If only John Harris would pay attention
The British right’s hostility to climate action is deeply entrenched – and extremely dangerous
D’ye know, we’re really not sure about that. We, of course, think of ourselves as being on the left, as all liberals - even the classical kind - are. The aim is to make life better for all, including and especially the poor. So, we advocate that peace, easy taxes and the tolerable administration of justice which achieves that task. We get labelled as being of the right because we insist that markets are the way to get that job done. Given that we’re right - as in correct - on this we must be labelled as we are, far-right, in order that the easily swayed do not begin to understand the point.
For we’ve not been hostile to climate action in the slightest. We’ve spent the past 15 years at least advocating the correct plan to deal with the problem. As they gave Nordhaus the Nobel for, Stern a peerage, assuming that the IPCC is correct about the existence and problems of climate change then the solution is a carbon tax at the social cost of emissions. Job done.
For that is what the actual science says. Do, please, note that “assuming” in there.
Harris contrasts our modest, moderate and correct analysis with this:
There is a very good book that explores all of this, published last summer: White Skin, Black Fuel, authored by the Swedish academic and activist Andreas Malm, and a group of “scholars, activist and students” called the Zetkin Collective. It roots the right’s climate politics in things that are as much psychological as political: nostalgia for an age of empire founded on coal and oil, a yearning for the machismo of heavy industry, and a view of the global south as a deep threat. The latter’s climate-based suffering must be othered and ignored, and its people have to be shut out, even as climate breakdown makes large-scale human movement more inevitable than ever.
One of Malm’s recent books - his publisher sent it to us surely by mistake - advocates the use of Leninist war communism as the correct reaction to climate change. That war communism that emptied the cities, dropped industrial output by 80%, caused a famine that killed perhaps up to 10 million and had to be abandoned after 3 years to return to the more market based system of the New Economic Policy.
It’s us that are to be regarded as dangerous, while Malm is “very good”?
Perhaps we could make just that tiniest, littlest, suggestion to John Harris? Could you start paying attention?