All
capitalistcountries…Fixed it for you
I’m 13 and this is deep.
Why? Capitalism cannot solve Climate Change, as it depends on the highest possible profit margins and rampant consumerism. Transitioning from a profit-focused system to fulfilling uses and needs in Socialism, where the Proletariat is in charge and can collectively agree to tackle Climate Change, is the only path forward.
This seems like you just want to be edgy and doomerist with nothing to back yourself up.
Capitalism cannot solve Climate Change, as it depends on the highest possible profit margins and rampant consumerism.
It’s definitely possible to do “Green Capitalism”, so long as the profit margins of green capital exceed dirty capital.
But Americans have huge investments in old dirty infrastructure that they want to use until it falls apart. That’s the real difficulty. How do you convince people with a $1B pipeline through the West Texas gas fields to scrape that project and build lower-profit windmills/solar farms and HVDC cable lines instead?
Our current leadership could subsidize green energy to move the market. But this would force existing businesses to build new capital rather than rent seeking on existing capital.
Compare the US to France, which has a huge legacy investment in nuclear power. They’re capitalist, too, but they aren’t in a rush to burn more fossil fuels.
Capitalism can’t do green. If you were to make an accounting of all of the environmental damage that capitalist industry has done to the ecosystem, the cost to clean it all up would dwarf the revenue. Capitalist economists are incapable of calculating such “negative externalities” because they don’t understand basic thermodynamics. I used to work in environmental remediation and am happy to talk more about this if there is interest.
Capitalism can’t do green.
Goldman Sachs would argue otherwise. There are enormous rents to extract from an energy source that’s functionally boundless. And as the capital costs plunge, investment soars.
the cost to clean it all up would dwarf the revenue.
Oh sure. Repairing the harm that the fossil fuel industry has done would require an incalculable amount of capital and labor. And there’s some stuff we’re never getting back. Millions of species driven to extinction, for instance. How do you even put a price tag on that?
Capitalist economists are incapable of calculating such “negative externalities” because they don’t understand basic thermodynamics.
Capitalist participants don’t need to calculate long term tail risks and external costs precisely because they’re external. Even the most environmentally conscious investor is only really interested in the 40 years between when they start making serious investments and they retire. C-levels who only plan to stick around for 5 years, maybe 10 years at the longest, have even less concern for the long term consequences of their decisions.
But that problem isn’t unique to capitalism. Soviet economies were also incredibly short-sighted during their early iterations. The Russians were notoriously sloppy in their industrial development. China’s only refocused on ecology in the last fifteen years (hat tip to President Xi Jinping). Cuba’s ecology is more a consequence of the embargo than their eco-socialist philosophy. Vietnam’s industrialization has carried a huge cost to the native wilderness and ocean space.
Still, a real five / twenty / fifty / one-hundred year economic plan gets you a lot farther than “How much money can we print inside the next fiscal quarter?” hyper-capitalist mentality. Government bureaucracies that seek to reproduce themselves indefinitely need to crunch the numbers on this in a way that fly-by-night businesses do not.
But if you’re just looking to industrialize green at a rapid pace, capitalist economics does the job as well as any other system.
Sure, no arguments there. I guess it’s the “green” label I take issue with. Carbon-free capitalism is definitely possible as long as there are enough critical elements to produce all of the necessary solar panels and wind turbines (and I guess fusion reactors if we’re really ambitious about printing money 🤑). I do wonder about rent collection long-term though, especially with such decentralized energy sources. Overproduction will also come sooner than everyone thinks. But I guess these are much better problems to have than imminent eco-catastrophe.
The funny thing is that you’ll have a hard time defending that the North Europe ones are governed by the property owning class… So this one is actually false. But it does apply to all countries that call themselves communist.
Anyway, it’s a very rare oddity for a country to have such a strong middle class that rich people can not reign free. Good for those few ones that managed it.
(And yeah, talk about non-sequitur on the 4rt one. It’s ridiculous. Yeah, the best way to fight climate change is by supporting a revolution lead by the OP’s favorite fascists. No explanation needed.)
The funny thing is that you’ll have a hard time defending that the North Europe ones are governed by the property owning class… So this one is actually false. But it does apply to all countries that call themselves communist.
All of the Nordic Countries are Dictatorships of the Bourgeoisie, they have seen sliding worker protections over time and increased disparity. Occasionally, Capitalists will make concessions to keep their power for longer, that’s what happened in the Nordics.
You are correct about Communist countries, they are directed by the Proletariat, who now owns the property. I doubt that’s what you were meaning, though.
Anyway, it’s a very rare oddity for a country to have such a strong middle class that rich people can not reign free. Good for those few ones that managed it.
It’s not really rare, it happened in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. Social Democracy is not fascism, but the idea of the Middle and Upper classes collaborating, ie the petite bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie against the proletariat, is something Social Democracy shares with fascism.
(And yeah, talk about non-sequitur on the 4rt one. It’s ridiculous. Yeah, the best way to fight climate change is by supporting a revolution lead by the OP’s favorite fascists. No explanation needed.)
