A knife-edge quest: Lord of the Rings resonates at Cop28 climate summit | Larry Elliott

BIn the 1960s, no self-respecting hippie would be seen dead without a well-thumbed copy of the Lord of the Rings. Along with a copy of Sgt Pepper and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, it personified the counterculture.

Times change. Tolkien’s most prominent fan at present is Giorgia Meloni, the most right-wing prime minister Italy has had since World War II. This set off alarm bells.

Tolkien hasn’t been cancelled, but LOTR has been accused – at various times – of being racist, nationalist, ultra-conservative, even fascist. The fact that Meloni knows the book backwards only added to the idea that Tolkien’s political views were a bit dodgy.

This is unfortunate because the central political message conveyed by The Lord of the Rings is the author’s hostility to rampant industrialization and growth at any cost. Saruman, the wizard who turns to evil, shows himself in his true colors when he cuts down the trees of Fangorn Forest to feed his furnaces. When Frodo returns to his village after his year-long search, he is saddened to find Hobbiton ransacked by a new mill, “a great brick building lying over the stream, which polluted it with steaming and fetid effluvia”.

Tolkien, by his own admission, was no socialist. He was anti-state and once said his political opinions were turning more and more towards anarchy. The hippies had it right in the 1960s: if he were alive today, Tolkien would be a green, and a deep green at that. He even anticipated the direct action of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil by proposing the dynamization of factories and power stations. LOTR is not a neo-fascist book; it is part of a literary tradition that stretches back to the Romantic movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

In his book Defending Middle-earth, Patrick Curry says Tolkien was a conservative, but not in the modern sense of the word, “almost entirely taken over by neo-liberalism, but in the sense of striving to preserve what is worth saving.” That seems like a fair judgment.

So what does this have to do with economics? Nothing to the extent that economics is almost completely absent in LOTR. The hobbits inhabit a pre-industrial country, tilling the fields and harvesting crops. The elves make beautiful objects, but otherwise don’t seem to do much. Only the dwarves in their mines seem to be doing much at all. To the extent that Tolkien had an economic model in mind, it is the Arts and Crafts movement, pioneered by William Morris. That’s fair enough. LOTR is a fantasy: it doesn’t need to explain where the wealth comes from.

All that said, the Lord of the Rings is a critique of hyper-industrialization that has greater political resonance now than when Tolkien began working on it during the 1930s. In those depression years there was an emphasis on growth at all costs. That philosophy did not change when the book was published in the mid-1950s. There were two models available, capitalism and communism, and they competed with each other to maximize production. No one cared too much about how many trees were cut down by the actual Sarumans. The cost to the environment was never a consideration for decision makers on the left or the right. The cold war was not only an arms race: it was also a battle between two growth models, which the west eventually won.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the dismantling of the Iron Curtain ushered in a period when an aggressive brand of globalized, free-market capitalism prevailed. But the victory was short-lived and before long environmentalism filled the ideological vacuum left by communism’s demise.

There are two ways of looking at the period since then. The first is to view the post-1990 world as the story of capitalism untethered, with the lust for growth and wealth taking the world to the brink of ecological catastrophe. Despite the scientific evidence and all of nature’s warning signs, greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise, making it increasingly difficult to prevent global temperatures from past the point of no return.

Seen from this perspective, humanity will be destroyed by greed and stupidity. The Orcs win.

However, there is a more upbeat way of looking at things. Over the past 30 years, the environment has become increasingly involved in policy making. Net zero targets, the commitments to phase out fossil fuels, investment in renewable energy, electric cars, official measures of economic well-being that look beyond growth: these are all signs of progress. The only intellectual developments of any real note in economics since the end of the Cold War have been green: degrowth and the circular economy, for example.

Capitalism is a highly malleable system, and it has responded to pressure from environmentalists. Whether this has changed deeply or quickly enough is unclear, but the fact that there is an annual UN conference to monitor progress towards meeting agreed decarbonisation targets. Countries must account for their actions.

Free-market liberals argue that, left to its own devices, the profit motive will eventually find a way to reduce greenhouse gases and save the planet. It seems unlikely. Without political pressure, it would be business as usual.

In reality, both the pessimistic and optimistic scenarios have merit. Progress was made, but it was not fast enough.

There is a point in the Lord of the Rings where Galadriel says that the quest to destroy the ring is on a knife’s edge, and this also applies to the quest to save the planet. It is also on a knife’s edge, as the nations represented at Police 28 in Dubai sure know.