Mark Carney's right - of course capitalism is the cure for climate change

It seems absurd that anyone even needs to make this point:

Challenged in an interview by the Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow over whether capitalism itself was fuelling the climate emergency, Carney gave a strident defence of the economic system predicated on private ownership and growth but said companies that ignored climate change would “go bankrupt without question”.

“Capitalism is part of the solution and part of what we need to do,” he said in the interview broadcast on Wednesday.

Taking the existence of the problem as being true, the solution is of course to change peoples’ behaviour. That means changing the incentives they face - and then watching as they scramble to make money out of those changed incentives. One obvious point being that those who don’t change their behaviour will, as The Governor says, go bust.

This isn’t a new point of course which is why it’s so absurd it has to be made. The original analyses of that warming future tell us, directly, that capitalism is the cure. The IPCC’s models are all built upon the insistence that it is. Globalised capitalism - neoliberalism that is - without fossil fuels produces a vastly richer and not warmer world. Any and every variation that is not globalised capitalism is worse in outcomes.

As absolutely every economist opining on the point has insisted - get the incentives, the price system, right and leave that lust for gilt and pelf to do the rest. You know, just like we’ve solved every other problem this past 250 years.