Sorry for the further delay. My medical problem is still holding me up. (No, I’m not going to tell you what it is! Slightly embarrassing.) But I should be able to resume blogging soon.
In the meantime I wonder how the climate-change deniers are reacting to the current terrible global heat-wave. ‘Nothing abnormal.’ ‘It’s happened before.’ ‘Don’t interfere.’ ‘Trust to nature’…?
In fact trusting to nature (or to a benevolent God) could be at the root of many of our problems today. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and pandemics are ‘natural’ too. As are financial crises, trade depressions and the like.
Which is the best argument against the neo-liberal way of looking at political economy. Laissez-faire, or the free market, doesn’t conduce to the good of all. Those who believed it did, from the nineteenth century onwards, were in hock to a notion as foolish as the belief that God (or nature) would take care of everything. In other words, it’s based on a great leap of blind faith, and not on logic. And a very convenient leap, of course, if it means you don’t need to put yourself out, and do anything.
I wonder how many climate-change deniers are neo-liberals too? Ex-Chancellor Nigel Lawson I know is one… Do the two ideologies go together?
And – very incidentally – neither nature nor God is solving my medical condition. For that I’m depending on state intervention – in this case from the excellent Swedish health service.
Porter’s Pensées 
I sometimes wonder why it is that neoliberalism and climate change denial go together so well. Sure, there *are* green businesses and investors, but they are an oddity, and those that there are compromise more on the green side than the investment side. Yet you’d think neoliberals would be at the forefront of climate activism – after all, even if you made money out of human extinction, how would you spend it?
I suspect that many neoliberals see climate change as more than a fact about the world – they see it as a personal attack. They have dedicated their entire life to the idea that self interest benefits everyone, that a rising tide floats all boats, that freedom means economic freedom, that the market optimises, that governments should butt out and let the wisdom of the crowd (suitably mediated through the tabloid press) run the world. Now every day the neoliberals are being shown that all those things are wrong; and moreover, that the coming crisis will be terrible and that it’s their fault. History – if there is any – will judge them as the worst of war criminals. How can they live with that? Of course, they’re going to double-down and insist they’re right all along. The alternative – that everything they’ve always fought for is catastrophically wrong – is too appalling. And who knows? They’re used to getting their own way; maybe they really do believe that if they brazen it out for long enough reality itself might bend to their will.
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Do climate change denial and free market economics have a natural affinity? It’s a good question.
Formally, neoclassical economics admits the possibility that phenomena like pollution (“externalities”) may shatter the Panglossian view that the free market delivers the best of all possible worlds. [Note: “possible” here is defined so as to exclude the “unscientific” question of the redistribution of wealth.] It offers two main ways to fix the problem and preserve the ideal nature of the free market system.
One of them is private property rights. It’s a kind of reverse reading of Marx’s complaint about how enclosure excluded commoners from forests. Neoliberals think that left unchecked, commoners will take too much wood for the long-term viability of the forest (“the tragedy of the commons”). The neoliberal idea is that a grouse moor run for shooting will be run so as to conserve enough grouse for future years, to maintain the value of the estate as a going concern. Of course, this assumes that what you are trying to protect are grouse rather than hen harriers, and the British class structure rather than public access. At any rate, it’s a philosophy that is highly congenial to large landowners.
The other is to tweak the free market system in such a way as to restore the necessary incentives or disincentives. Thus carbon taxes or permits disincentivise carbon use by “nudging” producers and consumers using market forces. This sits comfortably with some green-tinged neoliberals (Mrs. T?) but goes against the anti-governmental grain of the doctrinaire.
My recollection of past debates is that neoliberals have generally gone out of their way to play down resource constraints and environmental critiques and that the likes of Nigel Lawson have become victims of their own confirmation bias. It is notable that the likes of the right-wing writers at Spiked (some ex-Revolutionary Communist!) go out of their way to target environmentalists as the enemy, portraying them as hankering after a pre-industrial, pre-Enlightenment fantasy way of life. Moreover, in Europe and maybe in Britain too, anti-environmentalists are trying to mobilise a romantic nationalism about the landscape and yeoman farmers. Windfarms and solar farms are portrayed as threats to rural traditions, water conservation as a brake on agriculture; yet if climate change is unaddressed the landscape will change anyway, and traditions will not survive.
These are complex debates and the left has not always distinguished itself by its environmental awareness (viz. Labour’s Green New Deal being put on hold). Looking at fisheries, the idea of a “tragedy of the commons” does make some sense, but private property without government action cannot provide the answer. It is bizarre that some neoliberals can rubbish Greens as being against “modernity” when it is precisely science which has highlighted the reality of global warming. It seems that ideologies make bedfellows of those theories that are most congenial to them.
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