There are good methods for dealing with climate change.
Good being defined as dealing with the problem at the least cost to humanity. There are also bad ways, meaning increasing the cost to humans while perhaps dealing with less climate change. Economists are near united that markets, suitably adjusted, are the good way. They also tend to share the view that central planning and political schemes are the bad way.
But there are also entirely insane ways of trying to deal with it all. A new book by Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, underlines this insane third class. Malm’s argument is that capitalism has led us here, therefore capitalism has got to go. One problem?
If we look at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s climate models, we quickly find that markets and capitalism are part of the solution, not the problem. Malm’s previous book, Corona, Climate and Chronic Emergency, was, if this is possible, even more insane. He actually advocated war communism as the ruling system best able to get us through the pandemic. That’s the same war communism that shrank the Soviet Union’s industrial production by 90%, halved the food supply, and killed 5 million to 10 million people. Back then, war communism had to be abandoned for a more market-based, even capitalist, system after only three years.
In Malm, we see through a window to those who use climate change as the trigger for fulfilling their fantasies of how the world should be.
If we accept (which, to be fair, not all do) the science put forward by the IPCC, the solution should be clear: Introduce new incentives in our capitalist and market economies. The problem will be resolved. Much of what needs to be done has already been done — renewable energy is getting cheaper, for example. We don’t have to abolish industrial society and kill capitalism.
