Stop denying climate change and start showing how the answer to its challenges lies in markets not the state

This from Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change is pretty frightening:

“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,”

It's unsurprising that, to use Deirdre McCloskey's term, The Clerisy want to overthrow the idea of enlightenment and the great betterment. But it presents an urgent task to those of us who would like poor Africans and Asians to have the benefits of free markets and an open bourgeois society: make a capitalist case for action on climate change. If we don't, the ideas of Ms Figueres will prevail and the baby will be chucked out with the bath water.

And the starting point, rather than denialism, is to accept the premise of climate change and then ask what we can change to allow markets to deliver a low carbon, sustainable economy. I know many of you see the climate change stuff as a fraud - and it just might be - but, right now, you've lost that argument and, worse, you're leaving the policy space to the anti-market technocrats and the idiot left who are setting an agenda of state control, suppression of choice and impoverishment for millions.

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