The climate activists have it backwards. They want to overthrow capitalism to save the planet. The fossil fuel industry wants to preserve capitalism by denying the crisis exists. Both are wrong—and their battle is destroying any chance of actually solving the problem.
Here's the heresy: Free markets can solve the climate crisis faster than any revolution. Not the rigged markets we have now, but actual free markets where polluters pay their costs.
Let me explain why this matters more than ever in 2025.
The Problem: The Biggest Heist in History
Ten years after the Paris Climate Accord promised to limit warming to 1.5°C, we've blown past that target. Global temperatures breached the limit in 2024. Floods, droughts, wildfires, and intensifying storms are no longer future predictions—they're today's headlines.
Meanwhile, fossil fuels still account for over 80% of global energy consumption. This isn't happening despite renewable energy becoming cheaper—it's happening while wind, solar, and batteries have become the lowest-cost energy options for 90% of the world's population.
The explanation is brutally simple: negative externality. Behind this wonky economic term lies the con of the century.
A negative externality is a cost imposed on society that is not paid by those who benefit from it. When fossil fuel companies burn coal, oil, and gas, they profit. When the resulting carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere and destabilizes the climate, everyone else pays—in crop failures, infrastructure damage, healthcare costs, and ecosystem collapse. The profits are private; the costs are socialized.
This isn't a market failure. It's a rigged game. Fossil fuel companies have gotten rich precisely because they've never had to pay for their pollution. They've externalized trillions of dollars in costs onto the rest of humanity and the biosphere. If that's not the definition of theft, I don't know what is.
The Left's Ideological Trap
Climate activists look at this rigged system and draw the obvious but wrong conclusion: we need to overthrow capitalism itself. Strip away the green branding, and you're left with warmed-over Marxism: revolution first, solutions later.
This is climate activism as Live Action Role Playing.
When your strategy requires overthrowing the entire political and economic system before you can start reducing emissions, you've guaranteed failure. In the time it takes to organize a general strike, market forces with proper carbon pricing could deploy terawatts of clean energy.
They've learned nothing from the 20th century. Every radical leftist revolution that promised to overthrow capitalism ended in economic disaster, environmental catastrophe, and human misery. The Soviet Union turned the Aral Sea into a toxic wasteland. Maoist China's Great Leap Forward caused mass starvation while devastating forests. Centrally planned economies are terrible at innovation and even worse at efficiency.
As biologist E.O. Wilson observed about socialism: "Great ideology, wrong species."
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.