A little while ago I posted a piece called Are we wasting our time on denialism. My basic thesis was that most of the energy fighting climate change denialism was wasted energy – energy we could be putting into fighting the fight for good climate policy. Finally getting around to reading the latest copy of The Overland Journal I have managed to complete the piece Beyond Denial by Philip Mirowski, Jeremy Walker and Antoinette Abboud. They go into this issue in much more detail, and so I think it is worth a review.
If we think about the climate movement globally at the moment we can see two key themes – the vast majority of energy is spent either in defending climate science, or alternatively fighting for market-based mechanisms to solve the problem. We fight for climate science and then talk about carbon pricing mechanisms as a way to deal with the issue. For Mirowski, Walker and Abboud this has put the movement in dire straights – one where climate denialism is growing, and the market-based solutions being proposed are not cutting emissions. Authors such as Robert Manne in the Monthly, Nick Feik in the Age and Clive Hamilton have all argued similar positions. But according to the authors there is a bigger problem:
While we agree that the situation is indeed dire, we want to highlight another dimension to the tragedy: the unacknowledged dominance of neoliberal ideas across the spectrum of acceptable climate change.
The authors argue that the three most dominant elements of the climate debate; denialism, and the proposed solutions of market-based solutions and/or geoengineering show the dominance of neoliberalism in the climate change debate.
We think most people on the Left don’t full realise that the phenomena of science denialism, emissions trading and geoengineering are not in fact unrelated or rival panaceas but rather constitute together the full neoliberal response to global warming.
The reasons this array qualifies as neoliberal are twofold. First, they all originated from within think tanks and academic units affiliated with the neoliberal thought collective; second, the net consequence of all three is to leave the problem not to the state but to the market. Denialism buys time for the other two options; financialisation of the carbon cycle gets the attention in the medium-term; geoengineering incubates in the wings as a techno-utopian deus ex machine for when the other two options fail.
It makes sense. Neoliberalism can easily be argued to be the dominant political structure of our time, and it therefore makes sense that on an issue such as climate change neoliberalism would play a major role. Mirowski, Walker and Abboud make this argument extremely well. They argue that neoliberalism has see a shift in the definition of ‘the economy’ to one in which ‘the maket’ is seen as the omniscient arbiter of truth. In doing so, the market has become the key indicator of defining what is right and what is wrong – the market knows all and provides all solutions. It is therefore up to the market to make the decision on how to respond to such an issue as climate change.
What is interesting, and potentially different about climate change however, is that neoliberals have managed to use the issue to reinforce their own ideals, and bring the left along for the ride:
At each step along the way, the neoliberals guarantee their core tenet remains in force: the market will arbitrate responses to biosphere degradation because it knows more than any of us about nature and society. As a bonus, some segments of the Left, operating under the impression they can oppose one or more of the neoliberal options by advocating another – that is they might think they can defeat science denialism or geoengineering by advocating emissions trading – end up as unwitting foot soldiers for the neoliberal long march.
In other words, environmentalists have become ‘neoliberals on bikes’, becoming unwitting foot soldiers for neoliberalism and dooming our world to a point where geo-engineering becomes the last and only option available to save us from climate change. And Mirowski, Walker and Abboud provide an excellent analysis of how this is playing out (it is hard to cover it all in this piece). However, unfortunately this is where the critique seems to end. Whilst their analysis is great, I feel like it lacks that next step – how we deal with it. Now, don’t get me wrong – they do go somewhat into the failure of environmental neoliberalism – the failure of emission trading schemes in Europe and New Zealand and the terrible potential solution that is geo-engineering. But I come out really questioning how we can defeat these ideas. The authors provide a very quick solution at the end:
The way out of our current impasse involves a serious reconsideration of what ‘the economy’ actually is. Rather than allowing ourselves to be enrolled pragmatically in the neoliberal script, we need to remind ourselves that there are other policy options.
In doing so they suggest one policy solution:
For example, fixed high or rising carbon taxes applied universally to wholesale coal, oil and gas transactions deserve our serious consideration, as they might actually accomplish the effect of a ‘price signal’ and spur disinvestment in the ever-expanding fossil-fuel sector.
For me this is quite a confusing policy response after such an in-depth critique of neoliberalism – and it highlights to me some of the issues that we continue to face with neoliberalism, and importantly the continued economic-focus of environmental problems. Whilst I certainly agree that a high price on carbon is a better mechanism than an ETS, I don’t see it as part of the ‘serious reconsideration of what ‘the economy’ actually is’. In fact, in discussing the role it can play in accomplishing a ‘price signal’ it seems to me that it is just a different form of using the market to solve the problem.
And that is where the challenge lies. If we agree, as I do with Mirowski, Walker and Abboud that market-based solutions to global warming are not going to solve the crisis, how do we articulate a better response? I think they hit the nail on the head when they argue that a reconsideration of our economy is essential – but I think we need to delve into that issue in a much deeper way. This means fundamentally questioning not just the role of neo-liberalism in environmentalism, but neo-liberalism in itself.
I’m not going to provide any answers to that today, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot – so more to come.