Here's the painful irony: while Western climate activists invoke Hannah Arendt and debate the ethics of despair, authoritarian China is deploying more solar capacity in a single year than the entire cumulative capacity of the United States. They're not having solidarity circles about revolutionary transformation—they're manufacturing solar panels at scale that make fossil fuels economically obsolete.
Markets work because they align with human nature—self-interest, innovation, competition. Command economies fail because they fight human nature. You can't regulate or mandate your way to prosperity, and you certainly can't do it fast enough when the crisis demands massive technological deployment this decade, not after the revolution.
Why the Right Got It (Accidentally) Right
The activists blocking motorways, vandalizing paintings, and calling for mass uprisings aren't targeting the actual problem. They're performing moral outrage while fossil fuel lobbyists laugh all the way to the bank. Worse, they're alienating the very people whose support you need for real solutions. When climate action becomes synonymous with economic sacrifice, lifestyle restrictions, and revolutionary politics, you've lost before you've started.
Solidarity is wonderful. You know what's better? Gigawatts.
The market-based solution is so obvious it's almost embarrassing: make polluters pay for their pollution. Carbon tax. Carbon cap-and-trade. Internalizing the negative externality so that fossil fuels finally compete on a level playing field with renewables.
The moment you price carbon—really price it—the entire energy system rewires itself. Not because we've convinced everyone to virtue-signal about the planet. Not because we've organized a general strike. Because it becomes economically rational for companies and investors to switch to clean energy. The invisible hand doesn't require revolution; it doesn't require moral awakening. It just requires that people can't externalize their costs anymore.
This isn't magical thinking. This is how markets actually work. Pollution wasn't solved by making people feel guilty about smog in the 1970s. It was solved by regulation that made polluters pay—and suddenly the market innovated clean solutions faster than anyone predicted.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Yes, we need government involvement. Yes, we need regulation—specifically, regulation that forces polluters to pay their actual costs. But that's not socialism; that's capitalism actually working the way it's supposed to. The reason we don't have a price on carbon isn't because markets can't fix climate change. It's because the fossil fuel industry has corrupted democratic institutions to prevent the market from doing its job.
The solution isn't to overthrow the system. It's to fix the market. Make the rules so that polluters can't externalize. Suddenly, the problem solves itself through the same mechanism that has delivered unprecedented prosperity: innovation driven by profit incentive and competition.
Is this enough? Will carbon pricing alone save us? Probably not. But it will unlock capital flows and technological innovation at a scale that no revolutionary committee ever could. Tesla didn't emerge from a worker's commune; it emerged from a market where electric vehicles could suddenly be profitable.
The Real Heresy
Here's what will actually get you yelled at: the climate crisis will be solved by capitalists competing to deploy clean energy at profit, not by activists voting with their consciences.
The climate movement has mistaken itself for the solution. Climate activists haven't solved anything. Markets with proper price signals will. And that requires one thing revolutionaries will never accept: they have to let go of their ideology and admit that human nature—messy, selfish, competitive human nature—is actually the solution, not the problem.
Stop waiting for humanity to transcend capitalism. Start pricing carbon. The rest will follow.
Because in the end, markets will save the climate not because they're virtuous, but because profit margins don't care about ideology.
And maybe that's the only thing that will actually save us.