Modern environmentalism and the David vs. Goliath inversion

The massive power of profit-hungry corporations to induce humanity to act in self-destructive ways is a hardy perennial of intellectuals and political activists. But it is curiously lacking in persuasive explanations of precisely how it is that ordinary people can be led toward infinite myopia with respect to their own interests. They refuse to choose consumption patterns that are environmentally responsible, thus poisoning themselves and others. They refuse to vote for aspiring public officials who pledge credibly to pursue policies that can be described as such, thus allowing others to poison them. What’s going on?

It appears to be the case that a certain ray of realism finally has intruded on the environmentalists’ unified “corporate power” theory of everything, about which more below. A recent contribution to this genre argues that “neoliberalism” — believe it or not, “brought to ascendance by Thatcher and Reagan” — has yielded “a culture telling us to think of ourselves as consumers instead of citizens,” which means, of course, that ordinary people are refusing to follow the lead of those very same intellectuals and political activists. But why? Here, courtesy of the ineffable Martin Lukacs, is the answer:

If affordable mass transit isn’t available, people will commute with cars. If local organic food is too expensive, they won’t opt out of fossil fuel-intensive super-market chains. If cheap mass produced goods flow endlessly, they will buy and buy and buy. This is the con-job of neoliberalism: to persuade us to address climate change through our pocket-books, rather than through power and politics.

Wow. Thus has modern environmentalism suddenly awakened to the reality that the demands of the climate industry are not cheap, the upshot of which is that someone has to bear them, either through prices eroding the family budgets of ordinary people, or through taxes doing the same either directly or indirectly, or through reductions in public programs that have constituencies, that is, that bestow benefits upon actual people.

Thus has modern environmentalism now returned to the false consciousness of the masses induced to take such trivial actions as changing their lightbulbs while fossil fuel corporations remain free to “pollute” at will, immune “to the exercise of any democratic public will.” As night follows day, that false consciousness of ordinary people means automatically that there must be an elite — a vanguard of the proletariat — that will save humanity from those powerful corporations. Lukacs again:

The climate justice movement is blocking pipelines, forcing the divestment of trillions of dollars, and winning support for 100% clean energy economies in cities and states across the world. New ties are being drawn to Black Lives Matter, immigrant and Indigenous rights, and fights for better wages. On the heels of such movements, political parties seem finally ready to defy neoliberal dogma.

Got that? It is coercion — indeed, violence — that will save humanity in the face of the “climate crisis,” for which, by the way, there is little actual evidence. Is there an evil corporation anywhere that has the coercive power to force people to act in ways violating their own interests and preferences? Lukacs claims that “a hundred companies alone are responsible for . . . 71 percent [of global ‘carbon’ emissions].” Whether that factoid is true or not: Is he oblivious to the reality that firms produce “carbon” emissions because ordinary people demand the goods and services that are the central object of that productive activity?

And so the “corporate power” complaints of the environmental left, used as an excuse for its failure to induce massive numbers of ordinary people to act in ways inconsistent with their interests, are fundamentally dishonest. It is the “mass movements” so beloved of the left that are the real coercive power in this context, and it is fascinating to find that Lukacs and his allies are not shy about advertising it:

At the very moment when climate change demands an unprecedented collective public response, neoliberal ideology stands in the way. Which is why, if we want to bring down emissions fast, we will need to overcome all of its free-market mantras: take railways and utilities and energy grids back into public control; regulate corporations to phase out fossil fuels; and raise taxes to pay for massive investment in climate-ready infrastructure and renewable energy — so that solar panels can go on everyone’s rooftop, not just on those who can afford it.

As Mussolini might have put it: All within the climate crusade, nothing outside the climate crusade, nothing against the climate crusade. Thus has the climate industry evolved into a totalitarian ideology happy to crush the preferences of ordinary people. Perhaps Lukacs can name a “powerful” corporation that can do anything even remotely comparable to that.

Benjamin Zycher is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he works on energy and environmental policy. He is also a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute.