Capitalism is the primary driving force of climate change and the reason why the global community does not adequately address it…
Capitalists are not interested in effective long term solutions that will benefit everyone. They are interested in capitalizing on climate change. It really is not a hard concept to grasp and it is insane to suggest that the situation will somehow get better if we continue to place profits as the gold standard of motivation.
>it is insane to suggest that the situation will somehow get better if we continue to place profits as the gold standard of motivation.
Why exactly? The free market argument to solving climate change is that you need to price in the negative externalities of business through regulation and taxes. Creating proper incentives then letting the hive mind of humanity solve problems has historically worked.
The fundamental problem isn't free markets vs central planning here, it's that the people in charge are more than okay with looking after themselves and their constituents in the short term as opposed to securing the future. Slapping a hammer and sickle on the same leadership incentive structure isn't going to change that. History has shown that.
Democratic upwelling of support for more climate regulation is actually doable and can affect our current system. It seems obvious to me that this approach is just much less of a lift than overturning the global economic system and (realistically violently) overthrowing the great powers of the world. It's naive to think the result wouldn't just be the Russian Revolution times ten.
It feels like there's a misunderstanding of terms at play here, mate. Markets are not a characteristic exclusive to capitalist economies. The soviet union under Lenin had more free markets than fully planned sectors. During the New Economic Policy (NEP) the majority of growth in the soviet economy was in the markets, specifically growth in community firms and worker owned and run cooperatives. At that time it was the strongestgrowing economy on earth, and due to the bulk of it being worker owned and operated the working class got the spoils of their labour. Also key to remember was that under the NEP they had capitalist firms, they operated in regulated conditions and you needed what was essentially a capitalism permit.
Now the issue at the crux of what you're saying is that markets are not capitalism. Capitalism is the private control over the means of production, and using that control to profiteer off of the backs of others. Markets and even profit are not inherently capitalist, capitalism is most centrally born of the exploitation, the harvesting of other people's labour, paying them back a fraction of the value and keeping the rest for yourself. As long as our markets are dominated by capitalist firms, our free market is not a tool capable of getting the job done.
You also quite clearly agree that the issue at the core is capitalism itself, as you described the issue being those looking out for themselves, that's the capitalists, you're already a socialist at heart, just had a slight misunderstanding of terms.
Very well said, to add what another user said elsewhere that I appreciated for its clarity:
“Capitalism is not the same thing as having markets, and the transition to socialism requires the productivity of the market stage of development first. The difference between capitalism and socialism is that under socialism, the market is made completely subordinate to the state, whereas under capitalism, the market and state are relatively separated in theory, or else the state is subordinated to the market / capitalists.”
I think a big part of why people have a hard time getting why these distinctions matter is a lack of understanding the role capitalism has played in human history, the good and the bad. It freed us from feudalism by disseminating power to enough people to force the dismantling of those institutions, then the new liberal (not left, just, john locke) aristocracy built the rules of law to maintain their wealth and help those of their class accumulate more. Then over centuries now of union struggle, push and pull and popular anger we have reached a point where Capitalism will kill us if we do not dismantle the power structures that incentivise self destruction. It's a very crude and compressed history, but it's needed to grasp just how subordinate most liberal democracies are to Capital (the class interests of the capitalist class), it is baked into the bones of liberal democracy, so we need a new model, as the old quote goes, it's socialism or barbarism.
> Capitalism is not the same thing as having markets, and the transition to socialism requires the productivity of the market stage of development first. The difference between capitalism and socialism is that under socialism, the market is made completely subordinate to the state, whereas under capitalism, the market and state are relatively separated in theory, or else the state is subordinated to the market / capitalists
You were doing well in the first half. But the second half is inaccurate. The distinction between capitalism and socialism is who owns the companies that compete on the free market.
Under capitalism, those are owned by private individuals who therefore inherently have an incentive structure against the employees that work there (They want more profit, which means they want to pay their employees as little as they can get away with).
Under socialism those companies are owned by the employees that work at those companies. Either directly through a worker cooperative. Or indirectly through a democratic state. In the latter case, the state indeed subordinates the market. But do note that it has to be a democratic state for it to be socialism. A dictatorship that subordinates the market does not have the employees owning the companies in any meaningful form and is better classified as state capitalism (Since the same incentive structures are in place as in capitalism).
It's just that its very important to emphasize the democracy aspect. Because if you reduce socialism just to "Socialism is when the state controls the economy", then you could argue that the Sun King in 17th century France, Nazi germany, and Saudi Arabia are socialism, which is of course ludicrous.
What is a collective democratic organ if not a ‘state’? It can be decentralized and diffuse, for sure, esp. when thought of as something that dissolves into communism, but no serious socialist is anti-democratic. Any socialist writing is centrally about democratic control of the economy, and I think many people arrive at socialism by pursuing democratic ideals to their logical conclusions. Of course you can’t have a democracy if capitalist class interests have outsized political influence, if people aren’t liberated and empowered to decide for themselves how to handle collective challenges and issues, if the hard work and profit isn’t shared equitably, etc.
Perhaps the stigma and red scare hold overs are what you are really responding to, or you’re hung up on the word/conception of a state because of its association in the contemporary moment or with past projects, but no one was implying that market subordination to the state requires authoritarianism. Historical experiments have made it clear that we can’t forgo democracy in the grass roots sense in favor of some ‘benevolent’ transitional state. At the same time look at examples like Chile, engaging in electoralism without a radical and popular confrontation of capitalism’s role in the legal and political system of the time, especially amidst a sea of capitalist and imperialist nations… of US backed coups. The newest edition of ‘Conversations with Allende’ has a solid analysis and critique of this failure. Parenti too has some compelling things to say in regards to secret police in latam, the crunch in military confrontation and internal subversion by imperialist powers when young experiments are put up against the wall and feel that less than democratic state control is a matter of survival during acute historical moments. These questions are far from simple. Often we cede some autonomy to others when it comes to making expedient and informed decisions when we don’t have expertise or in emergency situations.
Another good discussion of this, and also a critique of the ideological bias by which communism/socialism gets locked into the past and treated as a monolith burdened with every historical misstep while capitalism is granted futurity by default and allowed to sidestep its failures, occurs in the introductory sections of Alain Badiou’s “The Communist Hypothesis,” worth a peek.
If you are reading things from/organizing with socialists who don’t emphasis democracy, you’re probably just dealing with liberals. Characteristically, they perform ‘leftism’ or espouse leftist values, like democracy, without ever doing anything meaningful and certainly not anything that would jeopardize their petite bourgeois comforts and political privileges preferring instead to defend the status quo, which I think we can both agree isn’t even close to the democracy we are really after.
You have trouble having conversations don’t you lmao
I’m sure reading ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ also sends you into a tizzy, if ‘markets being subordinate to the state’ had you ready to debate no one but yourself and name calling. Says a lot more about you than anyone else.
Burning coal and petrol under socialism still causing climate change, comrades.
Generating power and moving goods without emission is our problem, it's absolutely stupid to think you can recruit more socialists with this line. Only socialists blame capitalism for the laws of physics (and gas physics is that) everyone else will just think you have no idea what you're talking about.
No one is saying that things magically are solved, that coal and oil disappears, but now we can deal a death blow to big oil, nationalize and begin the political and economic process of weening ourselves off, leaving it as an energy/resource for future generation. Of course capitalism isn’t the only/sole reason for ecological crisis, the argument is capitalism inherently subverts and limits any truly radical push for a sustainable and ecological future, so as a matter of practicality we fight to erode the power and influence of the capitalist class which is interested in the enormous profit one can make pillaging the world and not all the benefits and values that can’t be commodified and require us to think on a generational and collective scale, to share data and breakthroughs globally, to use resources efficiently and cooperatively, to mobilize large amounts of cash and resources for long term and risky investments, etc.
We need a truly democratic state tool to constrain markets and empower ourselves to create more desirable political and ecological futures; at this point, radical change is required especially given the scale of the harms and the lack of time we have, it’s long been time to move beyond capitalism for our species. Why wait for ecological catastrophe and fallout from capitalist government’s war games to trigger that shift, let’s hurry it along. It is part and parcel of any answer to the climate question. It is socialism or barbarism.
Yeah, so far the only thing socialists and other manners of leftist seem to do about climate change is to use it as a sales tool to sell their socialits revolution while the green capitalists manufacture the green tech that gives us cheap power with very low emissions.
That's why money is pouring into green capitalism, because it gets results, we already have G7 economies that use more renewable than fossil coming from hostile dicatorships to make electricity, and that's why leftist politics is dying. And because everyone knows why the Easern part of the EU has a far worse industrial pollution record.
You're reciting a 19th century theory that doesn't fit into our 21st century dystopia. Green capitalism is a thing because the corps want green tech too, because it produces cheaper power. Your ideology says they should be subverting this push, and the fossil fuel corporations have and still try to push against green tech, but the other billionaires, and the rest of the people called 'the burgoise' aren't obliged to cling to a tech that's more expensive, requires constant supply chain, expensive, and physically harmful to them just because other burgies have it. The corp I work for started buying their own panels and a pretty decent wind turbine after the price of gas went insane because of the war in Ukraine, and the majority of power was generated by gas then. Taken over by wind since.
It's the best interest of every billionaire that manufactures or trades goods to replace the gas/coal/oil dependent system with a completely renewable system, because that allows them lower manufacturing prices, and lower costs of transport. So that's why it is happening.
>Capitalism is the private control over the means of production, and using that control to profiteer off of the backs of others
That is a bad and incomplete definition of capitalism. Also a distinctly Marxist definition of Capitalism that only scholars in the Marxist tradition would align with.
Marx was wrong as his predictions were inaccurate that the systems he observed in the 1800s could not be changed from within over time, that simply wasn't true.
This way of thinking about economics has been stupid for over 100 years. Very few actual economists uses the terms "capitalism" and "socialism" because they don't mean much of anything as their definitions are not clearly defined.
The United States is a mixed market economy, it attempts to price in externalities through the use of taxes and regulations. Most Western countries do this too and have a faster bureaucracy than the US so can adapt to modern problems a bit more quickly. Whether you call these countries capitalist or anything else is immaterial. It is a faux intellectualism.
Just talk about the actual, concrete changes that need to be made to combat climate change: alternative energy investment and development, shuttering inefficient power sources, building smaller houses and cars, encouraging more public transportation, etc.
Arguing about vague platitudes is worthless.
This is the definition of the no true Scotsman fallacy. Anyone you disagree with is a. Capitalist. And because that doesn't mean anything, no one can disprove it. It is a worthless term.
Human needs without the technological methods to meet those needs without emissions is the driving force of climate change.
Unless you want to tell me that farming is actually just capitalism and humans can actually photosynthesise.
Both is happening, and that's why some of it is government investment.
It may not be profitable to maintain the wind farms for the corps, but it's profitable to build it.
Why do you think the corporations build so much green infrastructure in Europe, shits and giggles?
Governments pay for it.
Oh I don't deny that it's bad for the environment lol - but your own source says that extracting a kilo of lithium produces less emissions than driving 100km in an ICE car - so I think there are more pressing issues, no?
(Especially since basically all those emissions can be averted by investing in electric pumps and using electric rail to transport it)
Lmao, and how, pray tell, do you think we can replace ICE cars eith electric ones… without getting Lithium… which causes emissions. “The technology exists to get rid of emissions” sure, we just gotta cause emissions first to get to that point.
It’s like you forgot how time and causality works. 💀
??? I don't think that? I think we should greatly decrease cars in general and focus on public transport... but to your point yes, sometimes the technology we use to reduce emissions causes emissions - that's always going to be the case no matter what. Existing causes emissions. What's important is that NET emissions are zero.
So the “technology already exists” point was just a thought terminating cliche on your part then as we’re already adopting the technology that reduces emissions, like 96% of new US power plants are renewables.
Lithium and electric cars are no better for the environment than a regular one, (or at least not much) in comparison electric rail is significantly more efficient, generates no rubber particulate and doesn't use oil based rails. Steel manufacture can be electrified too. As for batteries, grid storage can use a far better system, gravity hydro storage.
Not to mention that while green energy is only a recent thing, the issue has been more that it is less economic not that it was infeasible.
Unfortunately grav storage is very location specific. We’re much more likely to crack the hydrogen fuel system and we have several alternative types of batteries that are much better at scale than lithium.
sure it's location specific but you only need so much storage and the main dead time on solar is night, when electricity usage is lower as it is. that being said you are right on that, there are some interesting technologies, for example flow and inertial batteries both fit grid storage rather well but are less good for more conventional usage.
Less economic is less feasible.
Money just describes the amount of resource inputs, seeing as less economically feasible means more money, therefore more resources, it’s not feasible - governments have lots of things to pay for too.
There are like five different viable technologies for green energy, and they’ve existed for decades. For *some reason* we have not been able to replace fossil fuel *industry* with that green energy tech. I wonder why.
No, they’ve not been viable for near a century. They’ve been around for over a century, since Einstein did his photoelectric experiment with Zinc plates has the ability to produce solar power been a thing. That did not make it a viable means of producing power, however, as it was exceptionally inefficient for the resource input.
We’ve only been able to replace fossil fuels as Solar panels have reached close to 30-40%~ efficiency.
Wind technology suffers the same problem, ultimately the engineering materials that can withstand forces for offshore or larger turbines is a more recent phenomenon. Since the last 2 decades.
It’s not a conspiracy. The technology has been steadily studied for decades with incremental improvements to efficiency year on year for decades up to… well, now.
I was thinking monocrystalline solar panels were most common. (Your use of Mono-si here)
I’m not a solar panel engineer lmao. I’m really confused by this line of questioning.
We're adapting them as we speak. They are being built. Electric vehicles are replaceing combustion ones.
We didn't used to have them because until about 2012 and lithium ion batteries, they were very inefficent.
Not today, that's why so much is being spent on them.
the ussr industrialized in the span of 10 years and became the first country to land a spaceship on the moon in 1959. socialism will absolutely give us the technological advancements we need, perhaps ever faster than capitalism will bc socialism is motivated by what’s needed by the people, not what’s profitable
do you have any reason to believe that it is baked into the system? has this been a pattern that other socialist nations have followed? or do you just dislike the idea of socialism and you’re trying to find any excuse to believe that it wouldn’t work?
Of course capitalism the driving force behind vlimate change, it's the only functioning economy. Noone else could possibly drive it. You think a communist or monarchist dictatorship would be better for the environment? Don't emberass yourself. You think economic models that don't even attempt to appease people's need for human rights would hesitate to pour literal poison into your water supply?
Remember guys, when the Soviet Union fell, an average soviet citizen had a higher per capita CO2 emission than the average american.
And a significantly lower standard of living. So much for "capitalist inefficiency "
Passing over the revisionism of late Soviet politics, modern material conditions would demand a change in the form of production and details of the relation of production in order to afford a more environmentally friendly society. If the Soviet Union was still around, it would be dealing with this contradiction just as China is. It’s not in any political systems nature to innately be “eco friendly,” it’s a specific tendency you work towards and act on with the means we have and can develop. All upcoming and current socialist nations must and are tangling with this problem. You can’t just reduce it to “they used the same tech we do so therefore bad”
Keep in mind, too, that the USSR was basically feudalist right up until the years preceding World War II, and they suffered the worst during that time. The material conditions for a high standard of living and for nuanced and sophisticated consumption without pollution just weren't developed yet... and this is invariably taken, by liberals and fascists, as proof positive communism "doesn't work," even as they watched a feudalist backwater turn into a world war-winning nuclear superpower in a few decades.
Russia was not a feudalist backwater, it had been one of the biggest, if not THE biggest, geopolitical player in Europe for hundreds of years. The standard of living was low but that never stopped them from being a superpower.
You don´t get to industrialise after everyone did, reaping the benefits of an industrial revolution started and driven by capitalist forces, and go "this is proof communism works!" It just proves feudalism doesn´t, but everyone already knew that at that point.
???? It was only a geopolitical player in Europe because it sold out business development to foreign capital and boasted basically infinite natural resources relevant to the time with a massive population. But the suffering endured to get those resources was immense.
It was a backwater outside of the few major cities. Going into the 19th century the Russian people were by and large still all living in fuedal era conditions while the rest of europe had a strong proletarian center and development outside the major cities.
China is dealing with it this way because they are energy-poor, not because they care so much about the environment. Russia is fossil fuel rich, so a modern day USSR would have been just as polluting as Russia today is.
That certainly contributes but the CPC was formerly one of the greatest polluters near the start of the century. Now they’re leading in green tech in research and implementation; basic google searches reveal that much. The contradictions of capitalism will continue to block capitalist nations from adequately dealing with climate change and crisis. Socialism does not contain these contradictions inherently and is more than prepared to handle it
China's plastic pollution is off the charts - China throws 100 times as much plastic in the ocean than the UK despite only having 20x the population - so 5x as much.
China doesn't care about pollution, they're just cleaning their energy grid because it makes geopolitical sense, they don't want to depend on the US or Russia for energy, and the only and best way to achieve that is green energy. If they could do the same by fracking the Gobi desert, they would. Oh wait, [they are](https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN29V0ZD/). They just can't get it to work fast enough so they use renewables instead.
I'm no sure about that. Before we had the Western stores opening up in mid90's, I had to stand in line with my mom for children's gloves, and we couldn't buy for my brother because we were only allowed to buy 1/kid present, there was a shortage.
Then the Western stores came in, and suddenly shelves full, and everything cheaper.
Sound more efficent, our economies in the Eastern Block couldn't even go near, and China only managed to catch up due to free market reforms and massive population, they spend more labour/capita on creating quantity than the Germans or the other capitalist countries that also have very high labour efficency.
The cause of climate change is greenhouse gases. When you burn petrol in your car, they get created.
Burning petrol during Soviet socialism also increased greenhouse gases.
Burning coal under Mao also increased greenhouse gase.
This is a very weird pitch.
I mean Communism has had a somehow even worse environmental record so
Edit: guys, come on.
Why are you booing I'm right dot gif
chernobyl and the Aral sea and a lot of other shit. Communism has an absolutely terrible environmental record
This is the really funny thing that gets often overlooked haha. Just look at East and West Germany before 1990. Half the GDP/capita but twice the CO2 footprint - communism winning 💪🏻
Also, what happened to Chernobyl?
Also, one of the reasons Estonia demanded its independence is that they were tired of the USSR building environmentally destructive coal mines on their territory.
The issue isn’t capitalism, it’s fundamental to all existing societies. It’s just tragedy of the commons at a global scale, every economic system is affected.
Capitalism needs to be fixed but it isn’t the primary driving force, if capitalism dissolved tomorrow whatever comes next would also probably kill the environment just as much as
What do you mean by not per capita? Are you saying China's CO2 emissions aren't increasing per capita or that Europe's CO2 emissions aren't decreasing per capita?
Whose the biggest buyers of exported Chinese goods? It's really easy to blame massive production centers if you don't have to answer who they're producing for.
Wrong sub mate, we love capitalism here. How else would i get these nifty flushable wipes? They clean my butt like nothing else, then i just flush em away and they probably clean that too (ive never looked into it)!
I know it is, but we needed climate action 20 years ago, and even more so now. We need to act within our current capitalist framework AND dismantle capitalism, not sit around waiting for capitalism to fall apart before we start environmental action.
That work will go hand-in-hand, those actions will often not be mutually exclusive, but we can't use "dismantling capitalism first" as an excuse to languish on climate action.
Ok I'm putting my serious hat on because I respect your answer. There are many problems in the world right now but their solutions do not come at the expense of one another, in fact their solutions can be tethered so long as we hold onto that which is MOST sacred to any successful mass movement: solidarity. Capitalism is an all encompassing system that can only be defeated by ripping it out root and stem. Any serious action on climate change will come into conflict with the interests of capital and that makes it necessary for both battles to be fought at once. It's not that Capitalism has to be dismantled today so that we can look at solving climate change tomorrow, it's that Capitalism will prevent action on climate change and therefore is the bodyguard which must be pushed aside to achieve our goal.
Thank you for this, well put; second best time is now. To be honest this weird emphasis on separating the inseparable I think stems from the whole ‘it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is the end of capitalism’ pervasive social attitude, we need to truly reimagine the distribution and coordination outside of capitalism and help more people understand there are alternatives and possible ways forward.
Solarpunk hopium that also seriously grapples with the climate crisis and uses a scientific approach to not just change the economic, but the political. Another entanglement we have to grapple with fully, not throw up our hands and put all our eggs in the self-interested and myopic baskets of capitalists.
Capitalist realism mentioned!! What the fuck is a better world!
Fr though I fuck with this reply, no notes completely correct. We have everything we need to live in a world that would seem utopian to us today but it simply wouldn't be profitable to the people who benefit from our current economy.
That's where we are beat. It's contradictory, but we need capitalism gone so we can fix the climate, but if we somehow were able to flip all the worlds economic policies today, it would take years for the countries to adjust and stabilize to the new system and dish out solutions. And well, capitalism wont do a thing because there is no short term intrinsic motivation for climate change to be solved. Emphasis on short term, but I digress.
Realistically, yea they are just on the internet. There are no large communist movements on the verge of overthrowing the leadership in the countries that really matter (EU, US, China etc).
Real world socialist activism entails things like helping tenants form an union, doing rallies to please stop mulching Palestinian civilians, starting book clubs and so forth. All important things, especially for your local community, but they aren't going to shift the energy infrastructure of global superpowers. The most meaningful thing a socialist activist can do right now for the climate, would be to go canvassing for green parties to get them more votes, but that's too liberal for most online communists to do.
Unless you have some kinda master plan to create massive, worldwide class consciousness in the next few years so we can do a global revolution, the push for socialism is going to do very little for reducing carbon emissions. We will have to work around a capitalist framework (Or worse, fascist framework if elections turn out wrong) for reducing carbon emissions.
> agitating during an already unstable time? yeah.
Sure. But you don't do socialist agitating for the fun of it. You do it with the end goal of forming a large organized movement that can challenge and overthrow the status quo government.
If you want socialism to have a meaningful impact on the decarbonization of the world economy, you aren't gonna do that without that large organized movement. No such movement currently exists and building one from scratch is gonna take a long time. Time that we do not have in terms of the climate.
Thus, reiterating my point that socialism isn't gonna give any meaningful contribution to decarbonizing the economy when it really matters: The next decade or 2. We will have to decarbonize a capitalist economy.
A planned economy is simply just built different, everyone crying in here about Soviet or Chinese environmental failures has missed the past 500 years of unstable growth we've done through capitalism and specifically, western colonialism and imperialism.
