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By Root 795 0

deniers I know (most of whom I have great respect for on a personal level) all seem to hail from the political right, Matt Ridley included. The Global Warming Policy Foundation was founded by Nigel Lawson, formerly Chancellor of the Exchequer in Margaret Thatcher’s government, and author of a 2008 book called An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming, while the redoubts of newspaper climate denialism are all in the right-wing press, from the Daily Mail to the Telegraph and the Spectator.

Why should this be? Are many right-wingers, as some on the Green left assert, simply “antiscience”? Part of the explanation I think lies with deeply held political and social values. Climate-change deniers tend to be suspicious of what they see as big government and potentially intrusive state regulation over the private affairs of citizens and businesses. At the extreme represented by the U.S. Tea Party, this extends into a wide-ranging conspiracy theory about government in general: Its self-styled “Declaration of Independence” talks of Democrats “seeking to impose a Socialist agenda” and the “expansion of government power” that can only lead to “tyranny” and the reversal of capitalist progress.59 I have met and debated with many climate-change contrarians over the years, and my overwhelming impression is that they are motivated more than anything else by a libertarian political agenda that rejects the assumed universalist ideology of environmentalism, and that most also maintain a strong faith in the power of free enterprise to overcome any social or environmental problem. The science, of course, comes second: People tend to select what they want to hear based on preexisting beliefs, and choose their sources of information accordingly. A politically polarized media and the rise of blogs as a mainstream source of news and information have only reinforced this divergence in recent years.

Another issue under contention goes to the very heart of this book. I write here about fundamental planetary ecological limits, physically hardwired boundaries in the Earth system that can be identified scientifically and that humans must learn to respect if the planetary system as a whole is to remain reliably stable and hospitable to our species and many others. Yet most enthusiasts for free markets and capitalist economics find the idea of ecological limits hard or impossible to accept, and choose to believe instead that the expansion of human material consumption—even on an obviously limited single planet—can continue forever. As I will show in the final chapter, I believe that these diverging points of view can be reconciled, but only if both sides of the debate are prepared to be more open-minded. I have been frequently critical of the environmental movement in this book, but my argument with conventional environmentalism lies more with strategies than ultimate objectives: If the science about planetary boundaries is ever to gain popular credence and political force it is surely the Green movement that must be its most passionate and determined champion.

Climate change (and, by extension, ocean acidification) is politically toxic to the libertarian right precisely because it forces humanity to confront the necessity of respecting planetary limits—in this case regarding the capacity of the Earth system to tolerate emissions of greenhouse gases. I do not join with many Greens in accusing right-wing climate sceptics of being “antiscience”: as I have shown in earlier chapters, Greens are equally antiscience when it suits their own biases on issues like nuclear power and genetic engineering. But I do believe that the political right, with which I share some sympathies in many ways, has committed a serious error in cleaving to a dead-end denialist position on climate change—and thereby sacrificing the opportunity to frame economically liberal and free-market policies with which to combat it. At the same time, the capture of the Green movement by the political left has reinforced this sorry divergence, rendering Greens more marginal and less credible