I believe that Huber has an important insight here in this brief essay. Too often people on the left are unconscious of the ways capitalist indoctrination informs our thought processes and end up essentially supporting capitalist "solutions" to environmental crises.
...the idea of a self-regulating market is based in mythology. It has never existed. The market is never free or fair. It brings us booms and busts. It concentrates power. It only focuses on the short term. Most importantly for this essay, it does not (and I would add cannot) monetarily value the complex ecological systems that sustain life on this planet. We cannot “green” the market.Read the article to see how he argues for a public good politics of energy and against the politics of private accumulation of wealth derived from energy under the capitalist system. But then, shouldn't all important needs of our society be governed by the same principle? If your answer is "yes", then doesn't it follow that we need a new system whose basic tenets requires the public good over private advantage?
Yet sometimes our climate and energy politics implicitly assumes we can. In our neoliberal age of market idolatry, it becomes harder to realize when the logical outcome of our critiques reproduce market logics. I will lay out three common refrains in left energy politics that are themselves based on reasserting competition in a market.
