Conservatives cannot properly be climate deniers. At the heart of their political stance is a desire to hand on something better to the future than they have received from the past. Now that climate science is so clear, a recognition of the duty to act to protect the next generation follows naturally. Of course, Conservatives have been somewhat cautious. Constitutionally, they don’t chase after novelty and it’s in their character to question fashionable theories.

So we shouldn’t be surprised at the genesis of Margaret Thatcher’s commitment to fighting climate change. As a Conservative she wasn’t a pushover, but as a scientist, she rigorously tested the science and was convinced. Once convinced she saw the imperative to act, and that made her the first leader of a major economy to commit to the Rio Earth Summit. In turn, it was her influence that brought George Bush to the table.

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In today’s world, she would have scorned the populist attack on science that we are seeing from much of the American right. She wouldn’t have recognised it as Conservative but, instead, as a rearguard defence of the status quo and the vested interests that sustain it. At the heart of her criticism would be the flight from logic and science.

But she’d have been just as trenchant about the confusion between the distorted market and the free market. She would reject the distorted market beloved of Trump. That’s the market that defends vested interest by allowing coal owners to make profits while the community pays the cost of the consequent pollution, ill-health and climate change; the market that enables American cotton farmers to damage land and air while driving poor African producers out of business on the back of US subsidies worth more than the value of their crops; the market that lets oil and gas producers compete effectively with renewables only because they don’t pay for the damage they do to ecology, the water supply, and the air we breathe.

Thatcher believed that only the power of the market is strong enough to make the necessary changes to the way we live. She understood that the market must not be operated to advantage established owners and entrenched interests. Instead, it must be free to drive innovation and embrace change. Today’s consumers must be charged for the real costs of the products they buy. Creating slag heaps, poisoning the air, contributing to flooding – this is not the market working. It’s the opposite. It’s the product of market failure, a system fixed to advantage incumbents by leaving to the community or future generations, costs that should have been born by today’s businesses and consumers. It’s a system that enables Exxon and Peabody Energy to make profits by not charging the real cost of what they sell.

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Putting this right is essential if a free society is to flourish. It’s not just to combat climate change that we need reform, it’s to enable the market to be even more effective as the engine of opportunity and invention. Yet those in the new US administration who look to reinforce today’s market distortions label any attempt to free it of its perversities as “socialist” intervention.

Recognising the fact of global warming didn’t make Thatcher a socialist! Of all people, she embraced the concept of the free market because it worked, and she dismissed collectivism as an ineffective road to serfdom. Solving the problems of climate change needs the most efficient of markets where real costs are charged to customers and companies make real profits because they don’t pass those costs on to today’s or tomorrow’s communities. Bolstering old industries that in a free market would fail is not part of Conservative economics. Retaining fossil fuel subsidies so you have to subsidise renewables is a daft way of driving change.

We need to get the American right to recognise that free markets are uncomfortable for incumbents but essential to drive necessary change. One of the most necessary changes is to move to a low carbon economy, and the Conservative desire to make things better for the next generation should make them the most determined to use the free market to achieve it. And what an opportunity that gives us, the shift to new technologies, the new jobs, and the wealth creation are all within our grasp if we don’t let vested interests get in the way.