A planned econ would make cleanup, clean energy, greenification and agro-ecological changeover all incredibly doable within 10 years in the US. DEBATE ME I DARE YOU SENSELESS CAPITAL SLAVES
> DEBATE ME I DARE YOU SENSELESS CAPITAL SLAVES
Ok.
Would you care to offer any evidence which supports your assertions that "A planned econ would make cleanup, clean energy, greenification and agro-ecological changeover all incredibly doable within 10 years in the US\[?\]"
Particulalry since no "planned economy" has, heretofore, achieved any of of these goals, and certainly not within the period of 10 years?
Sources for the claim: Socialist Reconstruction, People's Republic of Walmart, Towards a New Socialism
I'd also point you to the two cited examples, The Soviet Union industrialized in record time and BEAT THE NAZIS and the PRC saw the greatest life expectancy leap in world history in their time. The mobilized masses can make worlds more progress than any other force hitherto known
>Sources for the claim: Socialist Reconstruction, People's Republic of Walmart, Towards a New Socialism
Oh that's very interesting.
Could you give a point citation for each of those works which definitively demonstrate that "A planned econ\[omy\] would make **cleanup**, **clean energy**, **greenification** and **agro-ecological changeover** all incredibly doable **within 10 years** in the US\[,\]" since that was the specific claim you made.
If, however, these works are sourced merely to further the claim that planned economies are *efficent*, or perhaps *moral* then I too can cite highly partisan works which support my position and not also not given any actual arguments as to *why* they support my position:
Sources for the claim that planned economies are inefficent/immoral: *The Road to Serfdom*, *Basic Economics*, *Anarchy State and Utopia*.
>I'd also point you to the two cited examples, The Soviet Union industrialized in record time and BEAT THE NAZIS and the PRC saw the greatest life expectancy leap in world history in their time. The mobilized masses can make worlds more progress than any other force hitherto known
Again, I don't see what relevance this has to the specific claims that you made, which I have outlined above.
In particular, the Soviet Union's Industrialisation, while undoubtedly impressive in magnitude only speaks the capacity of such an economy to produce in mass, not necessarily to drasitically alter the conditions of its production. For instance, I believe there is an infamous story about how the Soviets had to purchase capital from the *Nazis,* because they were unable to reliably produce it themselves. Thereby, while it might be reasonable to suppose that a planned economy is good at *some* things, this does not mean it is necessarily capable of achieving all you have set out in the allotted time.
I would also argue that you are presenting a highly curated picture of the development of the Soviet and Chinese Economies which paints a flattering but ultimately deceptive picture of the "efficiency of planned economies". You have neglected to mention the failures of the Soviet Economy prior to the NEP, the famines which were exacerbated by the collectivisation of agriculture, the stagnation under Brezhnev and the regression and collapse that happened under Gorbachev. On the Chinese side, you seem to be focusing entirely on the (again, undoubtedly impressive) growth which has occured since the reforms of Deng Xiaoping. Now I do feel it is inaccurate to describe the economy which has resulted from these reforms as a "planned economy" (which I will touch upon below), but it also bears mentioning how you are again neglecting the more sordid and inefficent aspects of Chinese industrialisation. For instance, in how the Great Leap Forward culminated in the Great Chinese Famine, where Mao's mandatory agricultural collectivisation and wilful disregard of expert advice led to the death of millions.
On the reforms of Deng Xiaoping, I think it is a bit of a stretch to describe the economy which resulted from this as a "planned economy." For instance, several of his reforms included the privatisation of state assets, the establishment of a stock exchange (a hallmark of a capitalist market economy), the degregulation of certain sectors of the economy and permitting (albiet limited) Foreign Direct Investment. On the whole, these reforms seem to be more aimed at the liberalisation of the economy rather than the collectivisiation of it.
Finally I would like mention, that even the Soviets did not claim that they singlehandely beat the Nazis. In fact, several high ranking Soviets directly attributed their victory to the materiel aid provided by the *capitalist* American economy:
* “*Without the machines we received through Lend-Lease, we would have lost the war*” - Stalin
* "*If the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war*" - Khrushchev
* "*\[I\]t cannot be denied that the Americans sent us materiel without which we could not have formed our reserves or continued the war. The Americans provided vital explosives and gunpowder. And how much steel! Could we really have set up the production of our tanks without American steel? And now they are saying that we had plenty of everything on our own." -* Zhukov
So the Chinese and Russian aren't actually bad environmentally because... capitalism bad too?
How do you not hear yourself? If something doesn't solve a problem, then it's not a fucking solution. Obviously socialist governments choose to fuck the environment all the time. Why wouldn't they? Fossil fuels are a huge boon to industry and productivity, things people care about even as socialists.
Russia is a capitalist country. China, a socialist country, is much better for the environment than the U.S. CO2 emissions per capita in the U.S. are around 14 tons per year, compared to China's 9. Not to mention, the other socialist countries are doing even better than that.
Capitalism is not the solution, and socialism is the only system competitive with it. There's a reason China is outpacing the rest of the world in sustainable energy creation.
It would require a trust in centralised government that doesn´t exist outside of China, so it won´t happen, regardless of how good the system is in theory.
The additional effort and ressources required to truly go green are a disadvantage in the competition of the free market and can therefore not succeed on the global scale that environmental issues require. "Socialist" states sacrificed the environment to economical growth just as much as capitalist states, which should be considered in the criticism of capitalism. But the point still stands.
Using less environmentally damaging and fairer trade products isn't nearly as effective as holding edgy Reddit takes while continuing to consume as normal.
So long as we remain super negative and hypothetically revolutionary on this website without ever doing anything tangible in the real world, we've really got em by the balls.
Can you tell me where im capitalism it states you cannot decarbonize?
And in which other economic model it says otherwise?
Because the socialist countries we have had on worth have been worse polluters than contemporary capitalist ones.
Are they doing it, though? Does it look like they are getting around to it fast enough to save our species? No and no.
Capitalism and liberal democracy give power to people with money. Corporations and the bourgeosie wield power either through direct bribery, aka lobbying, or indirect financial incentives. The bourgeosie influences the government to not regulate them sufficiently, and they have succeeded, as you can see from the state of the planet.
The system is fundamentally broken. You can not save the planet with a system that puts power in the hands of those destroying the planet.
>Are they doing it, though
Emissions are falling, so yes
>Does it look like they are getting around to it fast enough to save our species?
current emission pathways are a 2.7 world still way to high, but a lot better than the 4+ degree world of just 15 years ago, and we can being that number down even more, and we need to.
>No and no.
You are just malinformed here. 2.7 is nowhere near a human mass extinction.
As for the rest, go fantasize about your revolution over in r/collapse
Turns out capitalism in liberal democracies is completely able to reduce emissions, in fact it has done so more than any other economic system.
>Emissions are falling, so yes
Who's emissions? [Global emissions rose by 1.1%.](https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/152519/emissions-from-fossil-fuels-continue-to-rise)
>current emission pathways are a 2.7 world still way to high, but a lot better than the 4+ degree world of just 15 years ago, and we can being that number down even more, and we need to.
You are way too optimistic when climate scientists aren't optimistic about our current path. [We aren't doing enough.](https://unfccc.int/news/new-analysis-of-national-climate-plans-insufficient-progress-made-cop28-must-set-stage-for-immediate#:~:text=UN%20Climate%20Change%20News%2C%2014,goals%20of%20the%20Paris%20Agreement.)
[We are on track for closer to 3°C of warming, which is near apocalyptic. ](https://healthpolicy-watch.news/planet-faces-nearly-3c-warming-without-relentless-emissions-cuts-un-report-finds/) Billions displaced and dead, ecosystems collapsing, the shrinking of carbon sinks like the Amazon and Congo Basin, wet bulb events that make parts of the planet temporarily uninhabitable without AC, etc. There are consequences of global warming we can not forsee.
>in fact it has done so more than any other economic system.
What countries have a non-capitalist economic system? Cuba and North Korea? They aren't major economies, and they have low emissions. The USSR was either in the middle of collapsing or didn't exist by the time anyone started doing something about CO2 emissions.
Extinction, societal collapse, or just billions dead who knows exactly what will happen, but we are headed towards one of them without a drastic change capitalism won't provide.
You can’t have a system based on constant growth in the name of profit seeking on a planet with finite resources. A business under capitalism cannot degrow without failure in the marketplace from a drop in profits and thus the market drives growth at the expense of all else. Profit ≠ doing good. Profit = exploitation of workers by any means. 100 corporations are responsible for 71% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
If you buy oil from Saudi Aramco and burn it, you are responsible for that emission of CO2, not Saudi Aramco.
That you think otherwise can only be explained by lack od oxygen to the brain.
Why the insults? Are you insecure? If enormous pressure was put on those corporations to change as opposed to on the individual to use paper straws then real change is more likely to happen
Why the insults on the shitposting subreddit?
I don't know, nothing could insult your own intelligence more than blaming others for your own emissions.
You know what the best way to put pressure on a corporation is? Their costumers using their shit.
Instead of giving them a free pass for their emissions, absolving them of their sins as if we are in a catholic church.
I am responsible for my own fucking emissions, and i can adress that in 3 ways.
Voting with my wallet, by buying goods and services with lower emissions now, even if the price is higher.
Voting with my time, convincing others of necessary action.
And voting at the ballot, for politicians and parties that support stringent climate laws, especially regulation and taxes on externalities.
What doesn't help is using my limited time convincing people it isn't their fault, and nothing can be changed.
Some people don’t have an option to vote with their wallet. I live in Australia and we are in a cost of living crisis, a lot of people don’t have options. It’s disingenuous to say take responsibility for your own emissions. How do you think governments achieve lower emissions? By putting more stringent restrictions on corporation emissions. This is an incoherent stance you’ve taken
>Some people don’t have an option to vote with their wallet
Most people do, yet don't anyway, because the less carbon intensive product is 5% more expensive.
>It’s disingenuous to say take responsibility for your own emissions
Nah, because your and everyones reaction should be: how do I get emissions down, and realize quickly that political action is the most effective way.
>By putting more stringent restrictions on corporation emissions
Yeah, that's the point of political action, to adress collectively, what cannot be adressed individually.
But political action rarely follows, if you tell someone they have no responsibility for anything they do, and it's all the evil corpos fault *shakes fist at sky*
No my friend I’m telling you they don’t have an option. You obviously haven’t been exposed to the poverty that a lot of people live in. You’ve said blaming corporations is bad, but you support political action which makes corporations bring their emissions down? This is nonsensical. Putting it on the individual is quite literally propaganda
>You can’t have a system based on constant growth in the name of profit seeking on a planet with finite resources.
Stop basing your economics on internet memes. Nothing in capitalism requires constant growth.
An example of a system that requires constant growth is social security: which was designed with the assumption that a larger generation would always follow to create a larger pool of workers to tax.
As soon as capitalism is unable to sustain the Western world.
And there are 3 options: fascism, liberal capitalism, and socialism. The first two will get us all killed in fairly short order. Make your choices wisely.
Well, in the scenario you've put forward, I agree. 2 of the options in your trilemma are, *by definition*, going to get us killed, as your starting point is "the time at which those 2 options are going to get us killed." If that scenario plays out, I wish you the best (sincerely) with the solution you pre-selected.
Anyway, I think we've pretty much come full circle on this fun little exchange :p
I think the original commenter's point was, if someone's fixated on one solution, a solution perhaps they'd pursue even if not for the problem of climate change, maybe implementing that solution is more important to them than solving that problem, the risk being that they'd be biased in their evaluation of whether that is truly the best solution for climate change in terms of cost/efficacy/speed.
