Climate Policy: Green-Red-Brown

The fear that greenery, and in particular the central planning associated with climate policy, will be used to smuggle in a new variant of socialism is not new, and it’s not unrealistic.

But something else too is going on. Before going any further, I should say that the assumptions underlying this intriguing article by Robert Shrimsley in the Financial Times are not necessarily ones that I share. For example, he writes:

The climate agenda will see citizens required to make individual sacrifices for the greater good of hitting net zero goals.

Let’s just say that definitions of the “greater good” may vary. There is nothing intrinsically good about the current “race” to net zero (Shrimsley is writing about Britain, which accounts for around 1 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions), and, thanks to the devastation it will cause, there’s a great deal of bad.

That said, the article is well worth a read if you can make your way past the paywall.

Shrimsley writes that “the car clash is a proxy for a wider philosophical contest between collective public policy goals and individual freedoms.” He’s right. And this contest will be made sharper by its unmistakable class overtones. The wealthy will be able to spend their money to smooth their way through the inconveniences that the switch to electric vehicles (EVs) and the war against cars will bring. The less well-off will not be in a position to do so, particularly in the U.S., a huge country with (for the most part) public-transport networks that are, shall we say, far from dense.

Read on, however, to find this:

After years of prioritising individual rights, the political pendulum is swinging back towards collective demands. This goes beyond net zero to a fundamental diagnosis of the UK economy. Blair’s think-tank, which has Keir Starmer’s ear, has called for planning powers to rush through decisions for infrastructure, for centralised use of personal data, and for a digital identity for all citizens.

From planning to tax, AI to climate change, the coming battle is over how far people are ready to yield freedoms to what Labour calls “the strategic state”.

Count me skeptical as to whether the British state, now run by mild (mainly) authoritarians of the center-left, whichever party is in charge, has truly prioritized “individual rights” for many, many decades. In the U.S. the position has been better, but the gap between the two countries is closing, and closing in the wrong direction. What Shrimsley sees as possibly coming next in Britain is likely to be echoed in the U.S.:

From planning to tax, AI to climate change, the coming battle is over how far people are ready to yield freedoms to what Labour calls “the strategic state”. This, not any overstated crusade against cars, is the real political tussle of the next decade. Buckle up.

The “strategic state” is a chilling phrase. It will be much more collectivist than we have grown used to, and countries that fall to this ideology are not likely to be the most pleasant or prosperous of places to live, other than for those in charge. But rather than the old European vision of a socialist state seizing the “commanding heights” of the economy, we are more likely to see economies where the divisions between public and private sectors are blurred, even though the balance of power between the two is clear. The private sector will be subordinated to the public sector, which, one way or another, will try to harness the dynamism of capitalism in order to achieve its social, political, and economic goals. Shareholders won’t count for much, but “stakeholders” will be told that they do. As such, the strategic state will turn out to be an updated testing ground for a variant of fascist, rather than socialist, economics — complete, probably, (these being the times that they are) with the sentimental veneration of “nature” that was another feature in some sectors of the European authoritarian Right a century or so ago.

Good times.