Anti-Capitalist Sentiment (with some morality)

[rpm]

@ renton, so do you think the top-heavy distribution of wealth which capitalist systems create is going to alleviate enough of the world's poverty and raise the overall quality of life adequately for us to be able to effectively deal with the problems of climate change in time? does promoting more industry and more emissions in more countries sound like it will inhibit or speed up on the onset of the problem we're trying to solve? what if we get to the point where the only choice we have to continue existing is to cease industry and re-think our social and economic systems? will the world economy collapse? yep. but that sounds better than extinction.

i'm not a climate scientist and i've heard all kinds of different viewpoints on how real climate change is and how soon it will start doing what to our planet - but that's exactly my concern with our current trajectory. it seems people are willing to defend the ecologically-destructive effects of the "marketplace" to the grave. or at least gamble on doing so. that's not to mention the fact that we can't actually know when we've passed the point of no return as regards human-induced climate change (ie the changes we need to make, whatever they be, won't happen overnight. what if the wheels get in motion too late?). i'm certain this post will sound ridiculously alarmist to many people. but when we're potentially gambling on the survival of the species, and we are dealing with incomplete information (ie we dont know for sure the timeframe/effects of climate change), i tend to get a bit risk-averse. and i'm not convinced that a capitalist economic system is going to be able to deal with these issues in time, if at all.

[wufwugy]

@ renton, so do you think the top-heavy distribution of wealth which capitalist systems create is going to alleviate enough of the world's poverty and raise the overall quality of life adequately for us to be able to effectively deal with the problems of climate change in time?

If it doesn't, we're screwed.

The other options are, um, they, um....they don't exist. People love to say how capitalism doesn't address climate problems, but they never acknowledge that morals don't either. There is no theory remotely capable of addressing this problem without incredible side effects. The perfect analogy for this is the drug war. There was once a time when almost everybody believed drugs were bad (reefer madness sort of thing), and it was addressed by all sorts of regulatory penalties. We ended up creating a juggernaut of regulation trying to stamp out the drug problem, but it didn't work. Not only did it not work, it made things far worse. In fact, it made things so bad that it created tremendous problems that didn't originally exist.

People wanna say we can fix the problem of climate change with regulation. But we can't. Nobody knows how. Just like all the regulations in the world on drugs didn't do shit, all the regulations in the world on environmental conservation will just have unintended consequences. Good regulations are extremely hard to make. Regulations on future externalities that hinder the economy would make the drug war look like paradise