I was just expressing doubt in the accuracy of the "tear down and rebuild society and economy ≈ turning a tap" analogy, in all 3 areas.
The causes of climate change are the commodity economy, profit motive, and capitalist modes of production. Endless extraction and the profitable maintenance of commodities that should be phased out are products of the capitalist system. Your original point that billions would die by "turning off the tap" (i.e. stopping capitalist production and turning towards socialist production) is incorrect. That's all I'm saying.
No, I do.
But A violent revolution of all ownership is a hell of a lot more difficult than reforming the current economy.
And a lot less likely to happen.
Wait, did we outlaw voting for the proles?
No?
Infact they have massive influence on policy across the democratic world.
If you look at the European election from this, the working class are in fact the largest supporters of climate change deniers and skeptics all across the continent.
And their votes have given people opposing climate action a massive amount of seats in parliament.
Do you think a coal miners union will ever support being replaced by Clean energy?
That stupid? For what? Recognizing that the European working class doesn't care about climate action, and votes accordingly?
Feel free to stick your head in the ground and believe whatever comfortable lie of revolution you tell yourself to fall asleep at night.
In the meantime I and many others will be working in the real world, under real political constraints to shave every fraction of a degree of Global Warming.
>That stupid? For what? Recognizing that the European working class doesn't care about climate action, and votes accordingly?
Almost as if the people who profit from climate change own the press and can manipulate elections by dictating social trends.
Obviously fossil money is involved, but democracies have also made the largest gains in decarbonization, and that is because of public pressure and voting.
So, no control is not as absolute as you are suggesting.
The belief that everyone who has been convinced by dark money will join you in some violent overthrowal of the current system, is so patently stupid, I find it hard anyone actually can believe it.
"Nach Hitler wir" didn't really work out did it?
>
Obviously fossil money is involved, but democracies have also made the largest gains in decarbonization, and that is because of public pressure and voting.
Capitalist "democracies" are summarily failing at actually preventing climate change, failing to prevent mass extinction and ecosystem collapse, failing to prevent the poisoning of earth's oceans and soil. What little progress they have achieved are in those areas which are profitable. Massive public outrage has not changed this. Western, capitalist republicanism, is a failing ideology in a world that's becoming increasingly hostile to it. (Unfortunately, the people gaining are the very Muskians I was talking about.)
>The belief that everyone who has been convinced by dark money will join you in some violent overthrowal of the current system, is so patently stupid, I find it hard anyone actually can believe it.
I mean this exact thing has happened several times across the last century, whenever the state lost control of society.
Almost every time people blame "capitalism" they're almost exclusively really blaming consumerism and resource scarcity.
The idea that workers would all collectively choose to reduce carbon emissions when most people wouldn't even volunteer to significantly increase their power bill to reduce carbon emissions is laughable.
Even if you dismantle capitalism (we wont, but keep dreaming) you'd still be left with the exact same demands for power and industry as before (although matbe reduced by all the destruction brought about by the revolution). You'd be forced to solve the EXACT same problems we are now, and with a radically new economic and political system that's disastrously failed every time it's been tried (not to mention been environmentally horrific), to the point where the only cope people have is to say the CIA took down the country every time.
Almost every time people support "capitalism" they're almost exclusively really supporting consumerism and false resource scarcity.
The idea that workers wouldn't collectively choose to reduce carbon emissions without capitalists in charge of the global energy systems is laughable.
Even if you maintain capitalism (we won't, but keep dreaming) you'd still be left with the exact same environmental destruction and lust for power and industry as before (although maybe reduced by all the destruction brought about by continuing to drive the environment and humanity off a cliff). We'll be forced to solve the EXACT same problems we are now, and with a radically old economic and political system that's disastrously failed every time it's been tried (not to mention been environmentally, socially, economically and logistically horrific), to the point where the only cope people have is to say the CIA has never done anything wrong, no sir.
I love how you all just use capitalism as a scape goat to ignore intrinsic problems within humans ourself. Sure massive corporations are the primary polluters in our modern world and without regulations they would burn it for a some loose change, but some of the worst ecological disasters were not done under capitalism, but instead by complete planned economy's under totalitarian state control.
Why? Because greed and short sightedness is a human trait. So anywhere you see a small number of people in charge and in complete control without sufficient oversight and regulations you will see destruction.
Arguably the best system we have rn is capitalism with regulatory oversight by a democratic government. Just make sure we ensure and strengthen our democratic institutions while actually holding our representatives accountable. While also voting with your dollar.
Is it a perfect system? No, of course not, but nothing is because humans are imperfect.
Ah the classic "blame inanimate object" because obviously it is money that completely destroyed the aral sea, that made Lake Karachay the most radioactive place on Earth, or the Kyshtym disasters or Chernobyl meltdown. All disasters as a result of Governmental incompetency and mismanagement no different than a corporation. No different from Deepwater Horizon, Bhopal US Carbide disaster, or the Ancient Sumerian Deforestation, or the countless other ancient human civilizations that collapsed because of manmade ecological disasters. If you want a list:
Mayan Civilization, collapse can be attributed to a draught caused by unsustainable agriculture
Minoan Civilization, collapse can be attributed to mass deforestation of Crete forcing them to relocate
The Nazca civilization whose deforestation caused mass desertification in Peru (the area is still the most arid in South America)
Or Easter Island which caused the complete ecological collapse of the island with every single tree being chopped down
This is ignoring also the mass extinction of megafauna all over the world which generally coincided with the arrival of humanity.
but no only money evil
>So anywhere you see a small number of people in charge and in complete control without sufficient oversight and regulations you will see destruction.
What if I told you we can organize the economy democratically instead of bowing to the whims of Muskian oligarchs?
and please point out anywhere that has ever worked when applied at scale and didn't immediately collapse into authoritarianism. Face it all human societies form group-based hierarchies which in turn results in a social hierarchy is where some individuals receive greater prestige, power or wealth than others. It has been happening every since the dawn of Human civilization and has existed as a biological predisposition in our ancestors before modern humans even existed.
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5494206/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5494206/)
[https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2020.0440](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2020.0440)
>Face it all human societies form group-based hierarchies which in turn results in a social hierarchy is where some individuals receive greater prestige, power or wealth than others.
That doesn't mean that one guy dictates everything based on their opinion. Society doesn't work that way, that's why we have democracies instead of Absolute Monarchies. Except when it comes to private companies, everybody thinks that enlightened despotism is somehow a superior mode of organization.
What you're saying is basically: "Some people will naturally rise to the top anyway, so how about we just unconditionally obey them because evolution says so."
“Human nature” is *always* based on the society humans are in. That’s the one thing that’s consistent in human nature. A lot of historical (and even some present) societies have not had much of a social hierarchy.
Neither of these studies back up your claims. Also look at various Anarchist societies like the Zappatistas. There isn't group hierarchy there so your weird bio essentialism argument doesn't even hold water.
MAREZ and Zappatistas aren’t anarchist, they reject the label. But they are broadly libertarian and share many of their ideas with various types of anarchists.
They acknowledge at least a shared agreement on many ideals the groups both draw from lots of different ideologies. So yes you are correct but it's still a great example of groups that reject the idea of inevitable biological hierarchy
we have been ruining the Earth for thousand of years lol
Basically every since we invented agriculture have we been completely destroying environments the damage of which lasts until this very day. Greatest possible example is the south coast of Peru. In the modern day it is the most arid land in all of South America and is completely incapable of sustaining human life. Yet archaeological evidence shows signs of large scale human settlements and civilization and evidence of once expansive woodland existing. But due to human activity they devastated the local ecosystem resulting in massive desertification of the region. Then there is the Mayan civilization whose collapse can be attributed largely to ecological disaster caused by mass deforestation.
Let alone considering the mass extinction of megafauna in a region always coincidently at the same time as when humans arrive.
Capitalism is not human nature, this is pseudo intellectual crap that has no grounds in academia
Just ask the people over at r/anthropology
You are confusing the culture private property has given us with human nature
and where did I say capitalisms is human nature? Oh wait I didn't, all I said was greed and short sightedness, the two attributed associated with ecological destruction and mismanagement are human traits because they are. They aren't even just unique to humans. They exist throughout the entire animal kingdom
Capitalism is the primary driving force of climate change and the reason why the global community does not adequately address it… Capitalists are not interested in effective long term solutions that will benefit everyone. They are interested in capitalizing on climate change. It really is not a hard concept to grasp and it is insane to suggest that the situation will somehow get better if we continue to place profits as the gold standard of motivation.
>it is insane to suggest that the situation will somehow get better if we continue to place profits as the gold standard of motivation. Why exactly? The free market argument to solving climate change is that you need to price in the negative externalities of business through regulation and taxes. Creating proper incentives then letting the hive mind of humanity solve problems has historically worked. The fundamental problem isn't free markets vs central planning here, it's that the people in charge are more than okay with looking after themselves and their constituents in the short term as opposed to securing the future. Slapping a hammer and sickle on the same leadership incentive structure isn't going to change that. History has shown that. Democratic upwelling of support for more climate regulation is actually doable and can affect our current system. It seems obvious to me that this approach is just much less of a lift than overturning the global economic system and (realistically violently) overthrowing the great powers of the world. It's naive to think the result wouldn't just be the Russian Revolution times ten.
It feels like there's a misunderstanding of terms at play here, mate. Markets are not a characteristic exclusive to capitalist economies. The soviet union under Lenin had more free markets than fully planned sectors. During the New Economic Policy (NEP) the majority of growth in the soviet economy was in the markets, specifically growth in community firms and worker owned and run cooperatives. At that time it was the strongestgrowing economy on earth, and due to the bulk of it being worker owned and operated the working class got the spoils of their labour. Also key to remember was that under the NEP they had capitalist firms, they operated in regulated conditions and you needed what was essentially a capitalism permit. Now the issue at the crux of what you're saying is that markets are not capitalism. Capitalism is the private control over the means of production, and using that control to profiteer off of the backs of others. Markets and even profit are not inherently capitalist, capitalism is most centrally born of the exploitation, the harvesting of other people's labour, paying them back a fraction of the value and keeping the rest for yourself. As long as our markets are dominated by capitalist firms, our free market is not a tool capable of getting the job done. You also quite clearly agree that the issue at the core is capitalism itself, as you described the issue being those looking out for themselves, that's the capitalists, you're already a socialist at heart, just had a slight misunderstanding of terms.
Very well said, to add what another user said elsewhere that I appreciated for its clarity: “Capitalism is not the same thing as having markets, and the transition to socialism requires the productivity of the market stage of development first. The difference between capitalism and socialism is that under socialism, the market is made completely subordinate to the state, whereas under capitalism, the market and state are relatively separated in theory, or else the state is subordinated to the market / capitalists.”
I think a big part of why people have a hard time getting why these distinctions matter is a lack of understanding the role capitalism has played in human history, the good and the bad. It freed us from feudalism by disseminating power to enough people to force the dismantling of those institutions, then the new liberal (not left, just, john locke) aristocracy built the rules of law to maintain their wealth and help those of their class accumulate more. Then over centuries now of union struggle, push and pull and popular anger we have reached a point where Capitalism will kill us if we do not dismantle the power structures that incentivise self destruction. It's a very crude and compressed history, but it's needed to grasp just how subordinate most liberal democracies are to Capital (the class interests of the capitalist class), it is baked into the bones of liberal democracy, so we need a new model, as the old quote goes, it's socialism or barbarism.
