“Spring is here … and they can’t stop you enjoying it.”

That’s George Orwell in his essay Some Thoughts on the Common Toad.

“So long as you are not actually ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or a holiday camp,” he continues, “Spring is still spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.”

But, of course, now they have.

Today spring’s no longer spring – at least not in the old way.

With climate change wrecking the seasonal rhythms, scientists find plants emerging from the soil earlier than ever before. Almost everywhere, the ancient patterns have gone awry: last November, for instance, summer temperatures killed a third – yes, a third! – of Australia’s remaining spectacled flying foxes.

The atom bombs, the police, the dictators and the bureaucrats remain with us and, God knows, so do the lies streaming from the loudspeakers. But, as the sociologist John Bellamy Foster noted back in 2002, Orwell’s beloved toads are now vanishingly rare, with some 200 different species of amphibians driven to extinction in the last few decades.

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Some Thoughts on the Common Toad appeared in the socialist newspaper Tribune in 1946 just as the planet entered what environmentalists call “The Great Acceleration”: the period in which the human boot, weighing heavily since the industrial revolution, began to stamp on the face of nature.

Throughout the post-war boom, the tremendous expansion of the global economy drew more and more of the world into the circuit of capital. Ocean acidification, biodiversity loss, greenhouse gas emissions: all of these, and other indicators, shot violently upward from the late 1940s on.

The periodisation highlights a fundamental problem in the fight against climate change today.

We know now that scientists understood all the key principles of global warming decades ago. Furthermore, as Nathaniel Rich notes, back in the 1980s a real response seemed eminently feasible as “many prominent Republicans joined Democrats in judging the climate problem to be a rare political winner: non-partisan and of the highest possible stakes”.

But the early consensus for climate action coincided with what Naomi Klein dubs “the absolute zenith of the neoliberal crusade”. As a result, the leaders who committed to fighting warming also ruled out any response to emissions incompatible with their free market dogma.

Thus, in the negotiations that led to the Kyoto Protocol, the US, with the backing of companies like Enron, insisted that international efforts for climate change mitigation rely on business-friendly, market-based mechanisms such as cap and trade schemes. Even though Washington eventually refused to ratify Kyoto, the methodology championed by it (and institutions like the World Bank) became, by the early 2000s, an unassailable political orthodoxy.

Again, the notion that the market offered the best (or indeed the only) mechanism for fighting climate change was always pure ideology. For instance governments can shut down coal-fuelled power stations whenever they like – they don’t need price signals to pass legislation. In the real world, as researcher Jesse Jenkins explained to the New York Times “policies other than carbon pricing have driven the majority of emissions reductions to date”.

The ideologically-determined attempts to generate environmental outcomes through market action thus resembled huge Rube Goldberg machines, dependent on ultra-convoluted systems for results that can also be produced by non-market means.

But those fossil fuel corporations who supported (and sometimes led) the early campaigns for emissions trading systems saw the redundant complexity of market environmentalism as a feature, not a bug. Companies like BP and Shell understood – better than many environmentalists – that, in practice, a trading system could amount to a massive subsidy for big polluters since they could profit hugely by “selling” emissions they didn’t actually require.

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Furthermore, because a trade in carbon allowed the purchase of credits associated with carbon offsets (usually in the developing world), tremendous opportunities opened up for creative (and sometimes blatantly dishonest) accounting. An EU study from 2017 found that a full 85% of offset projects actually failed to reduce emissions at all.

Many progressives reluctantly embraced free market environmentalism, judging any action to be better than none – particularly as overt climate change denialism grew.

But that missed something else that the corporates grasped: namely, that the “put a price on carbon” slogan accepted, by definition, the commodification of the environment.

That was, after all, the goal of pricing: transforming nature, in all its complexity and diversity, into an asset legible within a corporate ledger.

Fixing a market value on carbon was never supposed to halt the economic activity underpinning the Great Acceleration. On the contrary, it was intended to speed it up. Even if trading schemes do cut greenhouse gases (which, by and large, they don’t), they’re designed, as pro-business measures, not to limit industrial expansion but to foster it. They’re meant explicitly to encourage more economic growth – and that’s something that’s no longer compatible with the preservation of nature.

As Foster points out, a continuous 3% average annual rate of growth means that world industry doubles every twenty-five years, grows by a factor of sixteen every century, and 4,000 times every three centuries. Given the current state of the planet, how would that not bring utter ruination? The World Wildlife Fund says that populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians have declined by 60% since 1970. What will be left if we continue economic metastasisation for another half century?

In political terms, the embrace by progressives of mitigation schemes so closely associated with big business has proved utterly disastrous. Over the last decades, an “environmentalism” that rewarded rapacious corporations seemed to many ordinary people less a strategy for preserving the planet they depended upon and more a rhetorical bludgeon wielded by an out-of-touch political class.

Take the experience in France, where President Emmanuel Macron, pledging to Make the Planet Great Again, introduced another neoliberal nostrum – a carbon tax.

A recent study revealed that carbon taxes don’t make a meaningful difference to the climate because governments invariably set them at too low a rate. Why? Well, carbon taxes are innately regressive – they pass the cost of reform onto the consumers who can least afford it – and thus are rarely popular.

In France Macron implemented his levy on fuel as part of a broader austerity package – and spurred the Yellow Vest revolt, a rebellion led by workers living outside the metropolitan centres, and with no choice but to use cars.

In other words, in the name of environmentalism, Macron managed to alienate France’s poorest – the very people who will suffer most in a warming future and so should have been a key constituency for change.

That’s why Thoughts on the Common Toad repays re-reading.

In his essay, Orwell takes for granted an affinity between everyday nature and working class people, who can, he suggests, find an alternative to oppression and exploitation in the environment around them.

“Even in the most sordid street the coming of spring will register itself by some sign or other, if it is only a brighter blue between the chimney pots or the vivid green of an elder sprouting on a blitzed site. Indeed it is remarkable how Nature goes on existing unofficially, as it were, in the very heart of London.”

In other words, Orwell celebrates an uncommodified environment, explicitly because it doesn’t obey the rules of the market.

“[T]he pleasures of spring are available to everybody, and cost nothing,” he explains, before exulting at the thought of birds, in the midst of bourgeois Britain, flagrantly avoiding rent.

The Great Deceleration we require today means deploying our scientific and technical knowledge to undo the damage we’ve wreaked. It means embracing economic planning, so that we use scarce resources for human need rather than corporate profit; it means confronting the military-industrial complex and abandoning the fossil economy; it means involving ordinary people in the decisions that shape their lives.

It means, in other words, constructing a non-market society, as scary as that idea will seem to some

In 1946 Orwell, a lifelong socialist, defended an appreciation of nature as something that made “a peaceful and decent future a little more probable”. The joy that he took in toads and kestrels and other creatures that evaded the market’s invisible hand hinted at an older kind of society – and potentially, a newer one.

The dictators and bureaucrats might be ruining spring, as they force every living organism to bear the consequences for their profits. But for most of human history we did not live under generalised commodity production, an economic order that’s remarkably recent. And if the past was different, the future can be, too.

As we struggle to preserve our only planet, that insight matters more than ever.

• Jeff Sparrow is a Guardian Australia columnist