3 ms·
The reason we haven't solved climate change is just because it's an incredibly hard problem, and we just flat out don't have a political consensus and clear man
by simonh 5y ago
The reason we haven't solved climate change is just because it's an incredibly hard problem, and we just flat out don't have a political consensus and clear mandate from the people to take the sort of drastic and incredibly costly steps it would take. Changing direction like that is a political problem first and an economic problem second.
As for Exxon, they may be scumbags and need reigning in, but basically they are just a business providing a service. We all consume fossil fuels all the time, and we need someone to buy them from. The way to reduce fossil fuel dependency isn't to just kill the oil companies, we'd kill our economies with them. We need to wean ourselves off the poison. We need to stop being their customer, not blame the shop for selling us the goods we went to the shop to buy.
I'm not sure what you mean by absolute private ownership of capital. We don't have that in an absolute sense at all. We confiscate capital through taxation (which I'm fine with by the way), we regulate markets (which is a necessary function of government), the government controls the money supply and directly manipulates financial markets all the time as is needed. The government is a massive employer and huge spender in the economy. I'm a Brit actually, but all of that is true of every liberal democracy. Heck, I even support the NHS, I think it's far better than the US model. However capitalism is fundamentally about individual rights and freedoms, not absolute ones, but valuable ones. I'm a wishy-washy centrist, and proud of it.