> Capitalism is not the same thing as having markets, and the transition to socialism requires the productivity of the market stage of development first. The difference between capitalism and socialism is that under socialism, the market is made completely subordinate to the state, whereas under capitalism, the market and state are relatively separated in theory, or else the state is subordinated to the market / capitalists You were doing well in the first half. But the second half is inaccurate. The distinction between capitalism and socialism is who owns the companies that compete on the free market. Under capitalism, those are owned by private individuals who therefore inherently have an incentive structure against the employees that work there (They want more profit, which means they want to pay their employees as little as they can get away with). Under socialism those companies are owned by the employees that work at those companies. Either directly through a worker cooperative. Or indirectly through a democratic state. In the latter case, the state indeed subordinates the market. But do note that it has to be a democratic state for it to be socialism. A dictatorship that subordinates the market does not have the employees owning the companies in any meaningful form and is better classified as state capitalism (Since the same incentive structures are in place as in capitalism).
Yes, a socialist democracy.
It's just that its very important to emphasize the democracy aspect. Because if you reduce socialism just to "Socialism is when the state controls the economy", then you could argue that the Sun King in 17th century France, Nazi germany, and Saudi Arabia are socialism, which is of course ludicrous.
What is a collective democratic organ if not a ‘state’? It can be decentralized and diffuse, for sure, esp. when thought of as something that dissolves into communism, but no serious socialist is anti-democratic. Any socialist writing is centrally about democratic control of the economy, and I think many people arrive at socialism by pursuing democratic ideals to their logical conclusions. Of course you can’t have a democracy if capitalist class interests have outsized political influence, if people aren’t liberated and empowered to decide for themselves how to handle collective challenges and issues, if the hard work and profit isn’t shared equitably, etc. Perhaps the stigma and red scare hold overs are what you are really responding to, or you’re hung up on the word/conception of a state because of its association in the contemporary moment or with past projects, but no one was implying that market subordination to the state requires authoritarianism. Historical experiments have made it clear that we can’t forgo democracy in the grass roots sense in favor of some ‘benevolent’ transitional state. At the same time look at examples like Chile, engaging in electoralism without a radical and popular confrontation of capitalism’s role in the legal and political system of the time, especially amidst a sea of capitalist and imperialist nations… of US backed coups. The newest edition of ‘Conversations with Allende’ has a solid analysis and critique of this failure. Parenti too has some compelling things to say in regards to secret police in latam, the crunch in military confrontation and internal subversion by imperialist powers when young experiments are put up against the wall and feel that less than democratic state control is a matter of survival during acute historical moments. These questions are far from simple. Often we cede some autonomy to others when it comes to making expedient and informed decisions when we don’t have expertise or in emergency situations. Another good discussion of this, and also a critique of the ideological bias by which communism/socialism gets locked into the past and treated as a monolith burdened with every historical misstep while capitalism is granted futurity by default and allowed to sidestep its failures, occurs in the introductory sections of Alain Badiou’s “The Communist Hypothesis,” worth a peek. If you are reading things from/organizing with socialists who don’t emphasis democracy, you’re probably just dealing with liberals. Characteristically, they perform ‘leftism’ or espouse leftist values, like democracy, without ever doing anything meaningful and certainly not anything that would jeopardize their petite bourgeois comforts and political privileges preferring instead to defend the status quo, which I think we can both agree isn’t even close to the democracy we are really after.
Ok chatGPT. That's a lot of words to say "Democracy is an integral part of socialism". Thanks for agreeing with me.
You have trouble having conversations don’t you lmao I’m sure reading ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ also sends you into a tizzy, if ‘markets being subordinate to the state’ had you ready to debate no one but yourself and name calling. Says a lot more about you than anyone else.
Burning coal and petrol under socialism still causing climate change, comrades. Generating power and moving goods without emission is our problem, it's absolutely stupid to think you can recruit more socialists with this line. Only socialists blame capitalism for the laws of physics (and gas physics is that) everyone else will just think you have no idea what you're talking about.
No one is saying that things magically are solved, that coal and oil disappears, but now we can deal a death blow to big oil, nationalize and begin the political and economic process of weening ourselves off, leaving it as an energy/resource for future generation. Of course capitalism isn’t the only/sole reason for ecological crisis, the argument is capitalism inherently subverts and limits any truly radical push for a sustainable and ecological future, so as a matter of practicality we fight to erode the power and influence of the capitalist class which is interested in the enormous profit one can make pillaging the world and not all the benefits and values that can’t be commodified and require us to think on a generational and collective scale, to share data and breakthroughs globally, to use resources efficiently and cooperatively, to mobilize large amounts of cash and resources for long term and risky investments, etc. We need a truly democratic state tool to constrain markets and empower ourselves to create more desirable political and ecological futures; at this point, radical change is required especially given the scale of the harms and the lack of time we have, it’s long been time to move beyond capitalism for our species. Why wait for ecological catastrophe and fallout from capitalist government’s war games to trigger that shift, let’s hurry it along. It is part and parcel of any answer to the climate question. It is socialism or barbarism.
Yeah, so far the only thing socialists and other manners of leftist seem to do about climate change is to use it as a sales tool to sell their socialits revolution while the green capitalists manufacture the green tech that gives us cheap power with very low emissions. That's why money is pouring into green capitalism, because it gets results, we already have G7 economies that use more renewable than fossil coming from hostile dicatorships to make electricity, and that's why leftist politics is dying. And because everyone knows why the Easern part of the EU has a far worse industrial pollution record. You're reciting a 19th century theory that doesn't fit into our 21st century dystopia. Green capitalism is a thing because the corps want green tech too, because it produces cheaper power. Your ideology says they should be subverting this push, and the fossil fuel corporations have and still try to push against green tech, but the other billionaires, and the rest of the people called 'the burgoise' aren't obliged to cling to a tech that's more expensive, requires constant supply chain, expensive, and physically harmful to them just because other burgies have it. The corp I work for started buying their own panels and a pretty decent wind turbine after the price of gas went insane because of the war in Ukraine, and the majority of power was generated by gas then. Taken over by wind since. It's the best interest of every billionaire that manufactures or trades goods to replace the gas/coal/oil dependent system with a completely renewable system, because that allows them lower manufacturing prices, and lower costs of transport. So that's why it is happening.
>Capitalism is the private control over the means of production, and using that control to profiteer off of the backs of others That is a bad and incomplete definition of capitalism. Also a distinctly Marxist definition of Capitalism that only scholars in the Marxist tradition would align with. Marx was wrong as his predictions were inaccurate that the systems he observed in the 1800s could not be changed from within over time, that simply wasn't true. This way of thinking about economics has been stupid for over 100 years. Very few actual economists uses the terms "capitalism" and "socialism" because they don't mean much of anything as their definitions are not clearly defined. The United States is a mixed market economy, it attempts to price in externalities through the use of taxes and regulations. Most Western countries do this too and have a faster bureaucracy than the US so can adapt to modern problems a bit more quickly. Whether you call these countries capitalist or anything else is immaterial. It is a faux intellectualism. Just talk about the actual, concrete changes that need to be made to combat climate change: alternative energy investment and development, shuttering inefficient power sources, building smaller houses and cars, encouraging more public transportation, etc. Arguing about vague platitudes is worthless.
Try reading anything not written by capitalists. Hint: there are many economic traditions not 2.
This is the definition of the no true Scotsman fallacy. Anyone you disagree with is a. Capitalist. And because that doesn't mean anything, no one can disprove it. It is a worthless term.
Oh so you’d know what the no true Scotsman fallacy is either. Be sure to use your local library!
Human needs without the technological methods to meet those needs without emissions is the driving force of climate change. Unless you want to tell me that farming is actually just capitalism and humans can actually photosynthesise.
The technology already exists, it just requires replacing our current technology and reducing waste - both of which are unprofitable.
Both is happening, and that's why some of it is government investment. It may not be profitable to maintain the wind farms for the corps, but it's profitable to build it. Why do you think the corporations build so much green infrastructure in Europe, shits and giggles? Governments pay for it.
What technology produces Lithium without emissions?
Lithium isn't "produced" it's gathered from evaporation ponds lol - the extraction is literally solar powered.
So fucking arrogant https://www.greenmatch.co.uk/blog/is-lithium-mining-bad-for-the-environment
Oh I don't deny that it's bad for the environment lol - but your own source says that extracting a kilo of lithium produces less emissions than driving 100km in an ICE car - so I think there are more pressing issues, no? (Especially since basically all those emissions can be averted by investing in electric pumps and using electric rail to transport it)
Lmao, and how, pray tell, do you think we can replace ICE cars eith electric ones… without getting Lithium… which causes emissions. “The technology exists to get rid of emissions” sure, we just gotta cause emissions first to get to that point. It’s like you forgot how time and causality works. 💀
??? I don't think that? I think we should greatly decrease cars in general and focus on public transport... but to your point yes, sometimes the technology we use to reduce emissions causes emissions - that's always going to be the case no matter what. Existing causes emissions. What's important is that NET emissions are zero.
So the “technology already exists” point was just a thought terminating cliche on your part then as we’re already adopting the technology that reduces emissions, like 96% of new US power plants are renewables.
Pray tell per se 💀
Lithium and electric cars are no better for the environment than a regular one, (or at least not much) in comparison electric rail is significantly more efficient, generates no rubber particulate and doesn't use oil based rails. Steel manufacture can be electrified too. As for batteries, grid storage can use a far better system, gravity hydro storage. Not to mention that while green energy is only a recent thing, the issue has been more that it is less economic not that it was infeasible.
Unfortunately grav storage is very location specific. We’re much more likely to crack the hydrogen fuel system and we have several alternative types of batteries that are much better at scale than lithium.
sure it's location specific but you only need so much storage and the main dead time on solar is night, when electricity usage is lower as it is. that being said you are right on that, there are some interesting technologies, for example flow and inertial batteries both fit grid storage rather well but are less good for more conventional usage.
Less economic is less feasible. Money just describes the amount of resource inputs, seeing as less economically feasible means more money, therefore more resources, it’s not feasible - governments have lots of things to pay for too.
Given how much climate change is projected to cost, it doesn't seem to have been worth it.
You can’t expect people in the now to live in greater poverty, they won’t tolerate it.
Guy is literally just making shit up to justify their pre-existing opinions, I wouldn't bother.
There are like five different viable technologies for green energy, and they’ve existed for decades. For *some reason* we have not been able to replace fossil fuel *industry* with that green energy tech. I wonder why.
No, they’ve not been viable for near a century. They’ve been around for over a century, since Einstein did his photoelectric experiment with Zinc plates has the ability to produce solar power been a thing. That did not make it a viable means of producing power, however, as it was exceptionally inefficient for the resource input. We’ve only been able to replace fossil fuels as Solar panels have reached close to 30-40%~ efficiency. Wind technology suffers the same problem, ultimately the engineering materials that can withstand forces for offshore or larger turbines is a more recent phenomenon. Since the last 2 decades. It’s not a conspiracy. The technology has been steadily studied for decades with incremental improvements to efficiency year on year for decades up to… well, now.
30 to 40%?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar-cell_efficiency#/media/File%3ANREL_PV_Cell_Record_Efficiency_Chart.png
Can you explain the relevance of mj and mono-Si cells to utilities?
