‘left’ climate action proposals, are not really that left wing, or anti-capitalist, is interesting and worth engaging with. He is largely correct; environmental action has largely been adapted to not challenging capitalism. Neoliberalism is both all-pervasive, unable to take action itself, and inhibiting of any action by others.
Lets begin with his final point:
“we are all neoliberals now. Some of us just haven’t realized it.”
Neoliberalism is about protecting and promoting corporate dominance. A neoliberal is a person who talks about free-markets and small government, but is quite happy to have government intervene to crush workers’ rights or popular protest, to protect companies when they engage in pollution and harm, and to distort or regulate markets in favour of established corporate power.
In neoliberalism, anything established companies do is perceived as the ‘market in action’, and hence wonderful; anything which anyone does to curtail corporate dominance or to protect livelihood, or even existence, is acting against the market, and is evil and to be suppressed. Neoliberalism is both fundamentally anti-democratic and pro-corporate liberty. Corporations do not need democracy, or generate democracy. Profit and financial power are the only virtues neoliberalism recognises. If destroying ecologies makes profit, even if there are any laws left to protect ecologies (which neoliberals will attempt to remove), then ecologies will be destroyed.
Neoliberalism is inherently boring and real world problem avoiding. Neoliberals pretend that what they call free markets bring liberty rather than corporate dominance. Their only solution to every problem is even greater corporate dominance and less government acting on behalf of the people.
It is not surprising that after forty years of neoliberal ‘free market’ talk most people feel alienated from a politics which has become about corporate subsidy and corporate freedom, while considering most of the electorate expendable, or mindless, and to be manipulated rather than listened to.
Neoliberalism creates the conditions of its perpetuation by preventing any challenge emerging, by ensuring critical politicans generally get little funding, by funding fawning politicians, by owning the media and ensuring you get bombarded with neoliberal talking points, by enforcing the market, and dismissing whatever challenge becomes known as ‘anti-market’, and markets are inherently good. It also sabotages its conditions of existence by removing responsibility for the destruction of the ecologies it depends upon.
It is not a surprise that neoliberalism cannot deal with climate change, as recognising climate change demands changes in the behaviour of dominating corporations, a recognition of their responsibility for ecological destruction, and a reassertion of the rights of those ordinary people who are going to suffer severely from climate change. All of this, like any other democratic action is simply branded an interference in the market and unworkable as a result.
Most people (including neoliberals) deny they are neoliberals in this sense, but this is the way neoliberalism works. It forms the destructive background of our crisis
“Many conservatives have attacked the Green New Deal as socialism”
Neoliberals attack everything that does not give the corporate sector more power and wealth, as socialist or communist, suggesting it will lead to mass death. That is their main shtick. It also shows the poverty of their arguments – a slur is enough to satisfy them and prevent any further thinking.
But, as Mr Nordhaus says,:
“what is striking about the Green New Deal and similar proposals coming from climate hawks and left-leaning environmentalists is not their radicalism but their modesty.”
Yes. The left is now what would once have been called economically right wing. The solutions which are being proposed in our parliaments to the problem of climate change, are moderate capitalist, not socialist. They are not radical. The fact that they are attacked in this way, rather than discussed, shows the intensity of the neoliberal desire not to trouble the established and dominant corporate sector. The right is always attempting to push us further to the right.
“almost no one, in either electoral politics or nongovernmental organizations, seems willing to demand that governments take direct and obvious actions to slash emissions and replace fossil energy with clean.”
For the mainstream left, this is pretty accurate. From the 50s to early 70s direct government action would have seemed the sensible and obvious thing to do to almost everyone, as survival is more important than corporate power or markets. Markets have no necessarily beneficial teleology, other than seeking profit at this moment; their long term processes can easily lead to destruction, or the crash. Its not as if we don’t know that markets do crash, and bring many people down with them. Markets always require custom and regulation to work.
“the apocalyptic rhetoric, endless demands for binding global temperature targets, and radical-sounding condemnations of neoliberalism, consumption, and corporations only conceal how feeble the environmental climate agenda actually is”
He is right again. Neoliberal dominance or free market fundmentalism, crushes all innovation and potential innovation (unless it renders profit). Mainstream environmentalism yields, possibly to keep funding and avoid full-on media attacks.
