In today's Philadelphia Inquirer, one Rich Ailes of Swarthmore has published a letter lambasting those who want a strong government response to climate change. In this letter, he argues that we should turn to that eternal panacea, the free market. He writes:
But consider this scenario: As the world warms incrementally, billions of market participants notice and reward entrepreneurs for products and services that help them adapt. This activity provides what we need and spreads wealth around to rich and poor alike.
My Gut Reaction: This sounds nice, Mr. Ailes, but how is that going the help the people who will most likely suffer the most from climate change: people in third world countries like Bangladesh and the islands of the Pacific.
More below the fold...
As Naomi Klein pointed out in a recent column in The Nation, the people most likely to suffer the worst effects of climate change are not first world elites who can easily afford extra insurance or new technologies designed to mitigate the effects of climate change. The people most at risk are those who live in third world countries, especially those that are below sea level. This has molded how Western politicians have responded to the crisis. Klein puts it deftly:
If wealthy white Americans had been left without food and water for days in a giant stadium after Hurricane Katrina, would it be possible for so many Republican politicians to deny the crisis? If Australia were at risk of disappearing and not large parts of Bangladesh, would Prime Minister Tony Abbott feel free to extol the burning of coal as "good for humanity"? If Toronto were being battered by historic typhoons that caused mass evacuations and not Tacloban in the Philippines, would building tar-sands pipelines still be the centerpiece of Canada's foreign policy?
Like many free market fanatics nowadays, Ailes assumes that capitalism will make everything better and raise all boats. This flies in the face of observable fact, where third world countries have by and large been the losers of capitalism, their role in global capitalism being the exploitation of their resources and cheap labor. Far from improving their lot, in countries like Bangladesh capitalism has been the background to
disaster.
Although Ailes makes a show of how his approach will supposedly help both rich and poor people, the reality is that most third world countries will not be able to afford these new technologies and services he envisions, outside of a few wealthy and usually corrupt elites. I suspect that deep down, he probably realizes this, and either doesn't care or rationalizes it away.