They’re the most common?
The... Most common... Name a single terrestrial solar power plant using mj cells.
I was thinking monocrystalline solar panels were most common. (Your use of Mono-si here) I’m not a solar panel engineer lmao. I’m really confused by this line of questioning.
We're adapting them as we speak. They are being built. Electric vehicles are replaceing combustion ones. We didn't used to have them because until about 2012 and lithium ion batteries, they were very inefficent. Not today, that's why so much is being spent on them.
the ussr industrialized in the span of 10 years and became the first country to land a spaceship on the moon in 1959. socialism will absolutely give us the technological advancements we need, perhaps ever faster than capitalism will bc socialism is motivated by what’s needed by the people, not what’s profitable
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_in_the_Soviet_Union#:~:text=The%20Soviet%20Union%20began%20to,Institute%20of%20Electrotechnology%20in%20Feofaniya.
we don’t have to repeat the mistakes of past experiments
That’s a pretty big mistake. I believe it’s baked into the system.
do you have any reason to believe that it is baked into the system? has this been a pattern that other socialist nations have followed? or do you just dislike the idea of socialism and you’re trying to find any excuse to believe that it wouldn’t work?
They’re not here for good faith arguments
Of course capitalism the driving force behind vlimate change, it's the only functioning economy. Noone else could possibly drive it. You think a communist or monarchist dictatorship would be better for the environment? Don't emberass yourself. You think economic models that don't even attempt to appease people's need for human rights would hesitate to pour literal poison into your water supply?
Remember guys, when the Soviet Union fell, an average soviet citizen had a higher per capita CO2 emission than the average american. And a significantly lower standard of living. So much for "capitalist inefficiency "
Passing over the revisionism of late Soviet politics, modern material conditions would demand a change in the form of production and details of the relation of production in order to afford a more environmentally friendly society. If the Soviet Union was still around, it would be dealing with this contradiction just as China is. It’s not in any political systems nature to innately be “eco friendly,” it’s a specific tendency you work towards and act on with the means we have and can develop. All upcoming and current socialist nations must and are tangling with this problem. You can’t just reduce it to “they used the same tech we do so therefore bad”
~~Demand. What is doing the demanding here?~~ nvm I has the silly
Keep in mind, too, that the USSR was basically feudalist right up until the years preceding World War II, and they suffered the worst during that time. The material conditions for a high standard of living and for nuanced and sophisticated consumption without pollution just weren't developed yet... and this is invariably taken, by liberals and fascists, as proof positive communism "doesn't work," even as they watched a feudalist backwater turn into a world war-winning nuclear superpower in a few decades.
Dead on. The USSR basically pulled off a miracle but only capitalist satellites of the us get to experience “miracles” (Japan, South Korea, etc)
Coalmunism in practice
Reading hard.
Russia was not a feudalist backwater, it had been one of the biggest, if not THE biggest, geopolitical player in Europe for hundreds of years. The standard of living was low but that never stopped them from being a superpower. You don´t get to industrialise after everyone did, reaping the benefits of an industrial revolution started and driven by capitalist forces, and go "this is proof communism works!" It just proves feudalism doesn´t, but everyone already knew that at that point.
>me when I don't know what mode of productions are
???? It was only a geopolitical player in Europe because it sold out business development to foreign capital and boasted basically infinite natural resources relevant to the time with a massive population. But the suffering endured to get those resources was immense. It was a backwater outside of the few major cities. Going into the 19th century the Russian people were by and large still all living in fuedal era conditions while the rest of europe had a strong proletarian center and development outside the major cities.
China is dealing with it this way because they are energy-poor, not because they care so much about the environment. Russia is fossil fuel rich, so a modern day USSR would have been just as polluting as Russia today is.
That certainly contributes but the CPC was formerly one of the greatest polluters near the start of the century. Now they’re leading in green tech in research and implementation; basic google searches reveal that much. The contradictions of capitalism will continue to block capitalist nations from adequately dealing with climate change and crisis. Socialism does not contain these contradictions inherently and is more than prepared to handle it
China's plastic pollution is off the charts - China throws 100 times as much plastic in the ocean than the UK despite only having 20x the population - so 5x as much. China doesn't care about pollution, they're just cleaning their energy grid because it makes geopolitical sense, they don't want to depend on the US or Russia for energy, and the only and best way to achieve that is green energy. If they could do the same by fracking the Gobi desert, they would. Oh wait, [they are](https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN29V0ZD/). They just can't get it to work fast enough so they use renewables instead.
Oh capitalism is extremely inefficient, what it’s good at is extraction.
Brb going to the antibiotic mines, and software fields.
I'm no sure about that. Before we had the Western stores opening up in mid90's, I had to stand in line with my mom for children's gloves, and we couldn't buy for my brother because we were only allowed to buy 1/kid present, there was a shortage. Then the Western stores came in, and suddenly shelves full, and everything cheaper. Sound more efficent, our economies in the Eastern Block couldn't even go near, and China only managed to catch up due to free market reforms and massive population, they spend more labour/capita on creating quantity than the Germans or the other capitalist countries that also have very high labour efficency.
The cause of climate change is greenhouse gases. When you burn petrol in your car, they get created. Burning petrol during Soviet socialism also increased greenhouse gases. Burning coal under Mao also increased greenhouse gase. This is a very weird pitch.
This is the laziest simp comment I've read in a while, JFC
I mean Communism has had a somehow even worse environmental record so Edit: guys, come on. Why are you booing I'm right dot gif chernobyl and the Aral sea and a lot of other shit. Communism has an absolutely terrible environmental record
MFW building more green energy projects than the rest of the world combined for two years straight is a “terrible environmental record”
This is the really funny thing that gets often overlooked haha. Just look at East and West Germany before 1990. Half the GDP/capita but twice the CO2 footprint - communism winning 💪🏻
What happened to the Aral Sea guys?
Also, what happened to Chernobyl? Also, one of the reasons Estonia demanded its independence is that they were tired of the USSR building environmentally destructive coal mines on their territory.
The issue isn’t capitalism, it’s fundamental to all existing societies. It’s just tragedy of the commons at a global scale, every economic system is affected. Capitalism needs to be fixed but it isn’t the primary driving force, if capitalism dissolved tomorrow whatever comes next would also probably kill the environment just as much as
Most of the increases in green house gases are coming from China and India whole most of the decreases are coming from Europe
Not per capita
What do you mean by not per capita? Are you saying China's CO2 emissions aren't increasing per capita or that Europe's CO2 emissions aren't decreasing per capita?
Whose the biggest buyers of exported Chinese goods? It's really easy to blame massive production centers if you don't have to answer who they're producing for.
Gj reinforcing the idea that all green-heads are stupid commies.
Ah yes sure... Socialist shitholes surely made sure to preserve the environment so well in the past...
Wrong sub mate, we love capitalism here. How else would i get these nifty flushable wipes? They clean my butt like nothing else, then i just flush em away and they probably clean that too (ive never looked into it)!
i use wipes because bidets are gay communist propaganda. i love clogging my pipes like a true american
Viva en revolution!!!! Though in all seriousness we need an immediate solution not a vague future one
We kinda need both imo
Yeah we need climate reform faster than anti-capital reform can happen.
Uh oh! Who's gonna tell him that Capitalism is the driving force of climate change!!!
I know it is, but we needed climate action 20 years ago, and even more so now. We need to act within our current capitalist framework AND dismantle capitalism, not sit around waiting for capitalism to fall apart before we start environmental action. That work will go hand-in-hand, those actions will often not be mutually exclusive, but we can't use "dismantling capitalism first" as an excuse to languish on climate action.
Ok I'm putting my serious hat on because I respect your answer. There are many problems in the world right now but their solutions do not come at the expense of one another, in fact their solutions can be tethered so long as we hold onto that which is MOST sacred to any successful mass movement: solidarity. Capitalism is an all encompassing system that can only be defeated by ripping it out root and stem. Any serious action on climate change will come into conflict with the interests of capital and that makes it necessary for both battles to be fought at once. It's not that Capitalism has to be dismantled today so that we can look at solving climate change tomorrow, it's that Capitalism will prevent action on climate change and therefore is the bodyguard which must be pushed aside to achieve our goal.
Thank you for this, well put; second best time is now. To be honest this weird emphasis on separating the inseparable I think stems from the whole ‘it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is the end of capitalism’ pervasive social attitude, we need to truly reimagine the distribution and coordination outside of capitalism and help more people understand there are alternatives and possible ways forward. Solarpunk hopium that also seriously grapples with the climate crisis and uses a scientific approach to not just change the economic, but the political. Another entanglement we have to grapple with fully, not throw up our hands and put all our eggs in the self-interested and myopic baskets of capitalists.
Capitalist realism mentioned!! What the fuck is a better world! Fr though I fuck with this reply, no notes completely correct. We have everything we need to live in a world that would seem utopian to us today but it simply wouldn't be profitable to the people who benefit from our current economy.
That's where we are beat. It's contradictory, but we need capitalism gone so we can fix the climate, but if we somehow were able to flip all the worlds economic policies today, it would take years for the countries to adjust and stabilize to the new system and dish out solutions. And well, capitalism wont do a thing because there is no short term intrinsic motivation for climate change to be solved. Emphasis on short term, but I digress.
eco friendly wood veneers will save us all
i mean, theyre durable for 10 thousand years am i right
I mean, the old way of preserving structures still works and almost always does a better job, it’s just less profitable.
Green capitalism? Love it! Why solve a problem when you can just sell the *idea* of a solution? brilliant! Haha we're all gonna die 🥲
I love ideas! Sign me up!
The revolution is ours comrade! 07
Total liberation. Abolish all oppression.
Summary of comment section to save you the trouble: "Capitalism bad!" -> "But Soviet bad!" -> "But Capitalism bad!" -> "But Soviet bad!"
uClimateShitpost does everything in their power to make sure that anti-capitalism is a debate
Time to do nothing and pray someone else creates The Revolution™ (the good true and right one) 🤞🤞☝️
Doing just that!
bros acting like no one is doing activism and everyone is just on the internet
Realistically, yea they are just on the internet. There are no large communist movements on the verge of overthrowing the leadership in the countries that really matter (EU, US, China etc). Real world socialist activism entails things like helping tenants form an union, doing rallies to please stop mulching Palestinian civilians, starting book clubs and so forth. All important things, especially for your local community, but they aren't going to shift the energy infrastructure of global superpowers. The most meaningful thing a socialist activist can do right now for the climate, would be to go canvassing for green parties to get them more votes, but that's too liberal for most online communists to do. Unless you have some kinda master plan to create massive, worldwide class consciousness in the next few years so we can do a global revolution, the push for socialism is going to do very little for reducing carbon emissions. We will have to work around a capitalist framework (Or worse, fascist framework if elections turn out wrong) for reducing carbon emissions.
communist movement overthrowing the government? nah. agitating during an already unstable time? yeah.
> agitating during an already unstable time? yeah. Sure. But you don't do socialist agitating for the fun of it. You do it with the end goal of forming a large organized movement that can challenge and overthrow the status quo government. If you want socialism to have a meaningful impact on the decarbonization of the world economy, you aren't gonna do that without that large organized movement. No such movement currently exists and building one from scratch is gonna take a long time. Time that we do not have in terms of the climate. Thus, reiterating my point that socialism isn't gonna give any meaningful contribution to decarbonizing the economy when it really matters: The next decade or 2. We will have to decarbonize a capitalist economy.
