Introduction
In October 1989, Deepak Lal delivered the annual Wincott Lecture in London.Footnote 1 Established by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) in 1970 in honor of the recently deceased Harold Wincott, a prominent Financial Times journalist who had close ties to the British neoliberals, the Wincott Lectures offered a high-profile platform to prominent neoliberal intellectuals. Previous lectures in the series had been delivered by such giants of the neoliberal tradition as Milton Friedman (1970), Friedrich Hayek (1973), Lionel Robbins (1974), and George J. Stigler (1982). For Lal, who would go on to serve as the president of the Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS) between 2008 and 2010, this lecture marked a key moment in his rise to prominence within the movement.Footnote 2
Entitled “The Limits of International Co-operation,” Lal’s lecture was a systematic critique of international economic planning, which he argued could not be justified on theoretical grounds. Though framed as an exercise in economic theory, Lal devoted more than half of the lecture to the problem of global warming. Drawing heavily on the views of prominent climate change denier Fred Singer, Lal called the findings of climate scientists into question, portrayed global warming as a natural phenomenon, and, on this basis, rejected any justification for international political cooperation. Once global warming is seen not as a political problem but as “a zero-sum distributive game,” he concluded, “all the moral authority of the cooperative solution … disappears.”Footnote 3
Lal’s 1989 lecture marked one of the first systematic statements of neoliberal climate change denialism, which did not mature into a distinct genre of late neoliberal thought until the mid-1990s, when a clutch of prominent neoliberal think tanks began to organize against the emerging global consensus on the science and politics of climate change. This article traces the intellectual history of neoliberal climate change denialism, using Lal’s critique of climate science as an aperture through which to approach some of the key arguments involved. Though the focus will be Lal’s views on climate change, the article will position them within late neoliberal thought at large. The contention is that Lal’s writings on the subject, though at points idiosyncratic, are representative of a specific mode of neoliberal climate change denial, one that was and remains influential both within neoliberal circles and beyond. The argument, to be clear, is not that the neoliberal movement has succumbed to climate denialism in its entirety. Internal disagreement persists and some neoliberals have developed alternative positions on the question of climate change. Rather, it is that a large and prominent segment of the neoliberal movement firmly embraced climate denialism and, on this basis, sought actively to thwart attempts to reduce carbon emissions. In the process, they carved out space within late neoliberalism for a distinct theoretical perspective on climate change, environmentalism, and fossil fuels that left a deep impression both on neoliberal thought and on climate denialism more broadly.
This article follows recent work in the intellectual history of neoliberalism in using that term to designate not any specific policy agenda or set of governmental techniques but a particular tradition of thought that first emerged in a recognizable form in the 1930s and that persists to this day.Footnote 4 This tradition was first articulated and subsequently refined, updated, and sustained by what scholars of neoliberalism have termed the “neoliberal thought collective,” a well-organized global network of academics, activists, think tank researchers, and elected officials. It is now well established that, since it was founded in 1947, the MPS has represented the intellectual vanguard of neoliberal theory, driving the elaboration of neoliberal ideas and amassing around itself a vast, globe-spanning network of think tanks, research institutes, publishing houses, and pressure groups.Footnote 5
On this definition, neoliberalism is the systematic body of ideas articulated by members of the neoliberal thought collective in pursuit of its intellectual and political objectives.Footnote 6 The substantive core of this body of ideas is a particular approach to the free-market order that foregrounds the political, cultural, and institutional conditions necessary to create and sustain it.Footnote 7 Importantly, however, neoliberalism extends beyond a theory of the free market. As a growing body of research has begun to document, neoliberal thinkers have also developed systematic theoretical perspectives on a wide range of other themes, including democracy,Footnote 8 the family,Footnote 9 the global order,Footnote 10 human rights,Footnote 11 and race and racism.Footnote 12 Somewhat surprisingly, however, historians of neoliberalism have had little to say on the way neoliberal thinkers have approached the question of climate change. With some notable exceptions,Footnote 13 historians of the neoliberal tradition of thought have glossed over the various ways in which it has conceptualized environmental issues. In part this is because, as Troy Vettese has noted, there exists little systematic scholarship on neoliberal environmental thought,Footnote 14 and in part it reflects a more general reluctance among intellectual historians to engage with how neoliberalism developed since it became ascendant in the 1980s, which remains much less studied than its mid-century iteration, represented by the works of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Gary S. Becker, and James M. Buchanan, among others.Footnote 15
