There is no ‘peace’ to be brokered with fossil fuel companies who stand to make billions. Effective policy is to threaten their gains
The yearning for an apolitical response to an intensely political crisis can be traced to a different historical period., warnings about climate change first emerged in the late 1980s, the zenith of neoliberalism.
When James Hansen from Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies told the US Senate about his confidence in a global warming trend, free market ideas once associated with far-right cranks had already cohered into an unchallenged orthodoxy. The Thatcherite slogan “There is No Alternative” exemplified the depoliticisation of neoliberalism, with the privatisations, deregulations, cuts and other signature policies of the era understood not as decisions but as externally imposed necessities.
An earlier generation might have reacted to Hansen’s warnings much as governments did during the second world war, when, during a different kind of emergency, western leaders nationalised key industries to direct production to required outcomes. But because neoliberalism established the market as more natural than nature itself, the consensus of the early 1990s held that the environment should be adjusted to the economy rather than the other way round.
Accordingly, from the Kyoto protocol onwards, the mainstream response to global warming centred on the commodification of the atmosphere: from cap-and-trade schemas in which companies bought and sold rights to pollute, to offset systems in which promises not to emit were traded.
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