Neoliberalism, Environmentalism, and the Crisis of the 1970s

This introduction sets the scene for the book in the events of the early 1970s: the emergence of the modern environmental movement amidst the ‘limits to growth’ debate and the energy crisis, and the concurrent political ascent of the neoliberal economics of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and the Mont Pèlerin Society. The reader is introduced to the problem of the contradictions between the ‘general equilibrium’ framework of free-market economics and the equilibrium concepts of systems ecology, and incommensurability of the laws of thermodynamics (e.g. energy physics) with the universal policy commitment to infinite fossil-fuelled economic growth. The introduction concludes by arguing that the formidable global influence of the ‘neoliberal thought collective’ into our present era can best be understood in terms of its hundred-year history of collaboration with multinational oil companies—a consistent programme to neutralise democracy and deny science and nature which has delivered us to the extreme horizons of global heating and mass-extinction we now face.