In contrast, critical political scientists and journalists working on climate change denialism have extensively studied the connections between denialist networks and neoliberalism (even if they do not always use the latter term). In their important book Merchants of Doubt, for example, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway trace the ties between a handful of climate change deniers, including Fred Singer, and several prominent neoliberal think tanks (such as the Heritage Foundation, the Heartland Institute, the Hoover Institution, the Cato Institute, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute).Footnote 16 They show that many of those attacking climate science shared a commitment to what Conway and Oreskes call “free market fundamentalism.”Footnote 17 Others have studied the influence of neoliberal think tanks on climate change denialism. Sharon Beder, Dieter Plehwe, Naomi Klein, Riley E. Dunlap, Núria Almiron, and Jeremy Walker, to name a few, have carefully mapped the central role neoliberal think tanks have played in pushing back against decarbonization.Footnote 18 As this literature shows, from the 1990s onwards neoliberal think tanks have decisively shaped denialist discourse by publishing a large number of denialist books, papers, and reports; organizing opposition to the findings of official bodies like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Stern Review; and coordinating with other groups in the denialist network. They accomplished this with lavish financial support from fossil-fuel corporations such as ExxonMobil, Shell, and British Petroleum.Footnote 19 In short, free-market think tanks were always “in the forefront of the anti-environmental counter-movement.”Footnote 20
Although this latter scholarship has done much to map the networks established by free-market activists and think tanks, it has paid less attention to the intellectual history and conceptual structure of neoliberal denialism. And while Oreskes and Conway signal the importance of free-market enthusiasm to much denialist discourse, they do not explore how the two intersect with each other. It is necessary, therefore, to connect research on the intellectual history of neoliberalism to critical analyses of climate denialism. This article argues that climate change denialism has been a key component of late neoliberalism, constituting not only a key strategic issue on which neoliberal think tanks and intellectuals mobilized and cooperated, but also a series of theoretical claims that quickly became prominent markers of neoliberal ideology. Using Lal’s thinking on global warming as a point of entry into these claims, it explores the way he stitched recognizably neoliberal ideas and motifs into a sweeping critique of climate science. Although Lal’s writings serve as a focal point, the article relies on new archival sources, discussed in the next section, to situate his ideas within the broader landscape of neoliberal climate change denialism as it took shape from the early 1990s onward. While it does not claim to arrive at an exhaustive account of neoliberal denialism, the article seeks to identify some of the actors and ideas that were decisive in shaping it.
Neoliberal denialism: the first decade
Organized neoliberal denialism first emerged in the early 1990s as a response to growing global awareness of climate change.Footnote 21 This awareness was reflected in efforts by the United Nations to expand its climate-monitoring infrastructure, expressed in a flurry of new programs, treaties, and protocols. During this period, key developments followed each other in rapid succession. In 1988, the IPCC was founded to bring together climate scientists and advance climatological research.Footnote 22 In 1990, the panel presented its first assessment report, calling for the establishment of a global framework to address climate change. This led to the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, where the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was drawn up. In 1995, the first Conference of the Parties (COP) was held in Berlin, and later that year the IPCC published its second official report. At the third COP meeting in 1997, the Kyoto Protocol was drawn up and ratified, extending the original UNFCCC framework by establishing legally binding commitments to reduce greenhouse emissions.
Many neoliberals regarded these developments with horror. They were acutely aware that if the IPCC’s predictions were accurate, if global warming is real, anthropogenic, and a mortal threat to humanity and the planet, then this would have stark implications for their ideal vision of a global free-market order. In political terms, decarbonization would require intensive planning, regulation, and intervention, which are anathema to the neoliberal imaginary. More fundamentally, the idea that carbon emissions are destroying the planet clashed with the central tenets of their philosophy. They realized, as Naomi Klein writes, that “if the free market system really has set in motion physical and chemical processes that, if allowed to continue unchecked, threaten large parts of humanity at an existential level, then their entire crusade to morally redeem capitalism has been for naught.”Footnote 23
As its critics have noted, neoliberalism has always organized itself as an adversarial thought collective that takes its bearings from the movements and philosophies it rejects.Footnote 24 If earlier neoliberals defined their work principally in opposition to socialism, Keynesianism, and anticolonialism, among other traditions, then many late neoliberals saw the IPCC and the UN climate framework as among their mightiest adversaries. If their predecessors were swimming against the intellectual tide, however, the late neoliberals were writing during a time when their own ideology had already become hegemonic. They were, moreover, the inheritors of a formidable transnational infrastructure of think tanks, research institutes, and networks that maintained tight links with the fossil-fuel industry. This meant that their response to the founding of the IPCC and the emerging climate consensus could be swift, coordinated, and amply resourced.
