Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate change as
individuals
Martin Lukacs
Stop obsessing with how personally green you live – and
start collectively taking on corporate power
@Martin_Lukacs
Mon 17 Jul 2017 15.56 BST Last modified on Thu 11 Oct 2018
08.43 BST
Would you advise someone to flap towels in a burning house?
To bring a flyswatter to a gunfight? Yet the counsel we hear on climate change
could scarcely be more out of sync with the nature of the crisis.
The email in my inbox last week offered thirty suggestions
to green my office space: use reusable pens, redecorate with light colours,
stop using the elevator.
Back at home, done huffing stairs, I could get on with other
options: change my lightbulbs, buy local veggies, purchase eco-appliances, put
a solar panel on my roof.
And a study released on Thursday claimed it had figured out
the single best way to fight climate change: I could swear off ever having a
child.
These pervasive exhortations to individual action — in
corporate ads, school textbooks, and the campaigns of mainstream environmental
groups, especially in the west — seem as natural as the air we breathe. But we
could hardly be worse-served.
While we busy ourselves greening our personal lives, fossil
fuel corporations are rendering these efforts irrelevant. The breakdown of
carbon emissions since 1988? A hundred companies alone are responsible for an
astonishing 71%. You tinker with those pens or that panel; they go on torching
the planet.
The freedom of these corporations to pollute – and the
fixation on a feeble lifestyle response – is no accident. It is the result of
an ideological war, waged over the last 40 years, against the possibility of
collective action. Devastatingly successful, it is not too late to reverse it.
The political project of neoliberalism, brought to
ascendence by Thatcher and Reagan, has pursued two principal objectives. The
first has been to dismantle any barriers to the exercise of unaccountable
private power. The second had been to erect them to the exercise of any
democratic public will.
Its trademark policies of privatization, deregulation, tax
cuts and free trade deals: these have liberated corporations to accumulate
enormous profits and treat the atmosphere like a sewage dump, and hamstrung our
ability, through the instrument of the state, to plan for our collective
welfare.
Anything resembling a collective check on corporate power
has become a target of the elite: lobbying and corporate donations, hollowing
out democracies, have obstructed green policies and kept fossil fuel subsidies
flowing; and the rights of associations like unions, the most effective means
for workers to wield power together, have been undercut whenever possible.
At the very moment when climate change demands an
unprecedented collective public response, neoliberal ideology stands in the
way. Which is why, if we want to bring down emissions fast, we will need to
overcome all of its free-market mantras: take railways and utilities and energy
grids back into public control; regulate corporations to phase out fossil
fuels; and raise taxes to pay for massive investment in climate-ready
infrastructure and renewable energy — so that solar panels can go on everyone’s
rooftop, not just on those who can afford it.
Neoliberalism has not merely ensured this agenda is
politically unrealistic: it has also tried to make it culturally unthinkable.
Its celebration of competitive self-interest and hyper-individualism, its
stigmatization of compassion and solidarity, has frayed our collective bonds.
It has spread, like an insidious anti-social toxin, what Margaret Thatcher preached:
“there is no such thing as society.”
Studies show that people who have grown up under this era
have indeed become more individualistic and consumerist. Steeped in a culture
telling us to think of ourselves as consumers instead of citizens, as self-reliant
instead of interdependent, is it any wonder we deal with a systemic issue by
turning in droves to ineffectual, individual efforts? We are all Thatcher’s
children.
Even before the advent of neoliberalism, the capitalist
economy had thrived on people believing that being afflicted by the structural
problems of an exploitative system – poverty, joblessness, poor health, lack of
fulfillment – was in fact a personal deficiency.
Neoliberalism has taken this internalized self-blame and
turbocharged it. It tells you that you should not merely feel guilt and shame
if you can’t secure a good job, are deep in debt, and are too stressed or
overworked for time with friends. You are now also responsible for bearing the
burden of potential ecological collapse.
Of course we need people to consume less and innovate
low-carbon alternatives – build sustainable farms, invent battery storages,
spread zero-waste methods. But individual choices will most count when the
economic system can provide viable, environmental options for everyone—not just
an affluent or intrepid few.
If affordable mass transit isn’t available, people will
commute with cars. If local organic food is too expensive, they won’t opt out
of fossil fuel-intensive super-market chains. If cheap mass produced goods flow
endlessly, they will buy and buy and buy. This is the con-job of neoliberalism:
to persuade us to address climate change through our pocket-books, rather than
through power and politics.
Eco-consumerism may expiate your guilt. But it’s only mass
movements that have the power to alter the trajectory of the climate crisis.
This requires of us first a resolute mental break from the spell cast by
neoliberalism: to stop thinking like individuals.
The good news is that the impulse of humans to come together
is inextinguishable – and the collective imagination is already making a
political come-back. The climate justice movement is blocking pipelines,
forcing the divestment of trillions of dollars, and winning support for 100%
clean energy economies in cities and states across the world. New ties are being
drawn to Black Lives Matter, immigrant and Indigenous rights, and fights for
better wages. On the heels of such movements, political parties seem finally
ready to defy neoliberal dogma.
None more so than Jeremy Corbyn, whose Labour Manifesto
spelled out a redistributive project to address climate change: by publicly
retooling the economy, and insisting that corporate oligarchs no longer run
amok. The notion that the rich should pay their fair share to fund this
transformation was considered laughable by the political and media class.
Millions disagreed. Society, long said to be departed, is now back with a
vengeance.
So grow some carrots and jump on a bike: it will make you
happier and healthier. But it is time to stop obsessing with how personally
green we live – and start collectively taking on corporate power.
Twitter: @Martin_Lukacs
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