Neoliberalism wrecked our chance to fix the climate crisis – and leftwing statements of faith have changed nothing

Why didn’t we nip climate change in the bud? Nathaniel Rich poses that question in an important article for the New York Times Magazine in 2018 (later published as a book). He notes that, for a brief period in the late 1980s, a consensus developed on the necessity for action. Back then, no one considered the science controversial and so a surprising number of mainstream politicians both acknowledged the threat facing humanity and pledged themselves to address it.

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“The conditions for success,” Rich says, “could not have been more favorable.” The opportunity was squandered because of a reluctance to sacrifice “present convenience to forestall a penalty imposed on future generations”, something he attributes to human nature.  

The Canadian writer Naomi Klein rejects that part of the argument with a righteous fury. She insists that, in fact, the timing could not have been worse, since the late 1980s represented “the absolute zenith” of the neoliberal turn. Rather than human nature, the problem was that, just as “governments were getting together to get serious about reining in the fossil fuel sector, the global neoliberal revolution went supernova, and that project of economic and social reengineering clashed with the imperatives of both climate science and corporate regulation at every turn”.

Fanatically committed to the free market as a regulator of all human social interactions, politicians ruled out public spending or direct bans on emissions. The only measures deemed credible centred on creating trading systems that turned environmental outcomes into commodities on which global financiers could speculate – in essence, nominating the most venal people on the planet as the best bet for saving humanity.

Unsurprisingly, corporate business continued as usual and the environmental disaster grew exponentially worse….

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/17/neoliberalism-wrecked-our-chance-to-fix-the-climate-crisis-and-leftwing-statements-of-faith-have-changed-nothing

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