Climate, Positivism and the Free Market

An unnamed historian living in the Second People's Republic of China in 2399 seeks to understand why the advanced industrial societies failed to prevent catastrophic climate change, despite having both adequate scientific knowledge and the technical means to avert the crisis. The historian draws on records from the time of the Industrial Revolution onwards, and describes the growing awareness of climate change in the late twentieth century, the extreme weather events of the early twenty-first century, the subsequent disintegration of the Western Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets and the following events which came to be called the Great Collapse. Two ideologies had gripped the western world and stopped it from taking the action needed to prevent its downfall. The historian is the fictitious narrator of The Collapse of Western Civilisation (Oreskes and Conway, 2014) and the inhibiting ideologies are positivism and market fundamentalism.

For the benefit of readers unfamiliar with the thinking of previous centuries, the historian provided a Lexicon of Archaic Terms, running from Anthropocene to Zero net-carbon infrastructure. The Lexicon together with the text shows that Western science was seen as limited by its philosophical grounding. Baconianism (after Sir Francis Bacon, 1561 – 1626) held that reliable knowledge about the natural world could be gained “through experience, observation and experiment”. Reductionism, an approach “sometimes credited to the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes” resulted in specialisation in narrow areas of inquiry, which “made it difficult for scientists to articulate the threat posed by climate change” since experts often knew little about fields beyond their own. Physical scientists attached great importance to statistical significance and this limited their influence in the wider world; an observed phenomenon was only accepted as true if the probability of its occurring by chance was very small. Positivism, in which the historian includes all the above ways of thinking, can be traced back to the philosopher Auguste Compte (1798 –1857), and regarded any statement that could not be tested through observation as outside the realm of science. Thus science was limited in its ability to address the world beyond science.

The economies of Western Europe and North America were seen as dominated by capitalism from the 16th to the 20th century; means of production were owned by individuals or government-chartered organisations known as corporations; profit was the primary motive - profit to owners, managers and investors; there was no liability for debts or social consequences. Capitalism concentrated wealth in hands of a few, who could then buy favourable laws and protection from government. Although sometimes described as a process of “creative destruction”, capitalism was “paralyzed in the face of the rapid climate destabilisation that it drove, destroying itself.”

Market fundamentalism was central to the Western economies, and is described as a “quasi-religious dogma … promoting unregulated markets over all other forms of human socioeconomic organisation.” It was backed by the concept of the “invisible hand” described as existing in a “form of magical thinking” which “ensured that markets functioned efficiently and that they would address human needs”. The “social, biological or physical costs associated with manufacture, transport and marketing” were not reflected in the capitalist system, being seen as external to the market. Economists found it difficult to accept the role of this “external” environment. The term market failure described the “social, personal, and environmental costs that market economies imposed on individuals and societies.”

Jonathan Cohn’s review of The Collapse of Western Civilization described the book as a scenario of decline, valuable as “a cautionary tale of the dangers of climate inaction” but leaving “much to be desired.” He sees the “nexus … between science and business, knowledge and power” as central to the book, which presents scientists as lacking “the mettle to compete” and sometimes comes close to claiming that ‘bolder climate action would come if only “scientists communicated better.”’ In Cohn’s view some important factors are missing from or inadequately represented in the discussion: non- governmental organizations; whole sectors of the economy; crises resulting from biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, and deforestation; and perhaps most importantly, “the possibility that increasing global interdependence could create a global climate movement”. Collapse is a very short book, and Cohn perhaps felt that it needed to be longer and range more widely (Cohn, 2015). The two “inhibiting ideologies” of positivism and market fundamentalism will be discussed further below.

Hartley and Kuecker (2021) refer to the “convergence of complex, interconnected, synchronous, and intractable problems” making up the “salient existential challenge of the 21st century”. They see positivism as linked to “old ways of thinking about public policy” which have “generated the conditions for such problems to emerge and have a poor record of resolving them”. Contemporary policy logic is built on “an anachronistic instrumental rationalism” which they define as the “thought-system and accompanying rule-set holding that discrete and targeted policy interventions … can be successfully applied to problems expressed in knowable and well-defined terms.” The intractable problems of the 21st century cannot be solved by instrumental rationalism, which is regarded as an example of “legacy thinking” along with Enlightenment thinking with its “largely unchallenged empiricist perspective”. The authors argue that “policy’s often faulty and deficient response to complex problems can be traced to the Western Enlightenment’s … valorization of scientific logic as an unassailable form of intellectual reasoning, and to the later application of scientific positivism to social questions.”

Market Fundamentalism has been described as “an intellectually influential, politically entrenched ideal” fiercely opposed to “state intervention in market economies for the sake of social welfare goals or the protection of economic and social rights” (Powers, 2024). Its core belief is that “robust protection of market liberties should be the fundamental principle of social organization”. Three rationales of market fundamentalism are listed: “market liberties are foundational for all other liberties, market liberties are necessary for self-defense against the moral and intellectual deficiencies of states, and competitive markets are not only efficient, but also best promote freedom, individual welfare improvements, economic fairness, and social stability”. Powers goes on to argue against “the market fundamentalists’ overarching conception of freedom”.

