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Harvard scholar Naomi Oreskes, the 2024 Patricia Sheffels Visiting Scholar in Environmental Studies, highlights how free market fundamentalism has thwarted the science of climate change

The best way to define market fundamentalism is in terms of what Ronald Reagan called 鈥渢he magic of the marketplace.鈥�

鈥淚t鈥檚 the idea that 鈥榯he free market鈥� is powerful, efficient, effective, rational and that most problems can best be solved by allowing the market to do its thing,鈥� explained , the Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University and an affiliated professor of earth and planetary science. She added that market fundamentalism also must be understood as a force that has long blocked, and continues to block, climate action.

Oreskes, the 2024 Patricia Sheffels Visiting Scholar in the Department of Environmental Studies, presented some of the findings from her research at a lecture April 4. In it, she detailed a decades-long campaign to cast doubt on science and block political action on climate change鈥攂uoyed by the argument that the free market is best poised to tackle the issue.

However, 鈥渢here is not such a thing as the free market,鈥� Oreskes said. 鈥淢arkets can be very effective for many kinds of things, but our argument is not all things.鈥�

In her 2023 book, written with Eric Conway, , Oreskes began with the 鈥渧ery notion of the free market鈥攖his idea that the market exists, it鈥檚 a thing, it exists unto itself, it has agency and even wisdom. I think of the metaphor of the invisible hand of the marketplace, which is often talked about as if it鈥檚 not a metaphor, as if there actually is an invisible hand,鈥� she said.

鈥淭he reality is that we make markets. They have been around since biblical times and are associated with the rise in capitalism, and people have been studying them for just as long鈥攜ou can find rules for how markets should operate in Leviticus. But there is no such thing as 鈥榯he free market鈥� and never has been. The reality is that government has always been involved in markets, in protective tariffs 鈥� in many cases, governments have created markets.鈥�

In the headlines in the 鈥�80s

Oreskes began her presentation by displaying a story that appeared on the front page of headlined 鈥淕lobal warming has begun, expert tells Senate.鈥� The expert was James E. Hansen of NASA, described in the story as a leading expert on climate change, who said 鈥渢hat there was no 鈥榤agic number鈥� that showed when the greenhouse effect was actually starting to cause changes in climate and weather. But he added, 鈥業t is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.鈥欌��

Oreskes further noted that in 1992, George H.W. Bush signed the , which he described as 鈥渢he first step in crucial long-term international efforts to address climate change.鈥�

鈥淪o, a few years ago, I got interested in the question 鈥榃hat the heck happened?鈥欌�� Oreskes said. 鈥淲e had a Republican president and Democratic leaders in Congress, so why didn鈥檛 we take those concrete steps that Bush promised us?

鈥淭he answer is not a lack of scientific communication. Lots of people at the time thought that scientists just weren鈥檛 doing a good enough job explaining the science, but what (Conway and I) showed 鈥� was a politically motivated campaign to cast doubt on that science and block political action.鈥�

This has been exacerbated, she said, by negative belief in government and hostility to government action, especially government regulations: 鈥淢arket fundamentalists will tell you that government needs to get out of the way and let markets do their magic.鈥�

For more than 100 years, she said, organizations like the National Association of Manufacturers have partnered with scientists and economists to stoke hostility toward government regulation, framing it as a backdoor to communism and antithetical their definition of freedom.

鈥淲e鈥檝e had conservative physicists who made common cause with the fossil-fuel industry and libertarian think tanks,鈥� Oreskes said. 鈥淲hy would educated, intelligent people deny basic scientific findings鈥攅specially about things as established as the harms of tobacco use or as big as the hole in the ozone layer? The answer is politics.鈥�

Together, politics and business have framed 鈥渇ree enterprise鈥� as one of the United States鈥� founding principles, but it 鈥渁ppears nowhere in the Declaration of Independence, nowhere in the Constitution, and if you know anything about the history of America in the 19th century, governments at the federal and state level were massively involved in developing the economy.鈥�

American capitalism has not protected freedom, Oreskes said, and 鈥渇reedom is not protected by our systems of distributing goods and services, but by our forms of government. If you think about it in terms of the political economy, there鈥檚 the political part and the economic part. The political part has to be supported by governance; freedom is supported by our laws and also by our civic norms, what we accept as legitimate and what we reject as not legitimate.

鈥淎 common American error is the belief that freedom is the absence of state authority. One part of the reason why so many Americans have made this error is because this is what we鈥檝e been told for more than a century by powerful people, powerful organizations and some powerful academics.鈥�

She said that the climate crisis can be seen as a market failure and that free-market fundamentalism has triggered 鈥渁 race to the bottom.鈥�

Quoting the author Kim Stanely Robinson, Oreskes said, 鈥淭he invisible hand never picks up the check.鈥�

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