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Mainstream climate politics has so far put nearly all its time and energy into correcting the “market failure” of climate change, from attempting to reflect the “social” cost of emissions with a carbon price, to creating markets where none existed and forcing actors to participate. It by now goes without saying that despite some minor improvements at the local or regional level, these efforts have achieved little. This is not to say, however, that they have not been material. To the contrary, in providing the illusion that something is being done, market-based climate policies have had considerable material impact by delaying more effective action.

the belief that those in the luxury cabins would never willingly let the ship sink.

And yet, as Quinn Slobodian has identified, this “new populist right” is in many ways not new. Instead, this new right is simply a warped version of what came before, retaining rather than rejecting neoliberalism’s core tenet: protecting capitalism from democracy.

We are in strange territory. The political no-man’s land of market-based liberalism has proven infertile terrain from which to build responses to challenges from climate change to economic stagnation, and as a result, remarkably fertile terrain for the outgrowth of the new right’s politics and imaginaries.

The capitalists perpetuate capitalism through an ideology that stresses that the world will only get better with the right rich people in charge, and they only get louder about that promise when their regime is in crisis. It’s no wonder, then, that in a society where technology represents a substantial share of economic growth and political power, the capitalists that are adjacent to that particular gold rush breathlessly proselytize its utopian potential, promising it most fervently to the ones mining the gold for them.

every worker who could potentially exercise control over the means of production believes their bosses’ stewardship is leading the world to a better place. Another, of course, is a salary that prevents the need for much introspection.