Darley (2024) reported on a debate between experts from the fields of sustainability, economics and politics on the question: 'Does the free market have climate action in shackles?' The points made in favour of the free market were its potential to drive rapid change, and the proven ability of profit-seeking entrepreneurs and investors to innovate in fields such as electric vehicles and renewable energy. Governments were seen as slow, inclined to overregulate and inhibit thinking and adaptation. The arguments against the free market were that it had failed to deliver on its promises: this was shown by continuing global wealth inequality, corporate dominance, climate-related disasters, and the large percentage of total greenhouse gas emissions produced by a relatively small number of large companies. The importance of regulation was illustrated by its success in saving the ozone layer.

Political divisions over the free market are illustrated by the two following articles. The first, published by System Change Not Climate Change, claims that ecosocialism “brings together two complementary ways of thinking about humans and the environment they live in”. The “eco” comes from ecology and the “socialism” from “the rich tradition of socialist thought and action, especially that associated with Marxism”, which “shows that the ecological crisis is rooted in a destructive economic and political system, capitalism” (SCNCC, 2024). The second, from the Foundation for Economic Education, argues against ecosocialism, and that “capitalism has facilitated some of the most important advances in reducing carbon emissions” (Rieger, 2018).

A less polarised view of the market is given by Tom Steyer in his book Cheaper, Faster, Better. In chapter ten he claims that there is no such thing as a completely free market. From an American perspective “every business must comply with a huge number of rules and regulations” and there is broad agreement that rules are necessary; “when done right” these constraints reflect the values of the society in which the business operates. Rules not only allow for innovation and for the power of capitalism to make large and rapid changes, but “help set a direction” for those changes, aligning the incentives of companies with the interests of the public. In the context of climate change, effective rules “form a feedback loop with climate capitalism”, promoting scalable breakthrough technologies, and encouraging people and policy makers to engage with them. Steyer sees the rules concerning road safety as an example of rules that have spurred innovation. US legislation on seat belts prompted the development not only of better seat belts, but of a range of improvements such as padded dashboards and collapsible steering columns, and road deaths fell in consequence. Rules promoting safety “didn’t destroy the American auto industry”.  Similar examples are regulations to reduce harmful emissions from vehicles and to increase their miles-per-gallon figures. Steyer proposes that for climate change, “standards are better than mandates” since the exact course that the clean energy revolution will take is unknown. Rather than defining exact methods we should specify the desired result and “allow the market to figure out how best to do it”. Fair standards can produce a “race to the top, where people pursuing their self-interest nevertheless end up doing something that’s good for the planet and the public as a whole.” Britain’s Clean Air Act of 1956 and California’s cap-and-trade system that created a market for pollution are cited as examples of successful rule making. While businesses might complain at first, they go on to “do what they do best: innovate, solve problems, and compete.” Steyer concludes that setting the rules will not be easy, and deciding “which policies unlock innovation and competition is a complicated task”, but that the promise of a clean tech revolution can be delivered “far more quickly than most of us today realize” (Steyer, 2024).

A concluding thought is provided by a comment on market fundamentalism from Daniel Susskind’s book, Growth: A Reckoning. While the price mechanism is an effective tool “for boiling down vast amounts of information to a single number… it will only ever reflect what people care about when they act as consumers in a market. It does not reflect what those people are concerned by when they act as citizens in a society” (Susskind, 2025).

References

 

Cohn, J., 2015, Review, Resilience, online, accessed 7 April 2025

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-08-28/the-collapse-of-western-civilization-review/

Darley, J., 2024, Does the Free Market Have Climate Action in Shackles? Sustainability Magazine, online, accessed 12 April 2025

https://sustainabilitymag.com/articles/does-the-free-market-have-climate-action-in-shackles

Hartley, K., and Kuecker, G., 2021, Disrupted governance: towards a new policy science, Cambridge University Press, online, accessed 10 April 2025

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kris-Hartley/publication/358645556_Disrupted_Governance_Towards_a_New_Policy_Science/links/

Oreskes, N., and Conway, E., 2014, The Collapse of Western Civilisation, New York, Columbia University Press

Powers, M., 'Market Fundamentalism', A Livable Planet: Human Rights in the Global Economy, 2024, New York, 2024; online edn, Oxford Academic, 2024, accessed 12 April 2025

https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197756003.003.0003

Rieger, M., 2018, In the Fight against Climate Change, Free Markets Are Our Biggest Ally, Foundation for Economic Education, online, accessed 16 April 2025

https://fee.org/articles/in-the-fight-against-climate-change-free-markets-are-our-biggest-ally/

SCNCC, 2024, What is ecosocialism? 2024, System Change Not Climate Change, online, accessed 16 April 2025

https://systemchangenotclimatechange.org/ecosocialism/

Steyer, T., 2024, Cheaper, Faster, Better, New York, Spiegel and Grau

Susskind, D., 2025, Growth: A Reckoning, Penguin Publishing Group

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