In the United States, the charge was led by the Cato Institute, a prominent neoliberal think tank established in 1977 by petrol billionaire Charles Koch.Footnote 25 In 1990, Cato established an environmental-studies program, led by Robert J. Smith,Footnote 26 which in 1991 hosted a conference titled Global Environmental Crises: Science or Politics? Boasting such leading climate change deniers as Richard Lindzen, Fred Singer, and Robert Balling, as well as Cato’s in-house senior fellow in environmental studies, Patrick Michaels, the conference brought together, in Cato’s own words, the “top scientific debunkers of environmental catastrophe.”Footnote 27 In the years to follow, Cato released a steady stream of high-profile books challenging the IPCC perspective. Authors included Patrick Michaels, Ronald Bailey, Wilfred Beckerman, Thomas Gale Moore, and Robert Balling, all of whom became central figures in the neoliberal critique of climate science.Footnote 28 Its prolific output and bombastic titles quickly earned the Cato Institute a reputation as one of America’s leading voices of climate denialism.Footnote 29
In Britain, a similar role was played by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA). Established in 1955 by Antony Fisher, the IEA was the country’s first and most influential neoliberal think tank. The IEA was largely funded through membership subscriptions and donations, and, as archival sources show, in the 1990s IEA donors included several fossil-fuel companies, including Shell, British Petroleum, Esso, and Amoco.Footnote 30 Like Cato before it, the IEA responded to the shifting climatological terrain of the early 1990s by dedicating a special research program to environmental problems, called the Environment Unit. Directed by Roger Bate, who wrote a regular editorial column on the environment for the IEA’s in-house journal, Economic Affairs,Footnote 31 the Environment Unit employed a handful of research fellows, including Julian Morris, who took over as its director later in the decade. One memo from the mid-1990s shows that the Environment Unit received direct financial support from fossil-industry donors, including Amoco, British Petroleum, and Esso.Footnote 32 Another memo states that one of the unit’s aims was to critically investigate whether there was a “scientific consensus about global warming, the depletion of the ozone layer and other environmental concerns.”Footnote 33 The Environment Unit worked closely with similar branches of other neoliberal think tanks, for instance by circulating Cato Institute titles to its subscribers.Footnote 34
The IEA’s Environment Unit was formally launched in March 1994 during a conference on Markets and the Environment, which featured a paper by Robert Balling calling into question the anthropogenic nature of global warming.Footnote 35 The conference was organized to coincide with the Environment Unit’s first publication, a pamphlet coauthored by Bate and Morris. Titled Global Warming: Apocalypse or Hot Air?, the pamphlet developed a critique of the IPCC’s scientific models and argued against governmental intervention on climate issues.Footnote 36 In 1995, the unit organized a second conference on the theme of Environmental Risk, which records show was attended by a number of fossil-industry officials, including representatives for Amoco, British Petroleum, Chevron, and Shell,Footnote 37 and featured a panel on climate change at which Cato’s Patrick Michaels spoke.Footnote 38 In 1997, the Environment Unit published a collection of papers titled Climate Change: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom, edited by Julian Morris.Footnote 39 Another broadside against climate science, the book contained a preface by Deepak Lal and included contributions by Morris, Roger Bate, Thomas Gale Moore, and Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen. The following year, Boehmer-Christiansen became the editor in chief of Energy and Environment, a journal known for publishing climate change denialism that, under her editorship, carried a number of papers by prominent neoliberals.Footnote 40 Although the Environment Unit was relatively short-lived and was quietly disbanded in the year 2000,Footnote 41 the IEA did not stop releasing denialist or denialism-adjacent titles as part of its regular publications program.Footnote 42
The Cato Institute and the IEA were by no means the only neoliberal think tanks to fund, support, and publish climate denialism. Other free-market think tanks that followed suit included the Heartland Institute (USA), the Heritage Foundation (USA), the Competitive Enterprise Institute (USA), the Hoover Institution (USA), the Fraser Institute (Canada), and the Instituto Libertad y Desarrollo (Chile), many of which established dedicated environment units. In 1997, three of these think tanks, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Fraser Institute, and the Heartland Foundation, established an international network called the Cooler Heads Coalition to coordinate their campaign against emissions reductions.Footnote 43
During this period, a key player behind the scenes was the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, another initiative by Antony Fisher set up in 1981 to provide the growing neoliberal think tank ecosystem with organizational and financial assistance.Footnote 44 Atlas provided funding to all of the think tanks discussed above and, in a 1997 newsletter, boasted about having helped the Instituto Libertad y Desarrollo set up an environment unit of its own.Footnote 45 Atlas also supported individual projects and its funding is acknowledged in Ronald Bailey’s 1993 Eco-scam and Fred Singer’s 1997 Hot Talk, Cold Science.Footnote 46 Atlas developed a particularly close relationship with Singer after 1995, when it provided a grant to Singer’s Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP), a prominent denialist research group founded in 1990.Footnote 47 This grant facilitated SEPP’s relocation to Fairfax, Virginia, where it shared a building with Atlas itself, ensuring a close working relationship.Footnote 48 In 2003, Singer’s SEPP founded the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), a research group dedicated to producing counterreports opposing every subsequent IPCC report. NIPCC continues to play a significant role in the international climate denial movement.Footnote 49
By the dawn of the new millennium, neoliberal think tanks had assembled a formidable climate denialist network that was not only well organized and global in reach but also vertically integrated so that it included within itself every step in the knowledge production process. Neoliberal think tanks employed salaried researchers like Patrick Michaels and Roger Bate, funded external denialists like Fred Singer and Robert Balling, hosted workshops and conferences, published their findings through in-house presses and journals, and facilitated wide dissemination of the resulting publications. This network was poised to respond swiftly to any climate reports by the IPCC, the United Nations, or national commissions, such as the 2006 Stern review, by injecting its own critique into public debate. Though dressed up as legitimate scientific disagreement, the true purpose of the neoliberals’ interventions was agnotological: to manufacture dissent and, in so doing, to delay, obstruct, and frustrate the decarbonization agenda.Footnote 50
“We are as likely to freeze as to frizzle”
At its 2008 general meeting in Tokyo, the MPS elected Deepak Lal as its next president, a role he was to fulfil for two years. In his introductory note to the society’s next newsletter, Lal outlined what his priorities would be during his tenure. Drawing on Friedrich Hayek’s original vision for the group, he insisted that the MPS should not just focus on narrow economic questions, but also address the way collectivist logics had corrupted the domains of politics, culture, international order, and even science. Lal singled out the field of “climatology,” in which the “abuse of reason,” a term borrowed from Hayek, was especially rife.Footnote 51 Climate science, he told his comrades, was one of the new frontiers of collectivism. And if climate scientists were leading the charge against the free-market order, under his leadership the MPS would organize a counterattack.
