Menu
Ireland's political and cultural magazine
— June – July 2013
H
UMANKIND’S greatest crisis coin-
cides with the rise of an ideology
that makes it impossible to address.
By the late s, when it became
clear that man-made climate change endangered
the living planet and its people, the world was in
the grip of an extreme political doctrine whose
tenets forbid the kind of intervention required
to arrest it.
Neoliberalism, also known as market funda-
mentalism or laissez-faire economics, purports
to liberate the market from political interference.
The state, it asserts, should do little but defend
the realm, protect private property and remove
barriers to business. In practice it looks nothing
like this. What neoliberal theorists call shrinking
the state looks more like shrinking democ-
racy: reducing the means by which citizens can
restrain the power of the elite. What they call
“the market” looks more like the interests of
corporations and the ultra-rich. Neoliberalism
appears to be little more than a justification for
plutocracy.
The doctrine was first applied in Chile in
, as former students of the University of
Chicago, schooled in Milton Friedman’s extreme
prescriptions and funded by the CIA, worked
alongside General Pinochet to impose a pro-
gramme that would have been impossible in a
democratic state. The result was an economic
catastrophe, but one in which the rich – who
took over Chile’s privatised industries and
unprotected natural resources – prospered
exceedingly.
The creed was taken up by Margaret Thatcher
environment
george monbiot
Break corporate
power to save the
planet
Neoliberal dogma forbids avoiding the 4, 5 or 6
degrees of global warming that the World Bank,
PWC etc predict
and Ronald Reagan. It was forced upon the poor
world by the IMF and the World Bank. By the
time James Hansen presented the first detailed
attempt to model future temperature rises to
the US Senate in , the doctrine was being
implanted everywhere.
As we saw in and (when neolib-
eral governments were forced to abandon their
principles to bail out the banks), there could
scarcely be a worse set of circumstances for
addressing a crisis of any kind. Until it has no
choice, the self-hating state will not intervene,
however acute the crisis or grave the conse-
quences. Neoliberalism protects the interests
of the elite against all-comers.
Preventing climate breakdown – the four, five
or six degrees of warming now predicted for this
century by green extremists like, er, the World
Bank, the International Energy Agency and
PriceWaterhouseCoopers – means confronting
the oil, gas and coal industries. It means forcing
those industries to abandon the four-fifths or
more of fossil fuel reserves that we cannot afford
to burn. It means cancelling the prospecting and
development of new reserves – what’s the point if
we can’t use current stocks? – and reversing the
expansion of any infrastructure (such as air-
ports) that cannot be run without them.
But the self-hating state cannot act. Captured
by interests that democracy is supposed to
restrain, it can only sit on the road, ears pricked
and whiskers twitching, as the truck thunders
towards it. Confrontation is forbidden, action is
a mortal sin. You may, perhaps, disperse some
money for new energy; you may not legislate
against the old.
So Barack Obama pursues what he calls an
“all of the above” policy: promoting wind, solar,
oil and gas. Ed Davey, the British climate change
secretary, launched an energy bill in the House of
Commons recently whose purpose was to decar-
bonise the energy supply. In the same debate
he also promised that he would “maximise the
potential” of oil and gas production in the North
Sea and other offshore fields.
Lord Stern described climate change as
“the greatest and widest-ranging market failure
ever seen”. The useless Earth summit last June,
the feeble measures agreed in Doha, the near-
collapse of the European Emissions Trading
Scheme, which was supposed to have capped
our consumption and the unpicking of domestic
commitments expose the greatest and widest-
ranging failure of market fundamentalism:
its incapacity to address our existential crisis.
Practical measures to prevent the growth of glo-
bal emissions are, by comparison to the scale of
the challenge, almost non-existent.
The ,-year legacy of current carbon
emissions is long enough to smash anything
resembling human civilisation into splinters.
Complex societies have sometimes survived the
rise and fall of empires, plagues, wars and fam-
ines. They won’t survive six degrees of climate
change, sustained for a millennium. In return
for years of explosive consumption, much
of which does nothing to advance human wel-
fare, we are atomising the natural world and the
human systems that depend on it.
The sound and fury of climate summits (or
foothills) probe the current limits of political
action. Go further and you break your covenant
with power, a covenant both disguised and val-
idated by the neoliberal creed. Neoliberalism
is not the root of the problem: it is the ideol-
ogy used, often retrospectively, to justify a
global grab of power, public assets and natural
resources by an unrestrained elite. But the prob-
lem cannot be addressed until the doctrine is
challenged by effective political alternatives.
In other words, the struggle against climate
change – and all the crises that now beset both
human beings and the natural world – cannot
be won without a wider political fight: a dem-
ocratic mobilisation against plutocracy. This
should start with an effort to reform campaign
finance – the means by which corporations and
the very rich buy policies and politicians We
must start to articulate a new politics, one that
sees intervention as legitimate, that contains a
higher purpose than corporate emancipation
disguised as market freedom, that puts the sur-
vival of people and the living world above the
survival of a few favoured industries. In other
words, a politics that belongs to us, not just the
super-rich.
This article first appeared in the Guardian
Twitter: @georgemonbiot
We must start to articulate a
new politics, one that sees
intervention as legitimate,
that contains a higher
purpose than corporate
emancipation disguised as
market freedom
“
