The Impossible Revolution - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 59

international negotiations, hindering truly effective worldwide action. In
short, this “solution” simply will not do.
The doctrinaire opposition to effective action has more than purely
practical consequences. It will force us to adopt half-measures, to be
sure. But it's worth contemplating why we must resort to them at all. It's
about time we faced the consequences of the “Reagan revolution”—the
notion that protecting the free market is more important than any other
consideration. If that dogma is true, then creating a business-friendly
environment trumps preserving the Earth. Capitalism maters more
than the biosphere. No doubt capitalism might have difficulty flourish-
ing if the biosphere begins to suffer; any sane businessperson should
be able to admit to that fact. But free-market dogmatists will not do so,
because they will not concede that the biosphere is in danger in the first
place. Their resistance to action is more subtle: in their view, capitalism is
more real than the biosphere. The conditions for business are real, as are
taxes and government funding, but in their view scientific assessments
of climate change are still so speculative and so dependent on unproven
models that they do not yet describe reality. Assessments of the business
environment, of course, also depend on models and estimates, but at least
they refer to modes of behavior that we understand. In this view, climate
change, if it exists, arises from physical processes we still don't fully com-
prehend. Adam Smith is good as gold, but the IPCC is still a bit fishy.
There is no need to change until the science is more solid—but even
then, how could it ever be as solid as the myth of Adam Smith? 88
This description of market fundamentalism might sound a bit
extreme. But in fact the entire public sphere accepts the principle that no
political measure can be justified unless it is consistent with the laws of
the market. (The only exceptions allowed these days are national secu-
rity, a handful of moral norms—such as those that forbid selling people,
body parts, or sex—and a few government programs too popular to
touch.) We've long since goten used to obeying this principle: it seems
we can't truly face any significant public problem (from elevated high-
school dropout rates, drug abuse, and worker safety to disaster relief and
the protection of endangered species) without considering its impact on
the economy and whether it would be cost-efficient to address it. Our
ultimate reality is the economy; any other factor that maters to us must