This broadside at climate science will not have surprised his audience. By the time he was elected the MPS president, Lal had firmly established himself as a prominent critic of climate science. As MPS members will likely have been aware, Lal had long maintained close links to denialist think tanks operating all over the world. In Britain, Lal was affiliated with the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), where he sat on the advisory council for the Environment Unit; the Social Affairs Unit, an offshoot of the IEA that regularly published denialist titles; and the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), which was established by former Conservative minister and life peer Nigel Lawson and for which Lal served on the academic advisory board. In the United States, Lal was affiliated to the Cato Institute, where he was a senior fellow, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, where he spoke at a 1997 conference on The Costs of Kyoto.Footnote 52 Lal also worked closely with denialism-adjacent think tanks in India. He was on the board of advisers for the Liberty Institute, based in New Delhi, which in the year 2000 invited Lal to deliver the inaugural Julian Simon Memorial Lecture. Lal, who had been a close friend of Simon’s until the latter’s death in 1998, devoted his talk to the dangers of the green movement.Footnote 53 He was also an associate scholar of the Centre for Civil Society, likewise based in New Delhi, which published some of Lal’s critiques of climate science.Footnote 54
As his audience will likely also have known, Lal himself had long denied the anthropogenic nature of climate change. Global warming, he argued often, is caused not by industry but by such natural factors as sunspot cycles and shifts in global cloud cover. In a book published with Princeton University Press in 2006, Lal spoke of “the climate change scare” and asserted that “the scientific basis of any great global catastrophe following from the undisputed increase in greenhouse gases is highly insecure.”Footnote 55 In his view, climate scientists and the IPCC were not disinterested scholars but professional scaremongers, their work calculated to justify ever more government intervention.
Lal first expressed these views in his above-mentioned 1989 Wincott lecture, “The Limits of International Co-operation.” Lal’s primary aim in the lecture was to develop a theoretical critique of international governmental planning by way of the economic concept of externalities. An externality, according to neoclassical economic theory, is a pecuniary cost imposed on others that remains uncompensated and is not reflected in the price of a commodity or service.Footnote 56 It is on the concept of externalities, Lal argued, that any case for international governmental planning must rest. Only if it can be convincingly shown that some countries incur uncompensated costs because of the economic activities of others can any kind of international intervention, from the fixing of exchange rates to environmental regulations, be justified. Lal argued that no such case could be made.
To illustrate his argument, Lal invoked two examples, one of which was the emerging global consensus on the greenhouse effect.Footnote 57 Only if human activity can be shown to have caused rising temperatures, he reasoned, can a sound case be made for governmental intervention. “If the claims about the nature and effects of this externality are correct, it could from the viewpoint of economic liberals be the externality to end all externalities.”Footnote 58 And if climate change did stand to cause great harm, “then internalising this externality could require a world central plan imposed by a world government.”Footnote 59 The stakes, then, were exceedingly high: to Lal, the very survival of the free-market order and its supporting philosophy were at stake.
As Lal noted, the case for environmental regulation rested on climate science. He conceded that “there has been some increase in greenhouse gases over the last 100 years and that this is likely to accelerate.”Footnote 60 This did not imply, however, that human activity has caused this increase, as “the projected changes in greenhouse gases are within their past variation in the earth’s geophysical history.”Footnote 61 Also unproven was the causal link between greenhouse gases and the occurrence of global warming. Lal argued that there is compelling scientific evidence to suggest that greenhouse gases would speed up evaporation of the oceans, increasing cloud cover globally and causing the planet to cool down rather than heat up. As he declared, “we are as likely to freeze as to frizzle as a result of the greenhouse effect!”Footnote 62
Even if global warming does occur, Lal went on to argue, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Some climatological models predicted that global warming would lead to improved climatic conditions across much of India and Africa, the result of more favorable patterns of rainfall, even as North America would experience worsening climatic conditions. This meant that “instead of the global warming being disastrous for humanity, it actually turns out … to be quite beneficial for India and Africa—where some of the deserts and drylands bloom.”Footnote 63 Suddenly, global warming presents not an externality problem requiring a world government, but a distributive problem that a global free-market system is perfectly suited to solve. Thus the titular limits of international cooperation were asserted and the theoretical basis for a globe-spanning planned economy was seen off.
