Anti capitalist and climate change activists demonstrate in London. Credit: Matt Cardy/Getty Images
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We have been given the ‘final call’ by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to save the world from “climate catastrophe”. Like last orders at the bar, one suspects there will be several more ‘final calls’ before we sit up and take notice.
For the far Left, it is the free market system itself that has created this existential crisis. If ‘Capitalism is killing the planet’, as the placards at radical eco-protests proclaim, then what other choice is there but to overthrow the system?
Yet to believe that anti-capitalism offers a panacea for climate change is to ignore twentieth century history. The destruction of nature in the former Soviet Union was unparalleled in Western democracies. By the time of its collapse, 40% of Soviet citizens lived in areas where air pollutants were three to four times the maximum allowable levels, nearly half of the children in Leningrad (St Petersburg) were suffering from intestinal disorders caused by drinking contaminated water, and a fifth of the population lived in ecological disaster areas.
The market may not guarantee an optimum allocation of resources, but the price mechanism is essential in determining resource scarcity. No bureaucrat or communist idealist – whether Stalinist or Libertarian – has yet found a way to replicate this function.
This does not mean the state has no role to play in encouraging better choices (more on that later), but knowledge about resource availability is fragmented and fluid, and is not something that can be slotted neatly into a government database.
The existence of private property can also act as a bulwark against the destruction of the environment (though it by no means guarantees it). When nobody owns something – a plot of land, say, or a forest – it tends to fall into disrepair or be exploited to destruction.
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