Julia Steinberger Needs To Start Taking More Water With It

JC onna Pogo Stick this is late night loons stuff

The idea that an adult woman can believe these things is just amazeballs. But here we are. A tweet from Julia Steinberger leads to her Medium essay about what’s wrong with the world.

An upheaval in 10 chapters:

1. The cause. We know the climate crisis is brought to us by highly unequal and undemocratic economic systems.

Err, no? Emissions are emissions. 100 people emitting one tonne each is exactly the same as 1 person emitting 100 tonnes. Sure, it’s true that a more unequal society will have more people emitting those 100 tonne personal amounts. But a more equal society will have more people able to emit another 1 tonne each. For, more equality is by definition the movement of some of those assets of the richer to those poorer - the economic assets which either allow or do the emitting. Sure, Jim Ratcliffe’s £50,000 private jet flight emits more than my £100 Easyjet one. But if we take the £50k off Jim and give it to 500 folk like me then all 500 of us might spend the marginal income on an Easyjet flight each - which would be more emissions than Jim’s spending of the money.

It simply is not true that economic inequality is the heart, the core or the cause of climate change. It’s idiocy to think it is too.

Of course, we know what’s happening here. Climate Change is Bad, M’Kay? Which it is, obviously. Economic inequality is Bad, M’Kay? Well, there the evidence is a great deal more mixed but whatever. But in the minds of the stupid all bad things have the same cause. So, if inequality is bad, climate change is bad, then they must be the same thing because they’re Bad, M’Kay?

2. The rise. The recent history of these economic systems, in the Americas and Eurasia, is dominated by the ascendance of neoliberal ideology.

Oh, that is good. Given that I am a neoliberal - a fully paid up one, Senior Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute and all - that’s very good. Given HS2, looming wealth taxation, the increased bite of idiot regulation and all that I can’t say that I see neoliberalism as winning right now but that might depend upon your starting point. If you’re a socialist - or an idiot but I repeat myself - you might well regard the plenitude of bananas in the supermarket as neoliberal. After all, that is something that socialism never did achieve.

3. The threat. Neoliberal ideology is antidemocratic at its very core. Its aim is to give free-reign over our societies to corporations, not citizens.

And, well, you know, bollocks. The very beating heart of neoliberalism is that corporations need to be controlled and they’re best controlled by the citizens. In the form of free markets rather than voting on which bureaucrats get the gold plated pension, true. But neoliberals are between indifferent and actually against capitalist power. The whole nub of the idea is that markets do the job of controlling capitalists better than bureaucrats, politicians or, obviously, capitalists.

There’s not really any way for her thesis to survive after getting so much of the basics wrong, is there?

But just one more tidbit:

Hayek and his neoliberal colleagues now needed another, antidemocratic way, to organise society. They didn’t want democracy, but they wanted some kind of self-maintaining organisation — by which they meant hierarchy. Organisation was supposed to be supplied by the market, and hierarchy by competition within markets. (It’s worth noting that neoliberals in the 1950s did not, although they should have, predict that unfettered markets lead to concentrations in monopolies or cartels. They would arguably disapprove of the vast corporations running our current economies, even though their market-above-democracy policies predictably brought them into being.)

Well, that wasn’t actually the last tidbit. But the idea that Friedman, Mises, Menger, Hayek and the rest didn’t worry about monopolies? Jesu C is really bouncin’ on that pogo stick right now. And then the idea that democracy will be better bulwark against monopolies than markets? Can you actually do backflips on a pogo stick?

The topics covered by Atlas Network think tanks are quite diverse, even sometimes contradictory, as a quick visit to their websites and publications reveals. However, they have two core constants. The first is the promotion of business-friendly neoliberal economic policies, disguised and massaged to appear democracy-compatible under Hayek’s mantle of ‘market freedom as the basis for all other freedoms.’ The second is climate denial and delay.

In fact, the Atlas Network think tanks have arguably been the largest conduit and support for promoting climate denial-delay all over the world.

Some Atlas Network think tanks will now have moved on, and present themselves as accepting of climate science, even promoting climate action.

Hmm. Well, this is a bit difficult. For I am, as above, a neoliberal. I’ve also spent the last 15 years arguing that we should have a proper carbon tax at the social cost of carbon. You know, institute the results of the Nordhaus Nobel, the Stern Review. I’ve written a report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation which similarly insists that we should have a carbon tax. For this I’ve been labelled by DeSmog as a climate denier. So, you know, pretty tough crowd.

But, if you want, the neoliberal case about climate change. Accept, for the moment, that it’s a real problem that needs to be dealt with (as is my own belief). Great.

So, what is it that we’re actually trying to do? We are trying to change the behaviour of 8 billion people. That means that we need some policy measure, some crowbar, that intervenes in the decisions - preferably all the decisions - of 8 billion people.

As Hayek pointed out in his Nobel Leccture as well as much other of his work the only thing that all 8 billion of us face as a series of incentives and information sources is “the market”. So, whatever it is that we’re to do about climate change must be that crowbar, that intervention, into the market - the carbon tax.

So, we’ve some bird shrieking that it’s the neoliberals responsible for it all when it’s only actually the neoliberals who have any plausible answer - that carbon tax.

Ho hum. Maybe it’s not more water needed with it but if that’s so think how lucky we are that free markets have also made the necessary lithium cheaper.