It is notable that Lal, a development economist, had no formal training in the field of climate science. This was not untypical for Lal, whose work frequently, in his own words, “trespasse[d] on the disciplinary terrain of others.”Footnote 64 His 1989 lecture was one such exercise in disciplinary trespass: as he admitted years later, when he began preparing the lecture, he knew very little about global warming. Himself unfamiliar with the relevant literature, he turned to Julian Simon, himself in the habit of making denialist arguments,Footnote 65 who provided him with a “reading list” and put him in touch with Fred Singer.Footnote 66 It is unsurprising, then, that Lal’s argument closely echoed Singer’s views, drawing especially heavily on a short piece published earlier in 1989 in the National Review.Footnote 67
Lal’s Wincott lecture marked a key moment in the development of neoliberal climate denialism for two reasons. First, it was delivered in 1989, shortly after the IPCC was founded and several years before the neoliberal movement began to develop an organized response to the emerging climate consensus that it represented. One of the first neoliberals to systematically criticize climate science, on the issue of climate change Lal was ahead of the neoliberal curve. Second, it established a set of theoretical bridges between more mainstream climate denialism and neoliberal thought. Though he rehearsed many familiar denialist arguments, the result of his heavy reliance on Singer’s work, Lal gave these arguments a neoliberal twist, filtering them through recognizably neoliberal ideas, concepts, and motifs. His 1989 lecture began the work of assembling a distinct subgenre of climate denialism, one that synthesized mainstream denialism with neoliberal thought and made each work in service of the other.
Elements of neoliberal climate denialism
In 2018, two years before his death, Lal published what was to be his last book. Entitled War or Peace: The Struggle for World Power, the book surveyed the geopolitical landscape and asked how relations between the United States, the European Union, India, and Russia were likely to develop in the near future. Somewhat surprisingly, along the way Lal took the opportunity to air his views on climate change. Claiming that “the science on climate change is still unsettled,” Lal criticized the IPCC for upholding an unscientific orthodoxy that falsely ascribes global warming to CO2 emissions.Footnote 68 Rising temperatures, he argued, are caused not by human industry but by “changes in solar radiation,” a naturally occurring phenomenon that humanity can do nothing to control.Footnote 69
Between his first brush with denialism in 1989 and his last word on the subject in 2018, Lal wrote routinely on the theme of climate change. While he never produced a book-length study on the topic he wrote several essays on environmentalism and climate change and frequently discussed these themes in his books, including Unintended Consequences (1998), In Praise of Empires (2004), Reviving the Invisible Hand (2006), Poverty and Progress (2013), and War or Peace (2018).Footnote 70 He also communicated his views on climate change to audiences beyond academia. In 1992, he wrote a piece for The Economist lambasting environmentalism,Footnote 71 in 2006 he featured in Mine Your Own Business,Footnote 72 an anti-environmentalist documentary about the Roșia Montană mining project in Romania, and he also routinely addressed the topic in his regular column for the Indian newspaper Business Standard.Footnote 73 Over the course of this period, Lal constructed a systematic and conceptually coherent model of climate change denialism that brought several themes together in novel ways. This section discusses four key themes and traces their impact on neoliberal climate denialism more broadly.
One key motif in Lal’s climate writings was his fierce critique of climate science. As discussed above, already in his 1989 Wincott Lecture Lal called into question the scientific basis of global-warming research, accusing climatologists of working with “dubious and uncertain models” that yield “flimsy and contradictory data.”Footnote 74 His specific target was research on carbon emissions, which unjustly claimed to have discovered a link between CO2 emissions and global warming. There existed plenty of scientific models that, working from the same data sets, projected global cooling. The science, he claimed, was inconclusive: “we could frizzle or freeze or there may be no change.”Footnote 75
Lal explored alternative climate theories across much of his subsequent work. In a 1995 paper, he forwarded an alternative explanation for global warming, arguing that neither fossil-fuel emissions nor the human-induced weakening of the ozone layer but fluctuations in solar temperatures as a result of the “sun-spot cycle” were to blame for global warming.Footnote 76 Lal returned to this argument in a 2012 essay, where he invoked a set of views that styled itself “cosmoclimatology” to venture the hypothesis that “the climate is controlled by low cloud cover”:
These low clouds, in turn, are formed when the sub-atomic particles called cosmic rays, emitted by exploding stars, combine with water vapours rising from the ocean. The constant bombardment of the planet by cosmic rays is modulated by solar wind, which when it is blowing prevents cosmic rays from reaching the Earth and thence creating the low clouds. The solar wind, in turn, is caused by the varying sunspot activity of the sun. When the sun is overactive with lots of sunspots, and the solar wind is blowing intensely, fewer cosmic rays get through to form the low clouds, and the planet experiences global warming, as it is doing in the current transition from the Little Ice Age of the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries.Footnote 77
Lal again invoked cosmoclimatology in his final book, War or Peace, writing, “The sun and stars control our climate rather than puny human CO2 emissions.”Footnote 78
Lal’s sweeping critique of climate science and his alternative theory of global warming were crucial to his broader philosophy of economic development. For him, the transition to a fossil-fuel economy during the Industrial Revolution marked the birth of modern economic growth, having “allowed mankind to create a world in which mass poverty, rather than being the unavoidable lot of mankind, could be readily alleviated through intensive growth.”Footnote 79 From this point on, development and fossil-fuel use became so fundamentally intertwined that the former was impossible without the latter. Fundamentally, economic development implies fossil industry, and if fossil capitalism alone could support the economic prosperity enjoyed in the global North since the nineteenth century, any effort to decarbonize the global capitalist order necessarily implied a return to poverty.
