and Friends of the Earth. Now their ranks are swollen by pinstriped climate activists wielding real power: the likes of Mike Bloomberg and his climate-related disclosure task force, and former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney (now UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance and Boris Johnson’s chief climate adviser). Bending the corporate knee at the climate altar comes at a cost to business performance. Corporate affairs executives tell chief executives what they must do to position their corporation as climate friendly. Plans are commissioned to decarbonise supply chains. Promising initiatives are killed for fear of antagonising the climate clerisy. Innovation is chilled. The corporation slows down and starts behaving like a government bureaucracy. The authors of the IPCC 1.5°C special report are open about viewing climate change as presenting the opportunity for ‘intentional societal transformation’.34 They view capitalism and its unprecedented transformation of human welfare as the enemy of the planet. By arguing for draconian emissions cuts that inflict far greater costs than estimates of any corresponding climate benefits, advocates of net zero evince scant regard for the welfare of the poor and the interests of humanity. The attempt to abolish carbon dioxide emissions requires abolition of the system that gave rise to them. ‘Capitalism pays the people that strive to bring it down’, Joseph Schumpeter, the greatest economist of capitalism, observed in the 1940s.35 They won’t succeed, but for the efforts of soft anti-capitalists within the capitalist system. To climate-shame corporations without the sanction of law or regulation and bind them in stakeholder fetters, will extinguish the dynamism that justifies capitalism. The moral case for capitalism rests on its prodigious ability to raise living standards and transform the material conditions of mankind for the better. Remove its capacity to do that and we will have quietly entered a post-capitalist era. As we shall see, that is what 1.5 degrees and net zero are all about.
3.
The non-disappearing coral atolls
‘We are losing the battle’, President Macron declared at the One Planet Summit in December 2017 to mark the second anniversary of the Paris Agreement. ‘Behind me are the heads of state and governments. In 50, 60, 100 years, there are five, ten, fifteen who won’t be there anymore’.36 It was the conference’s only moment of drama. In the playbook of climate alarmism, the coral atolls of the Pacific and Indian Oceans are the human equivalent of the polar bear; on the front line of global warming and threatened with imminent extinction. Do the facts bear out the climate soundbites? Disappearing summer Arctic ice threatens polar bears with habitat loss, so the climate trope goes. Despite being put on the IUCN Red List of threatened species in 2011, summer sea ice decline has meant a healthier prey base. From a low of 10,000 or fewer in the 1960s, polar bear populations are thriving and could easily exceed 40,000.37 Contrary to the climate narrative, polar bears 10