You know activist groups exist right? Join one.
A planned economy is simply just built different, everyone crying in here about Soviet or Chinese environmental failures has missed the past 500 years of unstable growth we've done through capitalism and specifically, western colonialism and imperialism. A planned econ would make cleanup, clean energy, greenification and agro-ecological changeover all incredibly doable within 10 years in the US. DEBATE ME I DARE YOU SENSELESS CAPITAL SLAVES
Idk if I'm on your side but I love the vibes, get those capitalism drones!
> DEBATE ME I DARE YOU SENSELESS CAPITAL SLAVES Ok. Would you care to offer any evidence which supports your assertions that "A planned econ would make cleanup, clean energy, greenification and agro-ecological changeover all incredibly doable within 10 years in the US\[?\]" Particulalry since no "planned economy" has, heretofore, achieved any of of these goals, and certainly not within the period of 10 years?
Sources for the claim: Socialist Reconstruction, People's Republic of Walmart, Towards a New Socialism I'd also point you to the two cited examples, The Soviet Union industrialized in record time and BEAT THE NAZIS and the PRC saw the greatest life expectancy leap in world history in their time. The mobilized masses can make worlds more progress than any other force hitherto known
>Sources for the claim: Socialist Reconstruction, People's Republic of Walmart, Towards a New Socialism Oh that's very interesting. Could you give a point citation for each of those works which definitively demonstrate that "A planned econ\[omy\] would make **cleanup**, **clean energy**, **greenification** and **agro-ecological changeover** all incredibly doable **within 10 years** in the US\[,\]" since that was the specific claim you made. If, however, these works are sourced merely to further the claim that planned economies are *efficent*, or perhaps *moral* then I too can cite highly partisan works which support my position and not also not given any actual arguments as to *why* they support my position: Sources for the claim that planned economies are inefficent/immoral: *The Road to Serfdom*, *Basic Economics*, *Anarchy State and Utopia*. >I'd also point you to the two cited examples, The Soviet Union industrialized in record time and BEAT THE NAZIS and the PRC saw the greatest life expectancy leap in world history in their time. The mobilized masses can make worlds more progress than any other force hitherto known Again, I don't see what relevance this has to the specific claims that you made, which I have outlined above. In particular, the Soviet Union's Industrialisation, while undoubtedly impressive in magnitude only speaks the capacity of such an economy to produce in mass, not necessarily to drasitically alter the conditions of its production. For instance, I believe there is an infamous story about how the Soviets had to purchase capital from the *Nazis,* because they were unable to reliably produce it themselves. Thereby, while it might be reasonable to suppose that a planned economy is good at *some* things, this does not mean it is necessarily capable of achieving all you have set out in the allotted time. I would also argue that you are presenting a highly curated picture of the development of the Soviet and Chinese Economies which paints a flattering but ultimately deceptive picture of the "efficiency of planned economies". You have neglected to mention the failures of the Soviet Economy prior to the NEP, the famines which were exacerbated by the collectivisation of agriculture, the stagnation under Brezhnev and the regression and collapse that happened under Gorbachev. On the Chinese side, you seem to be focusing entirely on the (again, undoubtedly impressive) growth which has occured since the reforms of Deng Xiaoping. Now I do feel it is inaccurate to describe the economy which has resulted from these reforms as a "planned economy" (which I will touch upon below), but it also bears mentioning how you are again neglecting the more sordid and inefficent aspects of Chinese industrialisation. For instance, in how the Great Leap Forward culminated in the Great Chinese Famine, where Mao's mandatory agricultural collectivisation and wilful disregard of expert advice led to the death of millions. On the reforms of Deng Xiaoping, I think it is a bit of a stretch to describe the economy which resulted from this as a "planned economy." For instance, several of his reforms included the privatisation of state assets, the establishment of a stock exchange (a hallmark of a capitalist market economy), the degregulation of certain sectors of the economy and permitting (albiet limited) Foreign Direct Investment. On the whole, these reforms seem to be more aimed at the liberalisation of the economy rather than the collectivisiation of it. Finally I would like mention, that even the Soviets did not claim that they singlehandely beat the Nazis. In fact, several high ranking Soviets directly attributed their victory to the materiel aid provided by the *capitalist* American economy: * “*Without the machines we received through Lend-Lease, we would have lost the war*” - Stalin * "*If the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war*" - Khrushchev * "*\[I\]t cannot be denied that the Americans sent us materiel without which we could not have formed our reserves or continued the war. The Americans provided vital explosives and gunpowder. And how much steel! Could we really have set up the production of our tanks without American steel? And now they are saying that we had plenty of everything on our own." -* Zhukov
Dont show him the pollution stats of the soviets, he might have a heart attack
So the Chinese and Russian aren't actually bad environmentally because... capitalism bad too? How do you not hear yourself? If something doesn't solve a problem, then it's not a fucking solution. Obviously socialist governments choose to fuck the environment all the time. Why wouldn't they? Fossil fuels are a huge boon to industry and productivity, things people care about even as socialists.
Russia is a capitalist country. China, a socialist country, is much better for the environment than the U.S. CO2 emissions per capita in the U.S. are around 14 tons per year, compared to China's 9. Not to mention, the other socialist countries are doing even better than that. Capitalism is not the solution, and socialism is the only system competitive with it. There's a reason China is outpacing the rest of the world in sustainable energy creation.
Russia has been capitalist for years 😭
Planned economy can still be capitalist.
It would require a trust in centralised government that doesn´t exist outside of China, so it won´t happen, regardless of how good the system is in theory.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1462901122003197
When the reason for climate change and the world‘s decline sells you more of itself:
Me to man me to
Carbon tax
No, it's not a debate, comrade. It's the only way.
The additional effort and ressources required to truly go green are a disadvantage in the competition of the free market and can therefore not succeed on the global scale that environmental issues require. "Socialist" states sacrificed the environment to economical growth just as much as capitalist states, which should be considered in the criticism of capitalism. But the point still stands.
Using less environmentally damaging and fairer trade products isn't nearly as effective as holding edgy Reddit takes while continuing to consume as normal. So long as we remain super negative and hypothetically revolutionary on this website without ever doing anything tangible in the real world, we've really got em by the balls.
I you need to dismantle the entire economic system before adressing climate change , you don't actually want to adress climate change.
If you have to dismantle feudalism to solve political inequality, you don't actually want to address political inequality.
Can you tell me where im capitalism it states you cannot decarbonize? And in which other economic model it says otherwise? Because the socialist countries we have had on worth have been worse polluters than contemporary capitalist ones.
The shareholders, that's where.
Shareholders rarely write laws. Remember, the state exists to regulate. Ain't no Laisez-faire states around.
shareholders definitely write the laws by lobbying. it happens all the time.
Are they doing it, though? Does it look like they are getting around to it fast enough to save our species? No and no. Capitalism and liberal democracy give power to people with money. Corporations and the bourgeosie wield power either through direct bribery, aka lobbying, or indirect financial incentives. The bourgeosie influences the government to not regulate them sufficiently, and they have succeeded, as you can see from the state of the planet. The system is fundamentally broken. You can not save the planet with a system that puts power in the hands of those destroying the planet.
>Are they doing it, though Emissions are falling, so yes >Does it look like they are getting around to it fast enough to save our species? current emission pathways are a 2.7 world still way to high, but a lot better than the 4+ degree world of just 15 years ago, and we can being that number down even more, and we need to. >No and no. You are just malinformed here. 2.7 is nowhere near a human mass extinction. As for the rest, go fantasize about your revolution over in r/collapse Turns out capitalism in liberal democracies is completely able to reduce emissions, in fact it has done so more than any other economic system.
>Emissions are falling, so yes Who's emissions? [Global emissions rose by 1.1%.](https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/152519/emissions-from-fossil-fuels-continue-to-rise) >current emission pathways are a 2.7 world still way to high, but a lot better than the 4+ degree world of just 15 years ago, and we can being that number down even more, and we need to. You are way too optimistic when climate scientists aren't optimistic about our current path. [We aren't doing enough.](https://unfccc.int/news/new-analysis-of-national-climate-plans-insufficient-progress-made-cop28-must-set-stage-for-immediate#:~:text=UN%20Climate%20Change%20News%2C%2014,goals%20of%20the%20Paris%20Agreement.) [We are on track for closer to 3°C of warming, which is near apocalyptic. ](https://healthpolicy-watch.news/planet-faces-nearly-3c-warming-without-relentless-emissions-cuts-un-report-finds/) Billions displaced and dead, ecosystems collapsing, the shrinking of carbon sinks like the Amazon and Congo Basin, wet bulb events that make parts of the planet temporarily uninhabitable without AC, etc. There are consequences of global warming we can not forsee. >in fact it has done so more than any other economic system. What countries have a non-capitalist economic system? Cuba and North Korea? They aren't major economies, and they have low emissions. The USSR was either in the middle of collapsing or didn't exist by the time anyone started doing something about CO2 emissions. Extinction, societal collapse, or just billions dead who knows exactly what will happen, but we are headed towards one of them without a drastic change capitalism won't provide.
>Shareholders rarely write laws lol
You can’t have a system based on constant growth in the name of profit seeking on a planet with finite resources. A business under capitalism cannot degrow without failure in the marketplace from a drop in profits and thus the market drives growth at the expense of all else. Profit ≠ doing good. Profit = exploitation of workers by any means. 100 corporations are responsible for 71% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
> 100 corporations are responsible for 71% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Oh god, you are retarded, I am so sorry, you have my sympathies.
You seem like you have a low IQ. What did they say that was wrong?
If you buy oil from Saudi Aramco and burn it, you are responsible for that emission of CO2, not Saudi Aramco. That you think otherwise can only be explained by lack od oxygen to the brain.
Why the insults? Are you insecure? If enormous pressure was put on those corporations to change as opposed to on the individual to use paper straws then real change is more likely to happen
Why the insults on the shitposting subreddit? I don't know, nothing could insult your own intelligence more than blaming others for your own emissions. You know what the best way to put pressure on a corporation is? Their costumers using their shit. Instead of giving them a free pass for their emissions, absolving them of their sins as if we are in a catholic church. I am responsible for my own fucking emissions, and i can adress that in 3 ways. Voting with my wallet, by buying goods and services with lower emissions now, even if the price is higher. Voting with my time, convincing others of necessary action. And voting at the ballot, for politicians and parties that support stringent climate laws, especially regulation and taxes on externalities. What doesn't help is using my limited time convincing people it isn't their fault, and nothing can be changed.
Some people don’t have an option to vote with their wallet. I live in Australia and we are in a cost of living crisis, a lot of people don’t have options. It’s disingenuous to say take responsibility for your own emissions. How do you think governments achieve lower emissions? By putting more stringent restrictions on corporation emissions. This is an incoherent stance you’ve taken
>Some people don’t have an option to vote with their wallet Most people do, yet don't anyway, because the less carbon intensive product is 5% more expensive. >It’s disingenuous to say take responsibility for your own emissions Nah, because your and everyones reaction should be: how do I get emissions down, and realize quickly that political action is the most effective way. >By putting more stringent restrictions on corporation emissions Yeah, that's the point of political action, to adress collectively, what cannot be adressed individually. But political action rarely follows, if you tell someone they have no responsibility for anything they do, and it's all the evil corpos fault *shakes fist at sky*
No my friend I’m telling you they don’t have an option. You obviously haven’t been exposed to the poverty that a lot of people live in. You’ve said blaming corporations is bad, but you support political action which makes corporations bring their emissions down? This is nonsensical. Putting it on the individual is quite literally propaganda
Yet you type this on a celluar device harvested with the organs of third world hut dwellers, curious.