At the level of theory, this argument framed decarbonization as an existential threat to the capitalist order. The danger posed by “the myth of anthropogenic global warming” was less that it got the science wrong than that it rationalized a policy program that would kill off any chance for future economic development.Footnote 80 Ideas like sunspot cycles and cosmoclimatology proved so useful to Lal’s argument because they handed him a convenient means of naturalizing and depoliticizing the phenomenon of global warming. Since, on this account, human activity has little bearing on its trajectory, the climate does not fall within the remit of legitimate governmental action.
A second and related motif in Lal’s writings on climate change centres on the motives driving climate scientists. Already in his Wincott Lecture, Lal suggested that one reason behind the rise of environmentalism was “the obvious self-interested gains from what economists now call rent seeking on the part of the scientists, bureaucrats and diplomats involved.”Footnote 81 Climate scientists and their institutions had become economically reliant on the steady drip of government funding, not just their research funding but their very careers depending on a widespread belief in impending climate collapse.
The load-bearing concept supporting this argument was that of rent seeking, most prominently articulated by public-choice theory, a neoliberal tradition associated with the work of Virginia school economists James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock.Footnote 82 In neoliberal theory, the rent seeker is a public official who claims to be serving the common good but in truth is manipulating the administrative apparatus of the state in pursuit of narrow sectional interests and the incomes (termed “rents”) that are produced by government controls.Footnote 83 The rent seeker is a threat to the competitive order not only because they impose costs on other market actors that exceed their contribution, thus disrupting the purity of price signals, but also because the rents they extract depend on government intervention, which makes them naturally opposed to any market-friendly reforms that would shorten government’s reach. Much like that of its close ideological kin, the free rider and the welfare cheat, the rent seeker’s behavior is not just economically inefficient but immoral, a fiscal parasite feasting on the tax-funded public purse. It was this body of work that Lal pressed into service in his critique of climate scientists and IPCC staffers, whose “interest lies in creating scares to maximize their income and thereby the salaries, perks, and size of their bureaucracies.”Footnote 84
Although he framed it as a technical argument rooted in public-choice analysis, Lal’s portrayal of the rent-seeking climatologist had a strong conspiratorial undertone. He claimed that environmental NGOs had “colonized” the United Nations in an effort “to hijack the bureaucratic international institutions to subserve their partisan and wholly unrepresentative ends.”Footnote 85 He described the IPCC as a “political body of scientists who have created the climate-change scare,” before going on to argue that the so-called “climategate” scandal (which has been roundly debunked) definitively proved that the debate over climate change is dominated by a “self-protecting clique of climate scientists controlling peer-reviewed journals” who “were willing to ruthlessly suppress any dissenting views.”Footnote 86 The image that emerges from these descriptions is less that of the self-interested rent seeker than that of a secretive cabal jealously guarding its power and prestige.
Lal’s critique of rent-seeking climate scientists prefigured a common trope of neoliberal climate denialism. The notion that IPCC staff and climate scientists are government-funding addicts quickly became a refrain in neoliberal climate theory, as did Lal’s reliance on public-choice theory to make this claim. In a 1997 IEA publication, for example, Roger Bate followed Lal in portraying climatologists as rent seekers with a vested interest in “hyping fears of a greenhouse catastrophe, demonstrating the need for their continued vigilance.”Footnote 87 And in a 2000 book carrying the Cato Institute imprint, Patrick Michaels and Robert Balling similarly argued that for an individual climate scientist to disagree with the alarmist portrayal of global warming would be to “bite the hand that feeds them.”Footnote 88 They added that a root cause of this problem is the academic tenure system itself, which is built on a perverse incentive structure that rewards conformity and punishes dissent, especially in a field so heavily reliant on government funding as climatology.
A third recurring theme in Lal’s work is closely linked to the idea of corrupt climatologists. In Lal’s view, the rent-seeking scientists of the IPCC were not alone in their crusade against fossil capitalism. The IPCC was one part of a broader green movement that also included environmental NGOs, activist groups such as Greenpeace, formal bodies like the UNFCCC, and, even more nebulously, the wider public’s attitude towards environmental matters. Environmentalism, on this account, constitutes a distinct political and cultural phenomenon the rise of which must be subjected to analysis. Already in his Wincott Lecture Lal asked what could explain the recent “shift of fickle opinion towards greenery.”Footnote 89 And although he considered the rent-seeking behavior of climate scientists and environmental NGOs to be one causal factor, he thought more needed to be said about the historical factors behind the wider green movement.