The left’s agitation boils:
“down to some variant of either regulating corporations to stop them from doing things that produce carbon emissions or subsidizing them to use energy and other technologies that reduce carbon emissions”
As he is arguing, this is pretty minor stuff considering the potential scale of the disaster, yet it is vehemently opposed.
It is also true that as well as regulation and subsidy, some people suggest a carbon price as a solution. Not carbon trading, but a governmentally determined price with predictable increases, which gives the business world certainty (to the degree certainty is possible), and is given back to ordinary people to compensate for price increases. Again this is a mild impingement on markets, less of an impingement than sea level rises and so on. Its not hard to find this suggestion, as he recognises in his next paragraph. He continues:
“the primary frame through which climate change has been viewed over the past three decades is as a market failure.”
Yes. With the reservation that this is not really what is usually meant by ‘market failure.’ The term ‘market failure’ implies the possibility of ‘market success,’ yet the complete inability of neoliberal markets to deal with climate change is now reasonably obvious. It is not market failure. It is the nature of the neoliberal market itself that is the problem.
“Missing from this frame is the notion that abundant, cheap, clean energy and the low carbon infrastructure and technology necessary to provide it is a public good.”
Indeed because neoliberalism and its free market theory will not allow, or recognise, this. There is no such thing as ‘public good’ in neoliberalism, and talk of ‘public good’ is seen as a screen for ‘socialist dictatorship’ (lessening of corporate dominance). This again shows the poverty of neoliberal thought. Economics and exchange is a social activity, which depends on social order and a sense of public good. If it does not serve the good of the general public, what is the point? But, in neoliberalism, there is only the private good of the corporate class. No one else counts.
“Treating climate change as a public infrastructure challenge, not a private market failure, brings a range of advantages that pricing and regulation cannot provide.”
Yes again. This kind of action should recognise the inability of the market to work to save us, by itself. Dominant players in the market are currently profitting from the actions which lead to climate change, and they are not about to give those benefits up, without struggle.
“[Public action] enables long time horizons that private investors are unlikely to tolerate; planning and coordination across sectors of the economy to integrate technology, infrastructure, and institutions necessary to achieve deep decarbonization; and low-cost public finance that could make the price of the energy and climate transition far more manageable. And assuming a reasonably progressive tax system, it would arguably do so in a manner at least as straightforward and equitable as cap-and-trade or carbon taxes that aim at “correcting” market failures.”
Yes, but a carbon price may also be useful, as not everything would have to be done by government fiat alone. Perhaps a non-neoliberal market, in competition with central planning, might be useful. We have had mixed economies previously, and they worked quite well; certainly better than neoliberal markets.
“Green opposition to nuclear energy and hydroelectric dams has evolved into skepticism of centralized grids and infrastructure planning.”
I have not noticed this at all. This seems to be lazy thinking. It’s easy for the right to assume Greens are stupid (as they are not neoliberals) therefore they wouldn’t approve of grid planning.
However, as an example of reality, the Australian Greens argue they wish to:
- “Establish PowerNSW. A new, publicly owned electricity company to generate, distribute and retail renewable energy for the people of NSW fairly and affordably.”
and:
- “Upgrade the power grid. Build much-needed new public network infrastructure, connecting our abundant renewable energy resources to the National Electricity Market.”
So there is no skepticism about improving the grid. It should be fairly obvious that nuclear energy and Hydroelectricity present fundamental ecological challenges, and dangers, in ways that grids do not. Greens might prefer local people not to be restricted by neoliberal regulations designed to protect commercial grid operators at the expense of those local people, but if the grid became a national project, aimed at more than just private profit, then this might be much less of a problem.
“It was only the distortion of energy markets by policy-makers, at the behest of fossil and nuclear incumbents, [Amory] Lovins [chair of the Rocky Mountain Institute] has long insisted, that has stood in the way of the rapid adoption of renewable energy.”
Sadly this ‘distortion’ (which is not a distortion but part of the way the neoliberal market works) is inevitable in a society in which the official ideology only values profit. Massive inequalities in wealth allow massive inequalities in social power and in access to that power. The super-wealthy can, and will, buy and reward politicians for supporting them, and pay for think tanks to persuade those politicians that, in being bought, they are acting virtuously.
“the realities of renewable energy at scale look nothing like the distributed and decentralized utopia that Lovins and his environmental followers promised.”
