The Capitalists are Saving the Planet

Isn’t it exceedingly ironic that those most loudly proclaiming the imminent destruction of the planet are also those most suspicious of the only force that seems to be capable of doing something effective about it? I mean capitalism, of course. That the capitalist should save the climate, is to modern moral imagination, rather like learning that the village Shylock has been feeding the poor. Yet, the truth, always so indelicate, so inconsiderate of ideology, appears to be moving stubbornly in that direction.

How many decades has it been now that the intellectual classes began treating capitalism as the unwholesome contagion of our age? The very word evokes images of smoke-belching factories, predatory merchants, and men in top hats smoking fat cigars while they plot the despoiling of our rivers. Yet, these same malign actors, driven not by virtue but by profit, have produced the electric car, the solar panel, and a battery so efficient that it now powers not just phones but the dreams of environmental redemption. The irony deepens when one observes that each of these innovations emerged not from the bureaucrat’s directive or the activist’s placard, but from that most despised of motives: greed.

Greed, to be sure, has its moral limitations. It is rarely pretty, and often vulgar. But it is also reliable. It is not subject to the vagaries of fashion nor to the delusions of utopia. Unlike the idealist, the capitalist must contend with the reality of the market. The entrepreneur who lies to himself goes bankrupt, while the ideologue who lies to others may become a minister. That, perhaps, is why one improves the world and the other only legislates it into further disorder.

Take, for instance, the spectacular decline in the cost of renewable energy. No international conference,  no declaration of planetary solidarity, and no tearful speech by a Scandinavian teenager achieved what the competition for market share has done. Venture capital, not virtue, drove the green revolution. The solar panel did not become affordable because humanity saw the light. No, it became affordable because someone hoped to make money by selling it to those who thought they had.

Even the moral grandstanding of the modern age depends upon the toil of the middle class, the very people so often mocked for their bourgeois respectability. Countless, cautious savers — schoolteachers, accountants, retirees — now find their modest capital channeled into solar farms, wind parks, and clean-energy startups. For all the denunciations of “capital accumulation,” it turns out that someone must first accumulate something before it can be invested in saving the world.

For every investor willing to risk his savings, there must be an entrepreneur willing to risk his livelihood. The green project that today seems obvious was, in its infancy, almost always a folly. Some dreamer had to mortgage his future to turn that folly into a factory. He endured the ridicule of his peers, the suspicion of his creditors, and the capriciousness of government regulators, who both demanded innovation and punished it with paperwork.

This is the miracle of capitalism: not that it creates wealth, but that it persuades ordinary people to risk their comfort in pursuit of uncertain improvement. This is something the moralist rarely understands. He imagines that noble ends can be achieved by decree, by good intention, or by sheer collective will. But the world is not improved by edicts—it is improved by risk. Risk, which is known by another name: entrepreneurship.

Of course, the new class of moralists will object that these so-called solutions are themselves tainted—that lithium mining destroys landscapes, that electric cars still draw power from coal, that consumerism is itself the original sin. And they are, in a sense, correct. But their argument is not that of the reformer; it is that of the ascetic. They desire not improvement but purity, a state incompatible with human existence. They would rather the world perish than be saved by the wrong sort of people. And purity is a luxury only the prosperous can afford, and prosperity, inconveniently, is produced by the very system they condemn. And so, the moral unease persists. 

One is tempted to smile at the spectacle: the environmentalist tweeting his outrage from a smartphone powered by rare-earth metals mined and refined by capitalist enterprise, his message carried by servers built and maintained by multinational corporations. It is capitalism all the way down, even in the protest against it.

Perhaps, then, it is time for a little gratitude. The capitalist does not save the planet out of benevolence, but only because the market now rewards him for doing so. The middle-class investor does not intend to fund environmental redemption; she only seeks a modest return on her savings. And yet, through this ungainly marriage of greed and prudence, the world becomes cleaner, richer, and—ironically—more sustainable.

If the planet is saved, it will be by those who, quietly and often unintentionally, make it profitable to be decent. The capitalist, in short, is addressing the climate crisis. And he is doing so in the only way humanity ever improves itself: by wanting something for himself and discovering, to his surprise, that others benefit in the process.

Image source: The Money Changer and His Wife by Quentin Matsys.