Climate Change Resists Narrative, Yet the Alphabet Prevails (A to Z): Now C!
Rational analysis favors a “carbon tax” called a “dividend”
Article by Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker Magazine, November 28, 2022
What’s the matter here? Why has so little progress been made on climate change, even as the dangers have become ever more apparent?
According to one school of thought, the problem has to do with incentives. There’s a great deal of money to be made selling fossil fuels — just in the first quarter of 2022, twenty-five of the world’s largest oil-and-gas producers announced profits of close to a hundred billion dollars — and still more money to be made by burning fossil fuels to make stuff to sell, from sunglasses to steel girders.
Meanwhile, the costs of climate change can be fobbed off on someone else. To use the technical term, they are a “negative externality.” In the words of the Stern Review, a report commissioned by the British government in 2005, climate change “is the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen.”
By this account, the obvious solution is to realign the incentives — to internalize the externalities. If the cost of the damage caused by a ton of CO2 was borne by the business (or individual) responsible for emitting that ton, then the business (or individual) would be motivated to cut back.
“A carbon tax offers the most cost-effective lever to reduce carbon emissions at the scale and speed that is necessary,” a 2019 statement signed by thirty-five hundred economists, including twenty-eight Nobel Prize winners, declared. Such a tax would move “the invisible hand of the marketplace to steer economic actors towards a low-carbon future.”
According to a second school of thought, the trouble runs a whole lot deeper. Our political system is dominated by corporate money in general and fossil-fuel money in particular. (Last year, the oil-and-gas industry reportedly spent a hundred and twenty million dollars lobbying Washington, and it probably spent a great deal more via front groups.)
It’s therefore naïve to imagine that policies that cut into fossil-fuel profits will be enacted. And even if they were, they wouldn’t solve the essential problem, which is that the “invisible hand” always grasps for more. If it’s not more oil, it will be more lithium to build batteries, and if it’s not more lithium it will be more cobalt, mined from the bottom of the sea.
“When it comes to global warming, we know that the real problem is not just fossil fuels — it is the logic of endless growth that is built into our economic system,” Jason Hickel, an economic anthropologist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, has written.
Climate change can’t be dealt with using the tools of capitalism, because it is a product of capitalism. It can be dealt with only by throwing off capitalism in favor of something else — a system aimed not at growth but at “degrowth.”
“The difficult truth is that, to prevent climate and ecological catastrophe, we need to level down” is how the British environmental writer George Monbiot recently put it.
A third line of thought — perhaps too bleak and unpopular to be called a school — is that, if big change is hard, bigger change is even harder. How are we going to build a whole new economic system if we can’t even enact a carbon tax?
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See Also: Naomi Klein – This Changes Everything, Bioneers, November 5, 2014
Climate change as more than an “issue.” It’s a civilizational wake-up call delivered in the language of fires, floods, storms and droughts. It demands that we challenge the dominant economic policies of deregulated capitalism and endless resource extraction. Climate change is also the most powerful weapon in the fight for equality and social justice, and real solutions are emerging from the rubble of our failing systems.