In his various attempts to explain the green movement, Lal ventured different, not always fully consistent, hypotheses. In 1989 he reached for a sweeping psychological explanation. “The fear of ‘Apocalypse Now’ has been an enduring superstition of mankind. When there are more immediate dangers (recession, war, natural disasters) these fears are suppressed, to arise again when times are better.”Footnote 90 Lal returned to the theme of superstition in later writings. One of his most oft-repeated lines of argument was that environmentalism is structured like a religious creed. Rooted in superstitious notions and faithful to a narrow orthodoxy, the green movement is motivated by “fear and contempt of the modernity whose central features are rightly seen to be an instrumental rationality which undermines humanity’s traditional relationship with God or Nature.”Footnote 91 Environmentalism answers to the deeply rooted human desire for religious faith, a desire that, historically speaking, was thwarted by secularization. “The spiritual and moral void created by the Death of God is,” he wrote, “increasingly being filled in the secular Western world by the worship of Nature.”Footnote 92 This argument, too, rapidly became a common motif of neoliberal climate denialism.Footnote 93
At other times Lal ventured a more historically oriented explanation, citing the collapse of the Soviet Union as the proximate cause for the left’s environmentalist turn. As he wrote in 1994, “with the death of socialism, greenery is now the new faith of idealists, providing a new focus for their inherent dirigisme.”Footnote 94 The green movement rose phoenix-like from socialism’s ashes, its heir in spirit if not in name. “The demise of the socialist economies does not mean [the] socialist impulse is dead, least of all in the First World … The growing environmental movement with its slogan of ‘sustainable development’ is also part of this renewed dirigiste backlash.”Footnote 95 Whether they were aware of it or not, their naive anticapitalism made environmentalists little more than crypto-socialists, collectivists in green disguise.
This was a deft rhetorical move. By metonymically conflating environmentalism with socialism, Lal implicitly invoked what is undoubtedly neoliberalism’s best-established villain: that of the collectivist planner who was pilloried in the pages of The Road to Serfdom and in countless other neoliberal tracts. By conflating the figure of the environmentalist with of that the menacing collectivist, Lal brought the weight of the entire neoliberal tradition down onto the green movement, subjecting it to the complex epistemological, political, and philosophical critique that earlier neoliberals developed of socialist planning. If environmentalism is simply collectivism by another name, then it is doomed to fail for the same reason all collectivist projects fail: its penchant for epistemic overreach. As Roger Bate once put it, if the greens “succeed in their objectives we will hurtle down a green road to serfdom.”Footnote 96 And like Hayek’s original road-to-serfdom argument, this critique of environmentalism rested on the premise that any step in the direction of a green agenda, however slight, would trigger fatal totalitarian drift. It condemned the entire green movement, root and branch, to the realm of the crypto-totalitarianism to which neoliberal philosophy tends to reduce its adversaries. Environmentalism, on this account, poses as grave a threat to liberty as socialism once did. In Lal’s words, “It is the major future source for global disorder.”Footnote 97
A fourth key motif in Lal’s views on climate change is that of empire. From his earliest critiques onwards, he insisted that the green movement had imperialist tendencies. Pushed to its logical conclusion, Lal argued in 1989, the environmentalist agenda amounts to a form of “eco-imperialism” seeking to impose Western values and ideas onto the rest of the world.Footnote 98 This forces cultures that are not naturally inclined towards them to adhere to principles like sustainability and carbon emissions restrictions and “creates a real danger of a new variant of direct or indirect Imperialism, to discharge a green variant of the 19th century’s White Man’s burden.”Footnote 99 Aside from being morally deplorable, green imperialism was also economically harmful, threatening to trap the world’s poor in a condition of penury by foreclosing the only reliable path towards material development: fossil capitalism. Lal’s concept of eco-imperialism was quickly adopted by other neoliberals. Roger Bate, Wilfred Beckerman, and David Henderson all used it in their writings,Footnote 100 while in 2003 Atlas senior fellow Paul Driessen published a book with the title Eco-imperialism. A 2005 reprint of this book, published by the Liberty Institute in New Delhi, included a preface by Lal himself.Footnote 101
On the face of it, the charge of imperialism does not seem especially damning coming from Lal, who wrote a book titled In Praise of Empires, where he argued that empires had historically been a force for good.Footnote 102 This has long been a staple of the neoliberal tradition, which has counted many colonial researchers among its ranks and has frequently celebrated the moral, economic, and civilizational record of European imperialism.Footnote 103 Unique to Lal’s theory of empires, however, was a formal distinction between two ideal types of imperialism. Some empires, which he termed “homogenizing empires,” seek to unilaterally impose their own cultural habits onto the subject population and, in doing so, foment disorder. Others, which he called “multicultural” empires, wish only to establish peace and orderly governance with the aim of fostering commerce.Footnote 104 These empires promote free-market economies and leave indigenous cultures intact. Whilst Lal rejected homogenizing empires, considering them economically inefficient and morally suspect, he celebrated the historical record of multicultural empires. In Praise of Empires went so far as to advocate the revival of multicultural imperialism for the twenty-first century, arguing that only US-led imperial rule could secure peace and good governance in Africa and the Middle East, regions Lal considered incapable of orderly self-governance.Footnote 105 More than just an ambivalent concept, empire was the horizon of Lal’s political theory.Footnote 106
Lal’s critique of what he called “eco-imperialism” was thus not that it was an imperialist project; it was that it embodied the wrong kind of imperialism. Indeed, In Praise of Empires staged its critique of environmentalism as a clash between competing visions of empire. The green movement, Lal argued, belonged to the tradition of homogenizing imperialisms, its primary objective being to impose its own moral values upon the world’s poor, “undermin[ing] their ancient and cherished ways of life.”Footnote 107 Any rival imperial power, such as the US empire he envisioned, would have “to confront the modern secular religious movement—the Greens—in their crusade to prevent economic development.”Footnote 108
But what would an anti-environmentalist imperialism look like in concrete terms? For Lal, the first and most urgent task for such an empire would be to dismantle or defund all transnational bodies that had been infiltrated by the green movement. This would include the World Bank (Lal’s erstwhile employer) and the IMF, as well as various United Nations agencies, such as the ILO and UNESCO. These bodies “do not serve the interests of the U.S. imperium, and even less so those of the world’s poor in whose name they claim to speak.”Footnote 109 By thus dismembering the UN, the imperial project would rob the green movement of its most valuable political outposts. A second step would be to scupper any climate treaties, such as the Kyoto or Copenhagen protocols, or any international environmental conventions in their orbit.Footnote 110 Although he spoke of these interventions laconically, what Lal suggested implied nothing less than the wholesale destruction of the United Nations’ climate research and diplomacy infrastructure.