Yes, again neoliberal ideology and action ‘distorts’ everything to perserve the powers of the corporate elite. Their aim is to prevent this elite having to change or respond to peoples’ needs or requests, and claim this is reputable because “the market knows best”. The environmental movement should not go along with any of these propositions, however dangerous this might appear.
“Most renewable energy today comes not from homes clad in solar panels but from enormous, industrial-scale wind, solar, and biomass facilities.”
This depends a little on where you live, but yes captured governments and renewable energy corporations, have tended to favour the enormous, and the centralised. They have favoured the structures which were good for coal energy companies and which removed local people from consideration or participation.
“The only remotely plausible path to the sorts of changes that many environmentalists now demand,… would require top-down, centralized, technocratic measures that most environmentalists are unwilling to seriously embrace.”
This is the fundamental paradox, but a centralised system which responded to, and involved, local communities could well have a different dynamic, if that was built into the planning. Again the problem is trying to adapt to neoliberalism.
“That is why the rhetoric of climate emergency in recent years has not been matched by explicit and specific proposals to do the sorts of things that a climate emergency would seem to demand.”
He should perhaps listen to some of the climate emergency declarations, and then realise the practical difficulty of acting against the endlessly wealthy elites…
This radicalism is
“fundamentally lacking any well-formed idea of what such a world would look like, in either its institutions, its actual social and economic organization, or most of its specifics—rationing, nationalization, or even just preempting local resistance to action… what most environmentalists, including radical greens, are basically demanding is capitalism with carbon regulations and lots of windmills.”
Yes true, and yet what visions there are, are still rabidly opposed by neoliberals, because it might set a precedent to challenge unfettered corporate power. There is no agreed on vision, because neoliberals refuse any negotiation, at all, even with this dilute environmentalism.
“there is little reason to believe at this point that we are capable of arriving at or sustaining the sort of political consensus that such an undertaking would require.”
This all suggests that the time for compromise with neoliberalism has passed. Neoliberals, as Nordhaus almost recognises, have obstructed climate action at every turn; no matter how mild the suggested action, they still claim it is too ‘socialist’. Over 40 years of neoliberal dominance there have been pretty much no neoliberal ‘free market’ suggestions for a solution to climate change that neoliberals have been willing to actually act upon. Perhaps because there cannot be.
Climate survival clashes with fundamental neoliberal principles.
The left may have to gain the kind of intolerance displayed by the neoliberals and not bother about further attempts at dialogue. Neoliberal markets do not work. Challenging neoliberals will be painful. Not challenging neoliberals will be death. Possibly this needs to be the fallback realisation of the environmental movement, left and right. Neoliberalism is not conservative at all.
Nordhaus ends with a kind of solution, which is probably yet another avoidance of the problem of neoliberal love of destruction.
“technological change will likely continue to prove more easily seeded and sustained than political change.”
Possibly, but again technological change and the way it is used, needs to be removed from neoliberal hands, or we will have more of the fracking disasters, and the leaking of methane in to the air. Fracking might “have significantly reduced the role of coal in the US electricity market” but it is doubtful it has reduced emissions, or preserved ecologies. It just reinforces the destructive system.
Technology has unintended consequences, but neoliberal technology will be designed and organised to benefit neoliberal power and wealth structures, before it will be designed and organised to improve quality of life or ecological stability.
Attempts to accommodate neoliberalsim and keep corporate support, may explain the incoherencies I have discussed in Australian climate policy, as neoliberalism is essentially hostile to ecological preservation and loss of any established corporate power. There is, and can be, no neoliberal effective climate policy. Consequently, neoliberalism must be defeated. We can begin by recognising that Neoliberalism in all its forms, is:
- essentially anti-democratic
- inherently destructive
- unable to deal with ecological problems or climate change
- reduces everything to maintaining profit
- uninterested in most peoples’ survival, if that might lessen corporate wealth
- controls the media, and hence what most people know
- attempts to destroy information which is true, but might affect it
- formidable as it is a form of plutocracy or rule by wealth
- attempts to take over the state, through buying politicians, lobbying, privatisation, and positioning corporate people in government departments responsible for regulating their corporate activities.
Challenging neoliberalism will be difficult. Perhaps the only alternatives are revolution or death. I’d much rather they weren’t, but when established power seems bent on destruction and ignoring the problems, then perhaps that is the only option.
Fighting neoliberalism will be painful, but it is the only course of action that will get us anywhere.
Tags: Anthropocene, neoliberalism, technology
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