Pirate's Cove

Usually, when you pin a Warmist down they’re happy to demonize capitalism and say it should be replaced, but, rarely tell you what they want to replace it with. But, there’s apparently a third way

Capitalism and Climate Change: A Centrist Pragmatism Capable of Solving the Climate Crisis

The conventional debate around the root causes and solutions to the worsening climate crisis follows a classic left-right divide. On one hand, the left-leaning camp holds that capitalism and its unregulated rise over the decades are fully responsible for the unchecked greed that got us here and that in order to save our planet, capitalism must be completely undone and replaced. On the other hand, the right-leaning camp believes that market forces alone can create the right incentives and mobilise the necessary resources to achieve rapid and deep cuts to global carbon emissions. Further along the spectrum still, a more radically conservative approach believes that we can continue business as usual and that the market will correct course as it has done in the past.

Both camps suffer from a multitude of shortcomings, including short-termism and selfish dogmatism. If we were to adopt the socialist course of action to dissolve capitalism and rebuild a new economic system from scratch focused on the climate, there wouldn’t be any time left to actually put in place measures to drastically curtail global warming. Similarly, business leaders need to recognise that government and corporations can and must work together to create the necessary incentives and markets to protect our planet from climate disaster, and acknowledge that a business-as-usual scenario risks taking us over the edge of the cliff. The stark reality is that global warming doesn’t abide by traditional political lines and any combination of mitigating factors will not fall neatly into any ideological bucket.

Government and business working together? Is that the 3rd way?

Although the worst effects of climate change will manifest themselves on civil society in the form of catastrophic habitat destruction and mass migration, the root cause of the crisis is a practical one and not ideological. We simply have to take urgent action to radically cut our carbon emissions and transition completely to a low carbon economy built on renewable sources of energy and production. This essay, therefore, calls for a more pragmatic ‘third way’ to how we tackle the climate crisis, one that rejects traditional left-right ideologies. Akin to the third way political stance that became popular in the late 1990s amongst world leaders such as Tony Blair and Bill Clinton that attempted to reconcile centre-left social policy with centre-right economic policy, today’s climate woes call for a centrist pragmatism that combines the best use cases of government intervention and the innovative might of market forces.

So, basically, massive government intervention in the market? What’s that called per Political Theory 101? Socialism. But, if you add in forcing citizens to act a certain way, we’re now over in the Authoritarian Model. Also known as Progressivism. Nice Fascism.

Even as we shift to more renewable sources of energy, new technologies might not be enough to compete with the dominance of fossil fuels. State intervention will play a crucial role in subsidising nascent new environmentally sustainable technologies that will be economically unviable at first, but at scale will make the difference in removing tens of billions of tons of emissions from the atmosphere this century. Similarly, governments around the world have been attempting to impose a carbon tax, a price that emitters will have to pay for every ton of carbon equivalent they release into the atmosphere, forcing businesses and consumers to switch to new technologies that are less carbon-intensive. These kinds of policies will be instrumental in driving large scale shifts to less carbon-intensive activities and can only be implemented by a large and effective public sector.

This third way sure looks like the Warmist’s first way. Surprise. Just repackaging the same old same old.