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 “the magic of the marketplace.”

“It’s the idea that ‘the free market’ is powerful, efficient, effective, rational and that most problems can best be solved by allowing the market to do its thing,” explained Naomi Oreskes, 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—buoyed by the argument that the free market is best poised to tackle the issue.

However, “there is not such a thing as the free market,” Oreskes said. “Markets can be very effective for many kinds of things, but our argument is not all things.”

In her 2023 book, written with Eric Conway, The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market, Oreskes began with the “very notion of the free market—this idea that the market exists, it’s 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’s not a metaphor, as if there actually is an invisible hand,” she said.

“The 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—you can find rules for how markets should operate in Leviticus. But there is no such thing as ‘the free market’ and never has been. The reality is that government has always been involved in markets, in protective tariffs … in many cases, governments have created markets.”

In the headlines in the ‘80s

Oreskes began her presentation by displaying a story that appeared on the front page of The New York Times on June 24, 1988, headlined “Global warming has begun, expert tells Senate.” The expert was James E. Hansen of NASA, described in the story as a leading expert on climate change, who said “that there was no ‘magic number’ that showed when the greenhouse effect was actually starting to cause changes in climate and weather. But he added, ‘It is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.’”

Oreskes further noted that in 1992, George H.W. Bush signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which he described as “the first step in crucial long-term international efforts to address climate change.”

“So, a few years ago, I got interested in the question ‘What the heck happened?’” Oreskes said. “We had a Republican president and Democratic leaders in Congress, so why didn’t we take those concrete steps that Bush promised us?

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

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

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.

“We’ve had conservative physicists who made common cause with the fossil-fuel industry and libertarian think tanks,” Oreskes said. “Why would educated, intelligent people deny basic scientific findings—especially about things as established as the harms of tobacco use or as big as the hole in the ozone layer? The answer is politics.”

Together, politics and business have framed “free enterprise” as one of the United States’ founding principles, but it “appears 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.”

American capitalism has not protected freedom, Oreskes said, and “freedom 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’s 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.

“A 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’ve been told for more than a century by powerful people, powerful organizations and some powerful academics.”

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

Quoting the author Kim Stanely Robinson, Oreskes said, “The invisible hand never picks up the check.”

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