Climate Change Market Solutions Trap

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.

I have no specific policy proposals to offer within the scope of this post only the general call for libertarian communism. On a side note, the aforementioned political label is great because it annoys both market fundamentalists and Stalinists.