Why won't RFK Jr. debate me on climate change?
And why won't debate club media demand it? The answer, of course, is capitalism.
RFK Jr. has released a campaign video arguing for “using free markets and not top down control” to combat climate change. This isn’t a new line for him; back in April I posted an old clip of him saying the same thing:
It’s an absurd argument even by reactionary standards. Of course the government should roll back subsidies to fossil fuel industries, stop waging wars on their behalf, and so on. But even if you manage to do all of that, and even if you think that capitalism will tend to eliminate greenhouses gases as an inefficiency, there is no reason to take for granted that it will do so quickly enough to prevent unacceptable climate outcomes.
This is in fact where climate change poses its most vivid threat to capitalist thought: along the dimension of time. In the way it sets short-term incentives against long-term consequences. Most living fossil fuel shareholders aren’t going to by around long enough to see the worst climate outcomes; many of them, in fact, wouldn’t even be around long enough to see the long run cost advantages of a mass transition to green energy. But they will be around to eat the costs of the up-front investment it would require, which is obviously why they don’t want to do it. Capitalism isn’t some mystical force that compels everyone to act in the best interests of humanity; it compels them to act in their own interests (and often just in their own short-term interests). If humanity happens to benefit then good for it, but this is just a happy occasional side-effect of capitalism, and not one, as we can see with climate change, that we can rely on. Innovation, industry adoption, deployment, consumer education/awareness, and market shifts in general — these are things that take time, and time is not a luxury we have anymore.
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