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Capitalism just values what people value. If nature is worth more as a tourist attraction than a farm, that is what it will be. I am not making excuses for capitalism here. I am just saying: you can either overthrow global capitalism and replace it with some new perfect system no one knows about yet OR we can start valuing different things as a society...
COVID lockdowns didn't put a dent in climate change and caused immense suffering - and they were pretty tame for a "lockdown". We'd have to make suffering much, much worse, and permanent, to have any effect whatsoever. This will never happen. Until there's an energy source that's more abundant than fossil fuels at the same or lower cost, this is just how it is going to be. Better to worry about how to adapt.
Didn't Europe cut down most of it's forests before capitalism had a name? Are communist systems much different in their treatment of nature? This seems to be a more general problem than something which is the result of capitalism
> This seems to be a more general problem than something which is the result of capitalism Sure, but the point is that dismantling of ecosystems is capitalism's central organising principle. It's what capitalism is : denote sophisticated evolved ecosystems as "property" rather than world, then allow the "owners" to dismantle them to create crude technological systems that require ongoing inputs from the outputs of pr…
Stuff like this is the main reason I was once a big climate change skeptic. I read stuff like this and it convinced me the whole thing was just religious apologetics. "Forgive me nature for I have sinned..." Over the time I was convinced by the evidence but also by hearing people talk about it outside this ideological framework.
Nature is simply that which is. Trees are nature and microchips are nature. Any division between that which is natural and that which is “artificial” is purely a human construction. An alien observing Earth would only see living systems and products of living systems and would see no intrinsic difference between a termite mound and a highway other than what apparently built it.
There is of course a very legitimate argument for care and restraint in our use of this planet’s resources, but that’s because it affects us. “Nature” doesn’t care. The Earth existed for billions of years before us and it will exist for billions of years after us.
The exploitation of nature in unsustainable ways is not a feature of any one political system. Humans have been doing it since there have been humans. Learning to live in a more sustainable manner is a goal that we only recently even named and started discussing.
Capitalism can t value anything. It is not conscious People value things.
Maybe the goal of economic gains help accelerate climate change, but what is clear is that we need economic strength to solve this problem. The most successful method we know of for generating economic growth is capitalism.
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The west is taking advantage of cheap labor in China and pushing all the externalities there. You're using a computer or smartphone that was presumably largely made in China to post this message.
To then turn around and say that climate change is entirely China's fault is absurd. You have to look at what countries are actually consuming the products leading to the emissions.
You're also conflating localized pollution with co2 emissions.
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Show me a non-capitalist country that is combatting climate change better than a capitalist country. Countries that don't emit because they're poor don't count.
The closest thing to an example is France. And France does relatively well among developed countries because it has nuclear power, not because it is non-capitalist.
It is the unchecked human instinct to drive the Machine of Progress forward that is at fault, and neither anti-capitalist narratives nor ESG idolatry is going to capture that out of the air. We are broken on a far more fundamental level - we just acquired the technology for that fact to manifest itself at global scale.
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The valuing of economic growth seems to be almost required as a Darwinian feature of nations. Resolve as a nation to value economic growth less than your neighbors, and you will soon be overpowered by them.
Yes! This is one of the many bad incentives.
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Where do you think all the products manufactured in China are going? The west is taking advantage of cheap labor in China and pushing all the externalities there. You're using a computer or smartphone that was presumably largely made in China to post this message. To then turn around and say that climate change is entirely China's fault is absurd. You have to look at what countries are actually consuming the products…