All that is solid melts into air: climate change and neoliberalism

Headnote

The market is incapable of protecting us from climate change

We live in a time of environmental change unprecedented since civilisation began. Industrial society has become a geological force in its own right, ushering in a new epoch: the Anthropocene. Most alarming of all is the threat of human activity leading to irrevocable changes in the global climate. By burning up the Earth's stock of fossil fuels, we are melting the polar ice caps, causing sea levels to rise and increasing the severity of floods. According to Nicholas Stern, author of the Stern Review on the economics of climate change: 'Climate change is a result of the greatest market failure the world has seen.'1

Stern's analysis would not come as a surprise to two of the greatest critics of free markets, Marx and Engels, who famously once wrote:

Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.

Free-market capitalism dissolves social bonds, promotes the precarity of labour and social life, and is now irrevocably changing the Earth's climate.

But today's most fervent proponents of free markets take a rather different view. To them, it appears, major climatic change is merely something to get used to. People are highly adaptable, reason the neoliberals, so we can weather any storm; better to spend our efforts adapting to environmental change, rather than trying to prevent it through costly measures to wean us off fossil fuels. After all, they argue, the best way of protecting ourselves against such inconvenience is simply to grow richer.

This is a new line of argument from neoliberals, who until recently have tended either to pour doubt on the science of global warming, or to rail against the perceived costs of switching to clean energy. Now the debate has shifted once again - to how well-suited human society is to adapting to external change. Though undoubtedly these new arguments are being adopted cynically, to provide yet more excuses for inaction, they are grounded in neoliberal principles and values. Free marketeers are trying to establish a new common sense, one that justifies toleration of environmental upheaval with...