First published in the print edition of The Witness Politics Journal.

‘We’ll be fine! Science follows funding and the funding to get us out of this climate mess will come when it’s a bigger problem. Humans always have and always will innovate themselves out of trouble’. This is the viewpoint espoused by the “rational optimists” of the world. It’s a bucolic picture. Human ingenuity prevailing as always. The glorious global market turns the wheels of innovation and solves everything. However, as nice as this portrait is, as comforting as it is, to twiddle our thumbs and wait for this all to blow over; it is a pernicious, unrealistic view held by those with vested interests in the existing system.

“anyone who believes you can have infinite growth on a finite planet is either mad, or an economist”

This viewpoint holds capitalism and the market as the driver behind all human progress. But, under the most recent incarnations of capitalism; which can be broadly named Keynesianism and Neoliberalism, the system has been founded on infinite growth, infinite production and infinite consumption. Sir David Attenborough once said, “anyone who believes you can have infinite growth on a finite planet is either mad, or an economist” and that seems to sum up the incredible struggle we have on our hands today. The reconciliation of global economic forces, and the globe itself. The market based logic of Matt Ridley and co is not entirely unfounded. Since the industrial revolution the market and the profit motive have provided us (at least in the west) with medicine, fuel, cheap food and consumer products. These are great achievements, but it is their proliferation, and the market mechanisms that support their proliferation, that is causing the problems. The tendency of the market to drive the price of goods down through industrial economies of scale means that our forests are decimated and cattle and sheep are ranched on an almost inconceivable scale. A 2012 report found that almost 1/3 of greenhouse gases emitted in a given year are the by-product of agriculture. Industrial farming may have given us cheap Big Macs, but the carbon sinks destroyed and the methane emitted in the name of market efficiency are destabilising our climate at an incredibly dangerous rate.

Industrial farming is but one example of how market behaviour destroys the planet. If you were to examine global plastic consumption, fossil fuel usage, air pollution and other damaging habits you would find the market, lurking in the shadows behind all of these issues. The economic dogma in most developed countries prioritises profit over almost everything else and despises state intervention in the economy. But, if we continue to put growth and profit on pedestals and, if we continue to let the state play second fiddle to the market we won’t be debating the possibilities of growth, we’ll be debating how best not to choke on chemicals in the air that should have been banned but weren’t. The idea that the market, especially the deregulated, neoliberal market that discourages investment and encourages rent extraction, is the solution; is at best folly and at worst the last mistake we’ll ever live to make. To keep below the two-degree threshold we must globally burn no more than 886 billion tonnes of carbon between 2000 and 2049. Big oil and gas firms have valued current reserves at 2.8 trillion tonnes. Do the share prices of these companies, that in a sane economy would be rendered obsolete, reflect the harsh reality of climate change? No. The value of their shares suggests those resources can and will be burned.

I do not want to abolish market forces and private property. This has been tried before with disastrous consequences. Nevertheless, without the guiding hand of the state we’re going to let capitalism run us into the leached, scarred ground. States must heavily regulate big business, through carrots and sticks. There should be harsh fines and jail time for firms in breach of environment regulation, and tax breaks for the ecologically responsible. We should also expand our economies beyond the market and state. Micro-energy production offers exciting opportunities for locally owned wind or solar farms that exist as commons, run by the local people for the local people. Free from the bureaucracy of the state, and the greed of the market Solarcommons have launched projects across America, and such projects are globally restoring community action and providing green energy in a totally non-market way. The state should also invest heavily in R and D. It may seem hypocritical for me to advocate technology as a way out, but that part of Ridley’s thesis may well be correct, he’s just wrong about everything else. Green technology is possible, and in a world where our labour is so damaging, automation of that labour could not only emancipate us from the drudgery of late-capitalism but could emancipate the environment from our punishing demands. A reduction in work would make us happier, and would slow our collective march towards an ecological apocalypse. Working less wouldn’t necessarily mean being poor either. Universal basic income is seen by many as the basis of a new economic system where we work less and is often proposed alongside a carbon tax. The future doesn’t have to be awful; but if we continue to sit back and expect a system of profiteers, rentiers and capitalists to do the right thing, we’re headed for disaster.