Apocalypse now? Striking to save the world
- Publisher:
- S. Murray-Smith
- Publication Type:
- Journal Article
- Citation:
- Overland, 2020, Summer 2019, (237)
- Issue Date:
- 2020-01-01
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Between 2008 and 2011, I was an activist in the Australian climate movement. It was a weird, in-between time in politics: after Rudd’s election and before his demise, the lines of march largely formed around which form of market solution – stronger, weaker; emissions trading scheme, carbon price – would be best suited to the problem. It seemed simple at the time. By pricing carbon, we would ‘internalise the externalities’: make capitalists pay, and they’d change their behaviour. Of course, that only makes sense if you accept that capitalism does what it says on the box.
In reality, the relationship between the state and capital in producing energy had the effect of creating a monopoly of pricing in the electricity market. The result of a price on carbon would be, some of us argued, that these electricity companies would pass the costs of the carbon price onto people paying the bills. And that would produce an inevitable backlash feeding from the age-old (false, damaging, and imagined) binary division that the right loves to encourage and exploit: the environmentalists versus the workers. Regardless of its utility in reducing emissions, the movement, we argued, should reject the whole thing as worse than useless.
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