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Climate Change Is the Product of How Capitalism “Values” Nature

globalpolicyjournal.com

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Re: Climate Change Is the Product of How Capitalism “Values” Nature

#41

Post by otikik »

yrgulation wrote: post #24

Quoted post unavailable.

That is incredibly short sighted.

The reason why you don’t see that much pollution in your country is that it has been outsourced to other countries with more lax pollution laws and less worker protection laws. This means that fabrication of an item produces more pollution than if it was built in your country (where there’s more regulation). And then there’s even more pollution due to the long transportation haul.

But you get a cheaper price tag. And your rivers are clean.

But think about these things when putting blame.

Re: Climate Change Is the Product of How Capitalism “Values” Nature

#42

Post by n4r9 »

happytoexplain wrote: post #17
LatteLazy wrote: post #7

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...

The problem is that capitalism naturally "takes advantage" of weaknesses in human decision-making, especially around being abstracted from consequences (by time, space, complex routing, etc etc), that even the very humans in question frequently agree should not be the way it works.

That's just one of several problems. Another one is that economic systems often tell people what to value, and what products to associate with what feelings. People rarely start smoking because they like the taste or sensation.

Re: Climate Change Is the Product of How Capitalism “Values” Nature

#43

Post by _jal »

nsxwolf wrote: post #28

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.

> This will never happen . [...] Better to worry about how to adapt.

In ecology, there's talk of population boom/bust cycles that result from biome variation, like a predator going away. This results in more members of a given species than can be supported by the rest of the biome.

Then comes the bust.

In human terms, adapting is probably mostly about hoping the right warlord owns you.

Re: Climate Change Is the Product of How Capitalism “Values” Nature

#44

Post by thwarted »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #18
dbingham wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a bit of a semantic dispute, but not an unimportant one. We are causing a major extinction event that is up there with the worst ones the Earth has experienced. That said, the end result is likely to be that we either go extinct or come very close and the remaining life on Earth picks up the pieces and starts re-evolving new biodiversity from the diversity bottleneck. It's happened before and life on Earth, as…

I think we have the technology now (or in the next 100 years) to move some of our people into moon bases here on earth. If I were Musk I would be building these now.

Considering how this thread started, you're saying that we need to escape to the one place that hasn't been corrupted by capitalism?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1Sq1Nr58hM

But more pragmatically, neither Biosphere project was considered successful enough to make this workable on earth at any large, or even small, scale. There is still much more work and research to do here. Any attempt here currently has a hard dependency on the larger ecosystem to supply it with inputs.

Musk working on building moonbases on earth looks a lot like what doomday preppers are already focused on.

Re: Climate Change Is the Product of How Capitalism “Values” Nature

#45

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

myth_drannon wrote: post #32
nsxwolf wrote: post #28

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.

WFH reduced the number of vehicles on the road and the traffic is still well below pre-Covid level.

Are personal vehicles are significant chunk of pollution? At any rate, lockdowns were a good glimpse of how much nicer things are without all the cars around.

Re: Climate Change Is the Product of How Capitalism “Values” Nature

#46

Post by otikik »

datadata wrote: post #27
titzer wrote: post #19

Nah, capitalism is just the most efficient system for economic growth. It's economic growth that's driving climate change, and economic growth is driven by population growth, reduction in poverty, and the hedonistic treadmill. It doesn't matter what -ism you put on it, climate change is driven by burning fossil fuels and every -ism would do the same. Fossil fuels are a very decentralized incentive problem; they are e…

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.

Not if all the nations do it together.

Re: Climate Change Is the Product of How Capitalism “Values” Nature

#47

Post by otikik »

galacticaactual wrote: post #38

I'm sure Russia and China are paragons of clean energy. Presupposition that this is capitalism's fault is ridiculous from the get go. 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 t…

Russia and China are capitalist. Communism is an attire they wear when they like.

Re: Climate Change Is the Product of How Capitalism “Values” Nature

#48

Post by ikinsey »

yrgulation wrote: post #24

Quoted post unavailable.

Did the demand for products from polluting industry disappear in the developed world or did the factories just move overseas? Shifting blame to "underdeveloped and corrupt nations" does nothing to address the fact that developed countries still demand goods from polluting industry and do little to promote more sustainable forms of economic development.

Re: Climate Change Is the Product of How Capitalism “Values” Nature

#49

Post by epistasis »

Is every form of industrialization, from the USSR to the UK to the US to China, capitalist?

Is the current energy transition, funded by massive amounts of capital, and the result of industrialization of technology, somehow less capitalistic?

Are the ESG efforts somehow less capitalist?

Sometimes, our mental frames are traps rather than tools for understanding the world. This essay makes me think that this person is quite trapped, unable to absorb or explain climate action of the past 30 years.

> Capitalism is a grow-or-die system. If accumulation declines, the result is economic crisis.

You know what else is grow-or-die? Life itself. All of life is a series of exponential growth, followed by slower growth. It's all logistic curves.

This idea that capitalism is all growth is a very simple-minded and inaccurate view of capitalism. It's also the death of firms. It's stagnation. Its fortunes squandered, in addition to fortunes built.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think that capitalism is the be-all end-all system, but these critiques are so weak as to block any chance at actually fixing the many many problems of capitalism.

I can't read this thing without thinking "really? Where is your critical thinking?" About every single paragraph.

Essays like this degrade the critique of capitalism into nonsense, ultimately weakening any attempt to change the system, because they discredit the idea that there are actually lots of legitimate critiques of the system. They also cheapen critique by broadening the definition to basically "what I don't like at any given moment."

Re: Climate Change Is the Product of How Capitalism “Values” Nature

#50

Post by arsome »

otikik wrote: post #46
datadata wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not if all the nations do it together.

Ah yes, truly an easy sell. Let's try telling that to the developing nations who's people are just getting access to clean water, electricity, refrigeration and transportation first.
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