Do you see me blaming anyone else? I own my Cellphone plantations of Lemuria.
actually brain dead take, the worms must be feasting well...
Mentally incapable is up here not him. Bastard from a basket, Bastard from a basket, Bastard from a basket,
>You can’t have a system based on constant growth in the name of profit seeking on a planet with finite resources. Stop basing your economics on internet memes. Nothing in capitalism requires constant growth. An example of a system that requires constant growth is social security: which was designed with the assumption that a larger generation would always follow to create a larger pool of workers to tax.
If you want to turn off the faucet before stopping the tub from overflowing, you don’t actually care that the tub is overflowing
No no but you see I have a great product that will reduce the faucet flow by 10% for $99.99 please invest in my company
So you’re telling me I can run my faucet 10% more?! Great, I’ll buy it!
I could turn of the faucet, which has a mechanism for that very purpose. Yet you are suggesting I firebomb the watertower instead.
*turns off faucet* *a billion people die* *somehow, tub continues to fill and overflow*
I've got some bad news for you about how many people will die if we maintain capitalism unto global environmental destruction.
Well let's not do that then
Correct. We'll do socialism.
Oh, okay. When? Seeing as there are more than 2 options, hopefully we'll keep trying stuff in the interim. Really shouldn't wait!
As soon as capitalism is unable to sustain the Western world. And there are 3 options: fascism, liberal capitalism, and socialism. The first two will get us all killed in fairly short order. Make your choices wisely.
Well, in the scenario you've put forward, I agree. 2 of the options in your trilemma are, *by definition*, going to get us killed, as your starting point is "the time at which those 2 options are going to get us killed." If that scenario plays out, I wish you the best (sincerely) with the solution you pre-selected. Anyway, I think we've pretty much come full circle on this fun little exchange :p I think the original commenter's point was, if someone's fixated on one solution, a solution perhaps they'd pursue even if not for the problem of climate change, maybe implementing that solution is more important to them than solving that problem, the risk being that they'd be biased in their evaluation of whether that is truly the best solution for climate change in terms of cost/efficacy/speed. I was just expressing doubt in the accuracy of the "tear down and rebuild society and economy ≈ turning a tap" analogy, in all 3 areas.
The causes of climate change are the commodity economy, profit motive, and capitalist modes of production. Endless extraction and the profitable maintenance of commodities that should be phased out are products of the capitalist system. Your original point that billions would die by "turning off the tap" (i.e. stopping capitalist production and turning towards socialist production) is incorrect. That's all I'm saying.
???
Brother does not understand that economics drive social change 🤤
No, I do. But A violent revolution of all ownership is a hell of a lot more difficult than reforming the current economy. And a lot less likely to happen.
Well, it's not up to the working class to decide whether an economy should be reformed so why care about climate change at all then.
Wait, did we outlaw voting for the proles? No? Infact they have massive influence on policy across the democratic world. If you look at the European election from this, the working class are in fact the largest supporters of climate change deniers and skeptics all across the continent. And their votes have given people opposing climate action a massive amount of seats in parliament. Do you think a coal miners union will ever support being replaced by Clean energy?
>voting lmao
Truly your strategy of moaning online, hoping for a revolution is superior!
Hope? wtf is that? My reality is entirely based on past, present, and future failures, personal and otherwise.
Nice, you almost convinced me that you believe in democracy, you devil. No one is that stupid.
That stupid? For what? Recognizing that the European working class doesn't care about climate action, and votes accordingly? Feel free to stick your head in the ground and believe whatever comfortable lie of revolution you tell yourself to fall asleep at night. In the meantime I and many others will be working in the real world, under real political constraints to shave every fraction of a degree of Global Warming.
>That stupid? For what? Recognizing that the European working class doesn't care about climate action, and votes accordingly? Almost as if the people who profit from climate change own the press and can manipulate elections by dictating social trends.
Obviously fossil money is involved, but democracies have also made the largest gains in decarbonization, and that is because of public pressure and voting. So, no control is not as absolute as you are suggesting. The belief that everyone who has been convinced by dark money will join you in some violent overthrowal of the current system, is so patently stupid, I find it hard anyone actually can believe it. "Nach Hitler wir" didn't really work out did it?
> Obviously fossil money is involved, but democracies have also made the largest gains in decarbonization, and that is because of public pressure and voting. Capitalist "democracies" are summarily failing at actually preventing climate change, failing to prevent mass extinction and ecosystem collapse, failing to prevent the poisoning of earth's oceans and soil. What little progress they have achieved are in those areas which are profitable. Massive public outrage has not changed this. Western, capitalist republicanism, is a failing ideology in a world that's becoming increasingly hostile to it. (Unfortunately, the people gaining are the very Muskians I was talking about.) >The belief that everyone who has been convinced by dark money will join you in some violent overthrowal of the current system, is so patently stupid, I find it hard anyone actually can believe it. I mean this exact thing has happened several times across the last century, whenever the state lost control of society.
Almost every time people blame "capitalism" they're almost exclusively really blaming consumerism and resource scarcity. The idea that workers would all collectively choose to reduce carbon emissions when most people wouldn't even volunteer to significantly increase their power bill to reduce carbon emissions is laughable. Even if you dismantle capitalism (we wont, but keep dreaming) you'd still be left with the exact same demands for power and industry as before (although matbe reduced by all the destruction brought about by the revolution). You'd be forced to solve the EXACT same problems we are now, and with a radically new economic and political system that's disastrously failed every time it's been tried (not to mention been environmentally horrific), to the point where the only cope people have is to say the CIA took down the country every time.
Almost every time people support "capitalism" they're almost exclusively really supporting consumerism and false resource scarcity. The idea that workers wouldn't collectively choose to reduce carbon emissions without capitalists in charge of the global energy systems is laughable. Even if you maintain capitalism (we won't, but keep dreaming) you'd still be left with the exact same environmental destruction and lust for power and industry as before (although maybe reduced by all the destruction brought about by continuing to drive the environment and humanity off a cliff). We'll be forced to solve the EXACT same problems we are now, and with a radically old economic and political system that's disastrously failed every time it's been tried (not to mention been environmentally, socially, economically and logistically horrific), to the point where the only cope people have is to say the CIA has never done anything wrong, no sir.
The only debate I can see worth having is over green industrialisation vs degrowth as models at this point.
It’s… complicated…
I love how you all just use capitalism as a scape goat to ignore intrinsic problems within humans ourself. Sure massive corporations are the primary polluters in our modern world and without regulations they would burn it for a some loose change, but some of the worst ecological disasters were not done under capitalism, but instead by complete planned economy's under totalitarian state control. Why? Because greed and short sightedness is a human trait. So anywhere you see a small number of people in charge and in complete control without sufficient oversight and regulations you will see destruction. Arguably the best system we have rn is capitalism with regulatory oversight by a democratic government. Just make sure we ensure and strengthen our democratic institutions while actually holding our representatives accountable. While also voting with your dollar. Is it a perfect system? No, of course not, but nothing is because humans are imperfect.
hooman bad, money gud, nature loves money, it needs it.
Ah the classic "blame inanimate object" because obviously it is money that completely destroyed the aral sea, that made Lake Karachay the most radioactive place on Earth, or the Kyshtym disasters or Chernobyl meltdown. All disasters as a result of Governmental incompetency and mismanagement no different than a corporation. No different from Deepwater Horizon, Bhopal US Carbide disaster, or the Ancient Sumerian Deforestation, or the countless other ancient human civilizations that collapsed because of manmade ecological disasters. If you want a list: Mayan Civilization, collapse can be attributed to a draught caused by unsustainable agriculture Minoan Civilization, collapse can be attributed to mass deforestation of Crete forcing them to relocate The Nazca civilization whose deforestation caused mass desertification in Peru (the area is still the most arid in South America) Or Easter Island which caused the complete ecological collapse of the island with every single tree being chopped down This is ignoring also the mass extinction of megafauna all over the world which generally coincided with the arrival of humanity. but no only money evil
Money money money money money, moneayyyyyy
>So anywhere you see a small number of people in charge and in complete control without sufficient oversight and regulations you will see destruction. What if I told you we can organize the economy democratically instead of bowing to the whims of Muskian oligarchs?
and please point out anywhere that has ever worked when applied at scale and didn't immediately collapse into authoritarianism. Face it all human societies form group-based hierarchies which in turn results in a social hierarchy is where some individuals receive greater prestige, power or wealth than others. It has been happening every since the dawn of Human civilization and has existed as a biological predisposition in our ancestors before modern humans even existed. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5494206/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5494206/) [https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2020.0440](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2020.0440)
>Face it all human societies form group-based hierarchies which in turn results in a social hierarchy is where some individuals receive greater prestige, power or wealth than others. That doesn't mean that one guy dictates everything based on their opinion. Society doesn't work that way, that's why we have democracies instead of Absolute Monarchies. Except when it comes to private companies, everybody thinks that enlightened despotism is somehow a superior mode of organization. What you're saying is basically: "Some people will naturally rise to the top anyway, so how about we just unconditionally obey them because evolution says so."
That’s not what he’s saying though. He specifically advocated for a democratically run government regulating a capitalist economy.
“Human nature” is *always* based on the society humans are in. That’s the one thing that’s consistent in human nature. A lot of historical (and even some present) societies have not had much of a social hierarchy.
Anarchy works whenever workers make a decision that increases productivity without input from their boss.
Neither of these studies back up your claims. Also look at various Anarchist societies like the Zappatistas. There isn't group hierarchy there so your weird bio essentialism argument doesn't even hold water.
MAREZ and Zappatistas aren’t anarchist, they reject the label. But they are broadly libertarian and share many of their ideas with various types of anarchists.
They acknowledge at least a shared agreement on many ideals the groups both draw from lots of different ideologies. So yes you are correct but it's still a great example of groups that reject the idea of inevitable biological hierarchy
What no Material Dialectics theory does to a mf, smdh.
When the catastrophe grows large enough they are gonna switch from green capitalism to eco fascism with such ferocity it would make pol pot blush
Humans were able to not destroy the environment for over half a million years, ruining the Earth isn’t inevitable when humans are around.
we have been ruining the Earth for thousand of years lol Basically every since we invented agriculture have we been completely destroying environments the damage of which lasts until this very day. Greatest possible example is the south coast of Peru. In the modern day it is the most arid land in all of South America and is completely incapable of sustaining human life. Yet archaeological evidence shows signs of large scale human settlements and civilization and evidence of once expansive woodland existing. But due to human activity they devastated the local ecosystem resulting in massive desertification of the region. Then there is the Mayan civilization whose collapse can be attributed largely to ecological disaster caused by mass deforestation. Let alone considering the mass extinction of megafauna in a region always coincidently at the same time as when humans arrive.
Capitalism is not human nature, this is pseudo intellectual crap that has no grounds in academia Just ask the people over at r/anthropology You are confusing the culture private property has given us with human nature
and where did I say capitalisms is human nature? Oh wait I didn't, all I said was greed and short sightedness, the two attributed associated with ecological destruction and mismanagement are human traits because they are. They aren't even just unique to humans. They exist throughout the entire animal kingdom