In reaching for a political theory of empire in response to the green movement, Lal tried to muster the tools of neoliberal imperialism to defend the capitalist order from its destruction by decarbonization. This rhetorical move is notable for its extremism. Neoliberal imperialism is the neoliberal critique of democracy pushed to its logical extreme.Footnote 111 This is what made it useful to Lal’s critique of environmentalism: because it enjoys wide public support both in the global North and, more importantly, in the global South, the idea of a green transition would not likely suffer defeat in any democratically representative forums. In other words, neoliberal imperialism allowed Lal to imagine a means of definitively settling the climate question by undermining any institutions advocating decarbonization or a green transition.
Concluding remarks
From the early 1990s onwards, neoliberal intellectuals like Deepak Lal articulated a distinct form of climate change denialism, one that combined elements of more mainstream denialism with long-established neoliberal ideas, concepts, and arguments. Facilitated by its sprawling and well-resourced think tank network, the neoliberal movement was able to inject this denialism into public discourse in its effort to delay or derail the green transition.
To be sure, this analysis tells only part of the story. As noted above, the neoliberal movement has not uniformly embraced climate change denialism. Neoliberalism was and remains divided over the climate question. Some neoliberal think-tankers, including Jeff Bennett and John Cochrane, as well as neoliberal-adjacent intellectuals like Bjørn Lomborg, have developed alternative views on climate change, conceding that global warming is anthropogenic, is linked to carbon emissions, and poses serious risks.Footnote 112 Others have sought to devise market-based solutions to climate issues, such as cap-and-trade or emissions markets.Footnote 113 However, while it is important to bear these internal disagreements in mind, it is equally important to remember that ideological consensus has never defined the neoliberal movement. What matters is not so much that emphatic denialists like Lal and soft sceptics like Bennett, Cochrane, and Lomborg have disagreed on the causes of climate change, but that this disagreement plays out on a stage of shared presuppositions. Decisive here is that what unites both perspectives is their shared rejection of what they perceive to be the alarmist views of the global scientific community and the dirigiste bias of bodies like the IPCC. More concerned with the looming threat of a climate Leviathan than with the prospect of climate catastrophe, even the more modest neoliberal climate theorists are fiercely opposed to coordinated decarbonization.
What is clear from the writings of Lal, however, is that neoliberal thought profoundly struggles to conceptualize the reality, severity, and implications of climate change. In the climate crisis, neoliberalism may well have met, if not its gravedigger, then certainly its analytical limit. As Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass have observed, “ecology has been neoliberalism’s Achilles heel since the beginning.”Footnote 114 This is to say that despite its self-portrayal as a philosophy of limitation, neoliberal thought has never been able to adequately conceptualize the problem of nature’s limits. And as these limits continue to assert themselves ever more unequivocally, something within neoliberalism will have to give: either it must collapse into all-out denialism or fantasy,Footnote 115 a path already partially mapped out by Lal, or it must reassess its theoretical foundations and abandon several of its most fundamental precepts. Lal intuitively recognized this when he noted that if climate change were indeed real, it would be the externality to end all externalities.
The point here is not that neoliberalism’s critics can sit back and watch it collapse under the weight of its internal contradictions. The point, rather, is that there is every risk that neoliberal reason would sooner let fire consume the world than subject its philosophical foundations to fundamental criticism. And, as Lal’s work indicates with chilling candor, in the effort to contain the fallout, the neoliberal order is liable not only to wreak havoc on democracy but to seek refuge in the politics of imperialism, de-democratization being its instinctive retort to market failure.
Acknowledgments
This article is based on a paper first presented at a workshop held in May 2023. I am grateful to workshop attendees for comments on the initial paper and to Troy Vettese, Isabel Oakes, Carla Ibled, Erik Baker, Gareth Dale, Niklas Olsen, and an anonymous reviewer for feedback on earlier drafts of the article.
Open access
