We began my interview last week on the "Connected & Disaffected" podcast talking about political polarisation: what is it, where it's come from, and whether or not we should fear it. My contention in the interview was that the Global Financial Crisis, and to a lesser extent the Iraq War, broke the post- Cold War hegemony of the neoliberal ideological consensus. In other words, the cultural quasi-equilibria characterised by the dominance of neoliberal narratives about society and the economy proved to be no longer fit for its structural environment. As a result, formerly marginalised social narratives are (re-)emerging, an experience that is deeply disconcerting to a generation of people socialised to believe there is no alternative.
One point from my notes that I didn't get to make in the interview was that climate change was the third and final nail in neoliberalism's coffin. I don't talk about environmental issues often on this blog: I'm not an environmentalist by nature and am generally content to let the experts come up with pragmatic fixes. As I write in Chapter XVII of my book, "Politics for the New Dark Age", I'm interested in the natural environment primarily as a source of free public services that marginalised people (especially) rely on to survive. I'm interested in how the exploitation and privatisation of the environment fuels the unjust accumulation of wealth by the powerful, and how the distribution of environmental harms of that exploitation often falls hardest on those already disadvantaged (see: Naomi Klein). In other words, I'm not the sort of person who declares that climate change is the greatest moral challenge of our times.
A perfect little problem
Once upon a time, climate change was the perfect problem for the socially-conscious neoliberal. A potentially existential external threat, it has several elements that appealed to the technocratic elite: expert scientific evidence was required to establish the case for action; cooperation between states necessitated vast and complex international negotiations; domestic solutions envisaged creating a new freely-traded market commodity without changing the economic status quo; and there were opportunities to 'educate' the masses about their consumption patterns and nudge them to make 'better choices'. I think it's fair to say all these methods failed one way or another. We're already blowing past the climate targets we set just four years ago; barely half of US adults believe human activity causes climate change; and most of the rise in consumer energy prices has been caused by price-gauging privatised monopolies, not investment in renewable power.
These failures are the result of the neoliberal worldview, and they should demoralise and delegitimise those techniques for anyone serious about social policy.
- Experts are not a magic bullet. And scientific facts are not social facts. As I write in the early chapters of my book, governance is about making value judgements. Despite what utilitarians believe, there's no technocratic formula that will calculate the most ethical way in which to distribute wins and losses. Scientists have established the inevitability of potentially irreversible climate change to a virtual certainty, yet that fact alone tells us nothing about what we should do about it. People intuit this: the best studies show that expert evidence has no effect on public opinion about climate change policy. In fact, relying on appeals to scientific authority has only led the powerful opponents of climate action to develop sophisticated techniques to muddy the waters, conduct personal attacks on scientists and discredit the very idea of expert knowledge. So, good job on that one, neoliberals.
- And then there's the wonkiest of wonk ideas: carbon trading. Why impose a new tax on pollution when we can create a complex new form of private property traded on indecipherably complex financial markets? Oh, and because this property right will be an artificial creature of state regulation, the price and quantity of carbon permits will be easily manipulated by lobbying interests on behalf the very industries that emit the most carbon. Australia's carbon trading scheme - while effective - was so convoluted and unpopular that the conservatives managed to repeal it FIVE YEARS AGO. As Democrats in the US have discovered with healthcare policy, when voters don't understand a public programme it's absurdly easy for opponents of regulation to portray it as a paranoid right-wing fever dream. Better simpler, direct policies that are easy to understand - and harder to attack.
- Finally, when all collective solutions fail, neoliberalism tells us that fighting climate change is ultimately a matter of individual responsibility. And since individuals have every incentive to free ride in a collective action problem they have no power over, why we simply need to educate people to make choices contrary to their own rational self interest! I've written before why this kind of 'education' strategy is counterproductive: it creates new hierarchies of knowledge and hides existing hierarchies of power in such a way to generate increased resentment and anxiety from the have-nots. People don't want cheap energy because they're bad people who don't understand climate change: they want cheap energy because they're resource constrained and want one fewer stressor on their daily lives. Middle class neoliberals aren't better or smarter people because of their 'green energy choices', they're using their existing wealth to invest in a social signifier of status. South Park had this one down in 2006.
What's left unsaid
Y'know what's not on this list? The classical sort of central government action traditionally used to solve environmental problems. The same sorts of programs that actually have been implemented and are making the biggest difference in saving us from potential climate catastrophe. Where's China's central planning body setting national targets for solar energy expansion that have made it the world's largest manufacturer of solar cells? The public investment in basic science that led to Australian universities developing modern photovoltaics in the first place? The unilateral government decisions, like Angela Merkel's to close Germany's nuclear power plants, that leads to the market embracing renewables virtually overnight? The basic role of national industry policy in directing subsidies away from the fossil fuel industry and towards more environmentally friendly forms of power generation? The answer is that neoliberalism made these sorts of policy responses literally unthinkable.
Solving collective action problems requires collective decision-making through national institutions (i.e. governments). As is true of social and economic dilemmas, so too of environmental ones. Nations that are on track to meet their targets under the Paris Agreement are going to do so on the back of their existing competence with industrial management and economic planning. Laissez-faire states without a tradition of government intervention in the economy, like Australia, are least likely to meet them. If you want to save the environment, you're first going to have to take a deeper look at how our societies and economies are structured. Ultimately, I'm with Naomi Klein on this one: our economic system and our relationship with the natural environment are so intrinsically linked that hoping for meaningful action on climate change under neoliberalism is self-defeating.
Consider that my message for the voters in Batman.