Some of them do grasp it intellectually as this comment to Krugman's post by "libertarian" shows:
Climate change gives people a reason to implement left-wing policies. Leftists have always wanted to fight against corporations, capitalism and consumerism. Leftists have always wanted to take stuff away from the rich. Now they have an objective, scientific reason to do so, not merely an ideological one. Of course pro-market people like me are angry. I'm pretty sure that this is how politically correct liberals feel like when people talk about IQ studies.
But we just have to ignore our feelings and accept the cold, hard facts. Climate change is happening, it is anthropogenic and it will have serious consequences if we do nothing about it. Yes, left-wing, anti-market, anti-rich policies would be bad and immoral IF there was no climate change. But the fact is that climate change IS happening, so the usual moral and economic pro-market arguments don't apply anymore. I believe that many other environmental problems can be solved by free markets, but not this one.
One might hope that libertarians, as the "rational" right wingers would be more like this person but from what I find, this just is not the case. The libertarian and Objectivist right is steeped in denial too. So it isn't just conservatives; Thatcher and "libertarian" are lonely voices on the right. This is why we can't just pin this on conservativism here. It's all the unrestrained capitalists.
Nature's Normandy on the Beaches of Free-Capitalism
The very existence of a limit to the amount of CO2 and other greenhouse gases we can pump into the atmosphere is nature itself upending a core tenet of capitalism, which implicitly assumes limitless natural resources are available.
Human behaviour causing climate change makes this a no longer valid assumption in economics. Nature does run out of stuff, and does run out of room to put junk like emissions. Liberals have spent decades warning that we would run out of oil, or room for trash, or copper, or fissile uranium and conservatives have constantly denied all this, content to assume that "technology" would find new sources of all the inputs that unrestrained voracious capitalism needs.
Now, we are finally hitting a very hard wall and no simple technical fix has magically appeared. It's still just so much cheaper to burn all the free energy the Carboniferous era left lying around, even with a massive ball of stable free fusion burning continuously 150 million kilometres away. The economics clearly favours burning fossil fuels...unless you price in the carbon externalities. But you only do that if you accept the existence of those externalities on a global scale, and that's a big leap for capitalism.
We're actually in a closed system running an economic model designed for an open one. That requires a different kind of economics.
Capitalism Can't Solve It
The solution to the climate crisis requires increased world governance (though not a "world government" proper). Voluntary action by individuals is not nearly enough, and even individual nations taking internally collective action will fail. Taxes on carbon, or a government imposed "cap", or regulation on industry is needed. Lots of major international coordination to curtail freeloading and even wealth transfers from rich to poor so that poor countries can curtail emissions too. Sure, cap and trade takes advantage of markets, but overall, the solutions are by and large liberal ones, that would leave the world a fundamentally unconservative place. There will be spillover into other topics, trade, labour standards, economic justice. Once governments around the world agree to coordinate regulation of carbon, they will find it easier to coordinate regulation of other things. The infrastructure will be there. It's easier to add a few staff and enlarge the mandate of a particular bureaucracy than to build it from scratch.
One way or another, climate change is the demise of the right wing economic worldview. The only question is whether liberalism "wins" (by solving the problem) or gets dragged into calamity by the deniers blocking needed action.
That's why they fight this so hard. It proves everything they believe is wrong. |
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