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

Yes, but not to a sufficient degree that is congruent with the point people are trying to make (ie, that the outsourced emissions swamp the decrease in domestic emissions). Net emissions from the developed world -- in aggregate and per capita -- are declining.

>the nature and logic of capitalism, understood as a system directed at the accumulation of capital.

Capitalism is about a lot more than accumulation of capital.

How about deployment of capital? Markets?

>Capitalism is a grow-or-die system. If accumulation declines, the result is economic crisis. The answer of the system is to boost accumulation.

Doesn't have to be

>speak of economic growth as a principal problem, and of the need for a steady-state economy as a solution

This I agree with but it's easier to conceptualize with a stable world population flourishing at a level where renewable resources are abundant.

>For capitalism, accumulation of capital is everything

This is a repeating theme, at one extreme

A political frame of mind may be socialist, communist, democratic, or things like that whether or not there is capitalism involved.

Even though people say there is always money in politics, there doesn't have to be either. Any of these different political systems could exist or function without money if people tried hard enough. It surely would be a way different civilization, so unfamiliar to us that it would be shocking. But maybe not that unfamiliar to more than one of the lost civilizations of many bygone millennia.

Now for capitalism you really do need money, other people's money to be specific. It's economic, not absolutlely required to be political either even though that's how it turned out to most people's experience.

As we see in democratic, socialist, and communist political systems, there are so often greedy capitalists who accumulate but do not leverage to produce or add real value. All suffer as the wealth needed to feed the accumulation is sucked out of the overall "economy".

Yeah, you need money to be a capitalist, but so many times almost nobody has enough so they mostly really "need money badly" for survival even if they are not greedy by nature.

OTOH many major worthwhile projects could never be achieved without excessive accumulation, which should ideally be leveraged into value added.

Greed is the fundamental problem to me more than capitalism itself, that's where the accumulation amounts to value consumed rather than value produced. One is positive, the other negative, once you get a critical mass of greed you can be sure many major worthwhile projects will never be achieved.

Regardless, different currencies have different environmental impacts.

It's not just the energy and raw materials that went into your EV that makes it have a bigger carbon footprint relative to the motor fuel savings. The money you have to earn and the work you have to do to pay for the thing bring the total up even more when it comes to environmental cost. The same consumer item can have a way different cost for different people.

All of life is ever changing, there is no stable ecosystem except in a moment, and only if you ignore the parts that are undergoing massive death after massive growth. Calling bacteria in a Petri dish "pathological" doesn't even make sense, it is the way of life, how life grows all over.

Disease and escape from disease are omni-present in biology, not mere pathology. Ever present extinction of species, ever present evolution of species, ever present birth and death of individuals, all make real life an ever-changing unbalanced dynamic. Life is ever changing, ever "growing" yet somehow always dying.

Follow the simple population models in biology, and you get chaotic boom and bust, feast and famine.

"Capitalism" is the same as biology here. Claims of requirements of ever-present growth are a factual. Capitalism survives recessions, depressions, just fine. There is no requirement of global growth for capitalism to survive, and the supposed "logic" that leads to that conclusion is ridiculous, full of holes. For the past decades, even the supposed "capitalism needs ever expanding amounts of energy" has been proven to be false. GDP is not tied to energy, GDP is tied to whatever humans value. Which is ever changing, ever evolving.

I think that the critique of capitalism embodied in this essay is a century too old. It misses the basic understanding of the past 100 years of biological discovery and better understanding of complex systems that happened not only in biology, but in many other academic fields.

Life persists even with individual species continually expanding exponentially until they hit population collapse. Capitalism is the same. And even relegating capitalism to only the "completely unregulated" system, whatever that means (all property rights exist within a legal system with regulation), capitalism does not tends towards ever-present monopolies. That at best leads to feudalism, to autocracy like in Russia, but feudalism/autocracy is itself unstable.

> There’s no denying that capitalism is “grow or die”, but so is socialism.

I think it's important to specify about what individual components "grow-or-die" here, because I'm having trouble agreeing that capitalism or socialism, as systems, are such.

Individual entities in capitalism, embodied in the concept of the firm, are not necessarily grow-or-die. A growing firm has a much easier life, as there is more slack in all parts of the system, and they can be less efficient in their allocation of resources. But a stagnant firm does not necessarily die. An accountant that is growing, or even shrinking, is not doomed to be replaced by another, growing accountant. Large firms can be stagnant for generations without dying. IBM is still around, right?

And similarly, even if a firm is growing massively, accumulating capital and collecting surplus value, that doesn't mean that the GDP as a whole is growing, because so many other large firms could be contracting.

The question of how the retired class of people eats, and how to distribute resources between younger workers and elder retirees is solvable in many ways, under socialism and under capitalism. Many of China's problems stem from inadequate retirement distribution, despite supposedly being a socialist or communist country.

This is why I feel that these discussions are completely pointless, our abstractions are no longer useful for describing the material reality of people. And we get ridiculous articles like the original post here that cod not even provide an adequate definition of capitalism to describe what they are talking about.

Its all monks debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, IMHO, pointless discussions disconnected from reality.

It improved local air quality significantly when cars were no longer on the road:

https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/air-quality-a-year-after-...