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

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 a Panglossian view of how well humanity can deal with it - or at least, the richer part of humanity.

Unpicking this emerging common sense is the focus of this essay. It begins by critiquing recent neoliberal views on coping with climate change, before moving on to examine how other political and philosophical traditions - conservative, green, social democrat - are addressing the challenge of environmental change. It concludes by proposing a new common sense - and a new political settlement to safeguard society against the vicissitudes of a changing climate.

The changing free market consensus

The winter of 2013–14 was Britain’s wettest ever. Nearly 8000 homes were flooded, a million households were affected by blackouts, and hundreds of flood defences were damaged.² In the midst of this misery, a group of well-connected free-market pundits and politicians decided to revise their opinions of climate change.

The first straw in the wind was an extraordinary declaration made by Owen Paterson, then Environment Secretary, in October 2013. Speaking at the Conservatives’ Autumn Conference, Paterson was asked to comment on the latest warnings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). ‘People get very emotional about this subject and I think we should just accept that the climate has been changing for centuries’, he opined. His reason for being so sanguine was that ‘it is something we can adapt to over time, and we are very good as a race at adapting’.³ As Environment Secretary, Paterson was responsible for UK policy on climate change; it later emerged that he had cut the department’s budget for doing so by 40 per cent, slashed the number of civil servants working on climate adaptation from 38 to just 6, and had never taken a briefing on climate science, either from his own chief scientist...