The embrace of market driven 'solutions' to climate change
is both bad policy and bad politics. Major liberal and social democratic
political parties have accepted the right-wing framing on the need for market
driven policies on all issues and have fallen into a political trap.
It is clear that any cost of doing business is passed onto
the consumer. For this reason, carbon pricing policies to impose an economic
disincentive on the use of fossil fuels are effectively regressive policies.
The adoption of these policies by liberals and social democrats allows the
political right to hammer them with this line of attack with seeming
credibility. The political right are perceived to be outflanking from the left
by proposing no action on climate change.
The market driven policy direction exposes the real
contradiction, constrained within capitalism, between the economic wellbeing of
the masses and climate action pursuant to climate science. Liberals and social
democrats continue to pretend this contradiction does not exist.