Can you explain how OP is supporting fascism? Is Marxism “fascist” to you? Why?
Our government was corrupted the moment the courts accepted the “Corporations are people/ Money is speech” arguments. At that moment, the government stopped representing the needs of ordinary people and only represented the needs of billionaires and their lobbyists.
It’s taking a long time to play out but it’s going to end badly.
It was corrupted as soon as the country was founded, it was meant to service white slave owning men.
Our government was corrupted long before that. Harlow Vs Fitzgerald in 1982 comes to mind as the SCOTUS unintentionally legislated from the bench due to some southern revisionist in 1874.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/15/us/politics/qualified-immunity-supreme-court.html
Woodrow “literally wrote Southern Revisionism” Wilson is where I would point my finger at where the corruption actually took root.
All first world governments have some degree of corruption from money in politics, but don’t kid yourselves: USA is much worse than most
Corruption in politics was described to me once as the grease that keeps the cogs of government turning. The importance difference is what type of grease is used. A government with low corruption uses a small amount of very clean grease, just enough, and only in the right places, to make the sticky gears turn. A government with high corruption will just drench every gear with very dirty crude oil, and if the gears seizes up they won’t even notice.
In an ideal world the machine of government wouldn’t need any corrupt grease or oil to keep turning but no one truely lives in that world, yet.
I don’t know how to get everyone I know to really understand this. Every time I bring it up in conversation, the other person just puts their hands up and explains that they’re powerless to address it, so it’s not even worth talking about. I don’t know how to respond to the apathy.
To be honest i offen feel the same, just helpless and too insignificant to change it in my own. But thats the point, we are not allone! I just try to show them undenieble facts, the already very present effect of climate crisis or just statistics of how the money is distributed in our country. The thing I struggle most with them is their bad feith in people. For example many welfare programs or in the extreme the concept of unconditional income by the state gets always used to argue that people are lazy and it would not work because no one would get a job anymore, which i disagree with
The best way to counter this is to point out the laziness at the top. Corporate welfare is way more damaging to society than the few million lazy people at the bottom. It would cost a lot less to write them off than to pay CEOs 2000 times as much as the average worker.
Try recommending Marxist texts, or inserting them (tastefully) into conversation.
And, since we’ve shifted so far to the right, the “Marxist” texts can be written by John Maynard Keynes.
I agree with the sentiment, but I do think Marxism itself should be spread, haha.
With reasonable, actionable steps. If you don’t have those, then they kind of have a point, don’t they? It’s like the Newton’s flaming laser sword of politics.
the meme format doesn’t make any sense
Less than 5 probably
Negative 20 is in fact less than five and twenty, so I think you are both technically correct.
I would usually say this is going too far, but this winter didn’t seem nearly as cold as usual, and that was concerning. Feels like in the next two decades the planet might not have winter… And might have a deadly season that was formerly summer.
Yesterday 21th of July was the hottest day in recorded global history. This year’s February, April and June were the hottest respective months in recorded history. Just putting this out there
Huh, some commenters raise a good question. What are the non-capitalist countries doing to fight climate change?
China is building out massive renewables and massive coal.
My list is short, please add to it.
What are the non-capitalist countries doing to fight climate change?
Lots of solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear energy investment in the public sector. Huge investments in mass transit and electric engines. Conversion of old coal powered steel production to electric. Dense urban real estate department. Disposable waste reduction. Big efforts at tree planting along the Gobi Desert.
They’ve been very “all options on the table” about climate change. Some work. Some don’t. But the progress is undeniable.
“Massive coal” was twenty years ago. India is “massive coal” now.
They have an electric car that costs $10,000.
They are quickly switching from Li batteries to Na, which will not require Ni or Co either.
They have a mixture of capitalism and central planning, so it’s not entirely fair to call them “non-capitalist”.
Not far in the past.
In China, 47.4GW of coal power capacity came online in 2023, GEM says. This increase accounted for two-thirds of the global rise in operating coal power capacity, which climbed 2% to 2,130GW.
China’s 70.2GW of new construction getting underway in 2023 represents 19-times more than the rest of the world’s 3.7GW. As the figure below highlights, the country’s trajectory (red line) is diverging significantly from the rest of the world (orange line).
I was considerably happier before I knew this. Hopefully coal prices will continue to increase, and they won’t end up burning more coal even though their capacity has increased. From what I’ve read, it’s mainly provincial governments trying to boost their economic statistics that are responsible for this building spree.
I keep clicking this thumbnail because bright colorful fluffy animals.
I keep reading the text and not comprehending anything.
That’s not a bad thing, we all come to new things not understanding them at first, especially topics that we don’t get a good grasp on until we’re into adulthood and no longer have a structured education system to guide us. Subjects like politics, economics, sociology etc.
We all come to these daunting subjects with various levels of knowledge and ability, all we can do is try to dip our toes in to a subject that feels important to understand, get reading, watching videos, whatever works best for you, and go from there :-)
Aka “getting radicalised by bad faith actors on the internet”
