Antimarket: Capitalism Decarbonised https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n07/william-davies/antimarket review of Review and discussion of: The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet , by Brett Christophers
Liberal ideology imagine that ‘economic life’ (i.e. competitive egalitarian markets) still rules the roost. This myopia is manifest in the economics curricula of major universities, which have continued to exclude theories which emphasise power, uncertainty, monopoly and instability, and clung to an orthodoxy in which economic activity is chiefly determined by prices and incentives.
Politicians, meanwhile, cleave to liberal fairy tales about making work pay, social mobility, and ownership for all—which are increasingly divorced from a reality of in-work poverty, unearned wealth, and spiralling rents. And financial services masquerade as just another ‘sector’ among many, selling their wares in a marketplace like humble shopkeepers.
Brett Christophers, in The Price Is Wrong, adds to this list a potentially more drastic symptom: a failure on the part of policymakers to understand the energy transition on which the future of the planet hinges. The operating assumption of energy economists over the years has been that the key obstacle to the growth of renewable energy is its higher cost, which renders it unable to compete against fossil fuels in the energy market, and hence reliant on government subsidy. It was a moment of great excitement, therefore, when in 2015 the International Energy Agency reported that, finally, renewable technologies (primarily solar and wind farms) were ‘no longer cost outliers’ relative to gas, coal, oil and nuclear power generation.
the goods on which society depends have been privatised in the name of encouraging market competition, but with results that look nothing at all like a ‘free’ market, and with predictable beneficiaries. These goods haven’t just been privatised, but ‘assetised’, in the sense that they have been packaged up, quantified and managed in ways that suit the calculations and interests of financiers. (The difference in the case of renewable energy is how unusually treacherous the assetisation project has been, to the point where it has often proved impossible to get the necessary turbines and solar panels built in the first place.) The financial sector deals in the language of risk, but it seeks out situations in which profitability is effectively guaranteed, a certain level of return baked in.
the central fact of the climate crisis is that there is very little time, and the scale of the political challenge increases with each passing day. The importance of acting as swiftly as possible scrambles our usual political and moral coordinates, forcing us to look beyond the political and economic solutions we might usually hope for, and more favourably on those which are considered ‘realistic’.
Waiting for solutions to emerge in a bottom-up fashion, whether from activists or from markets, is not sufficient. Only the state has the power, the money and the coordinating capacity to direct capital investment at sufficient scale and speed towards the renewables sector. In practice, the distinction between a ‘de-risking’ state (which tops up private sector profits) and a Green New Deal (which builds new public infrastructure) may be less clear-cut than it appears on paper. The priority, as it has been now for decades, is to go as big and as soon as possible
