What we have witnessed over the last couple of decades is the inability of the vast majority of capitalist societies to deal with long-term issues (I am defining long-term as a length of time beyond the 3-4 year election cycle).
Notwithstanding the Nordic countries who have a socialist bent to their democracy, Western capitalist societies seem currently incapable of long-term planning.
The current democratic political process of 3-4 year election cycles forces political parties to focus on short-term political wins to maintain (or take back control of) power. Focusing political policy and budgets on long-term planning, with outcomes decades in the future, affords little opportunity for the incumbent government to showcase progress and tangible results. This opens them up to attacks from political opponents on waste and ineptitude. In turn making it difficult for them to win the next election cycle.
One of the primary issues that has been affected by long-term policy inaction is climate change. Climate change as an issue is not only long-term, it also requires huge sums of budget spend. For example, transforming a country’s current energy infrastructure from coal-fired power plants supported by gas (and in some instances nuclear energy) to renewables requires billions of dollars in infrastructure, from decommissioning current infrastructure, building new renewable infrastructure and repurposing the grid, powerlines etc to accommodate.
Throw in the fact that climate change is somewhat an esoteric political issue – and the remedies have a direct impact on established industries that are highly profitable and politically powerful (through lobbying and political donations) – explains the world’s ineptitude at tackling climate change with the voracity required to contain it.
We have the ingenuity, capability and capacity to turn this around, but we are lacking the structural political dynamics to allow this to happen. One hope is that renewable technologies rapidly become highly competitive in the market, subsuming dirty technologies and destroying their viability. The theory goes that if this happens before we reach the environmental tipping point we are saved.
We are asking a lot of the renewable energy market. They need to quickly become highly profitable and economically stronger than the established energy industry, in order to build the political clout to end the old-school energy industry’s stranglehold on politics. Unfortunately, this appears unlikely.
Another potential ‘out’ for current Western governments is China’s focus on renewables. Recently China has pushed hard into the EV and renewable energy space (largely solar panels and battery storage). China sees these industries as a way to transition from being the world’s factory into more lucrative, specialised markets to support their growing middle class. China has the capacity to underwrite these technologies in order to be highly competitive, forcing out the established markets – ie coal, gas and nuclear – who can’t compete on price.
Whether these ‘solutions’ come through in time to halt the warming of the planet before tipping points are reached is the big question. It appears capitalist democracy has failed us and our hopes lie on non-capitalist dynamics and the alignment of their interests with the planet’s.
Shane Stephens 