In the past months, climate change has been front and center. I’ve noticed something about the conversation. Everything from action plans to academic research takes as a given that the pace and the scope and even the very possibility of change is a function of “the market.”
You’ll start to notice it too. There are stories about automakers, ostensibly trying to shift their fleets to electric, but waiting for consumer demand — a “shift in the market.” Governments are subsidizing renewable energy, so that it becomes more competitive in national energy markets where grid utilities buy power. Governments are also investing in basic research, everything from desalination to data collection, with the hope that it will eventually commercialized as climate tech. There are “cap and trade” programs where you literally buy the right to pollute. The “price” for carbon emissions floats with global supply and demand for carbon credits. A market.
This week’s issue of the Economist is titled “The Climate Shock,” and it tells a story about the challenge of climate change and points to some solutions. There are plot twists, protagonists and antagonists, but the scene is set on a market stage.
“Since May the price of a basket of oil, coal and gas has soared by 95%. American petrol prices have hit $3 a gallon… the panic has also exposed deeper problems as the world shifts to a cleaner energy system, including inadequate investment in renewables and some transition fossil fuels, rising geopolitical risks and flimsy safety buffers in power markets… At a minimum, however, the cost will be higher inflation and slower growth.” (The Economist)
More and more people are painting pictures of climate change from their own perspectives — pictures that are optimistic or utilitarian or dystopian — but they all paint within the frame of the market.
The market has swelled into an impossibly large concept. We are part of it, we are subject to it, our actions happen within it. Our fate will play out according to the market’s whims, and the best hope we have is to lasso it with regulations or cajole it with investments or yank it with the reins of policy.
There are well intentioned efforts at that kind of wrangling. The Green New Deal or the Infrastructure Bill in the US, the Paris Agreement and the United Nations’ COP on the international stage. Mariana Mazzucato’s “value theory” is all about shaping markets, and it’s now guiding the EU’s “mission-oriented” policy.
It’s important to spell out the subtext of all of these efforts. If we tune up the machinery of the market, and steer it a little bit, then business will realign and technologies will spring into existence and save the world — we won’t have to deal with any unpleasantness.
This is lazy logic, and it’s simply not true.
Markets are everywhere in our world. They are very good at solving many different kinds of economic problems (I’ll get to why and how in a moment). Market solutions have historically made decision-makers powerful and wealthy. So it’s really no surprise that those decision-makers are focusing on using markets to tackle climate change. But it’s market dynamics that caused climate change in the first place — that’s been proven out for hundreds of years. If I had to place a bet, I’d say the market is going to keep doing what it’s good at.
So I’m skeptical about using this massive tool we’ve built over hundreds of years and expecting it to do something it wasn’t built to do and which it’s never done before. But thinking about how markets work, and why they’re so powerful, is a good place to start, if we’re looking for alternative approaches.
“A market is a composition of systems, institutions, procedures, social relations or infrastructures whereby parties engage in exchange… In economics, a market is a coordinating mechanism that uses prices to convey information among economic entities (such as firms, households and individuals) to regulate production and distribution.” (Wikipedia)
In other words, a market is a system for sharing information about what different actors have and what they need, by coordinating exchanges between them. It is especially useful in situations where there are so many actors and so much information that it’s hard to engage one-on-one. Situations like climate change.
I had the pleasure of being on a panel last week with Julius Lindsay. He used a phrase that has been lodged in my mind ever since:
Climate change is a social problem with ecological outcomes.
I’ll add to that.
Markets are social tools with ecological outcomes.
What other social tools might have ecological outcomes? How can we coordinate in the interest of climate action? How can we share information about what we have and what we need? What might it look like to engage in a politics of listening and acting, rather than market-shaping and competing?
Kim Stanley Robinson has been making a strong case for carbon capture, and the way he frames it is a good example of non-market coordination. His argument is pretty clear: Tweaking market dynamics isn’t going to slow down carbon emissions fast enough. We need to pull carbon out of the air. It’s going to be expensive, and everyone needs to pony up. None of this squares neatly with the market, but we need to get on with it if we want to survive. In short: massive scale listening and coordination without a market.
I’m also interested in the individual, personal, small-scale, and messy process of listening and coordination. Again, Julius Lindsay’s work is a good example. When tasked with developing a climate action strategy for the town of Richmond Hill, he didn’t focus on policies and regulations. He worked with residents to create a guide for how to talk about climate change, with a focus on bridging political fault lines. Most interestingly, the guide doesn’t emphasize abstract ideas like melting ice caps or the Amazon rainforest. Instead, it’s grounded in specific places and local features of Richmond Hill, and it tells stories of how these familiar things will change as a result of climate action or inaction.
“Brown’s political listening addresses this. It suggests that any gathering contains many inchoate political futures and that political work consists of helping some of those come into being. Indeterminacy is not the end of history but rather that node in which many beginnings lie in wait. To listen politically is to detect the traces of not-yet-articulated common agendas… One might think of them as latent commons. They are latent in two senses: first, while ubiquitous, we rarely notice them, and, second, they are undeveloped. They bubble with unrealized possibilities; they are elusive. They are what we hear in Brown’s political listening and related arts of noticing. They require stretching concepts of the commons.” (The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins)
This is how Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing describes the work of an organizer named Beverly Brown. Tsing sees latent commons in the relational webs all around us. Webs of exchange that are as dense and complicated as… markets.
Tsing goes on to describe latent commons as messy and imperfect, neither utopian nor dystopian, and certainly not salvific — but brimming with potential for common agendas. “Some radical thinkers hope that progress will lead us to a redemptive and utopian commons. In contrast, the latent commons is here and now, amidst the trouble. And humans are never fully in control.”
To place our hope in the market is to wish for a utopian commons that we control and which saves us. It’ll never happen. I think we are better off following Tsing and Lindsay and Robinson into the mess of relations.
We need to put work into doing what the market does — coordinating and sharing information. We need to get used to talking about climate change, and listen to each other, and connect it to the places we love right around us. We need to acknowledge, with Robinson, that solutions are going to be difficult, and that their logic will be orthogonal to the market. And most of all, we need to accept that climate action can’t simply be abstracted up into market-shaping policy and regulation and investment that has effects ten years down the line. It’s here and now. We are in the thick of it.