The broadside attack on capitalism is going to be the undoing of the climate advocacy movement. Neoliberalism has become the global consensus, and it’s not going anywhere. Neoliberals and outright conservatives have been in charge of the U.K., the Netherlands, Germany, Canada, Australia, the United States, etc., for decades. Even “socialist” Macron has reinvented himself as a neo-liberal. People remember the depredations of socialism and the stagnation of “democratic socialism” and don’t seem eager to repeat them. (Greta Thunberg’s home country of Sweden cut spending as a percentage of GDP by almost 20 points since 1990, slashed corporate taxes, deregulated and privatized, etc.).
Telling people we need a command economy to effectively combat climate change is a non-starter. “Major lifestyle changes” or ghastly thoughts like “reducing human population” will result in climate advocates being pilloried.
There are basically three possible outcomes:
1) We don’t change, technology doesn’t save us, and climate change turns out to be not as bad as some people feared. (A recent UNDP report estimated that a “high warming” scenario would case Bangladesh’s GDP growth rate to decrease from 6% to 4% by 2100. Bangladesh would be vastly better off taking that hit than departing from neoliberal economic policies.)
2) We don’t change, but technology reverses climate change.
3) We don’t change, technology doesn’t save us, and contrary to consensus science, runaway greenhouse effects kill us all.