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Climate Change Is the Product of How Capitalism “Values” Nature
- verdverm 4y agoDidn'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
- aussiesnack 4y ago> 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 prior evolved systems. The process of converting evolved ecosystems into technological ones is economic 'growth' - a mislabel for a 2 to 3 century process that can end only with the death of the living planet, or of capitalism, whichever comes first.
- verdverm 4y agoThe earth and life have survived several cataclysmic events. Why would this time > end only with the death of the living planet Certainly the CO2 PPM will not cause this https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/02/15/co2-dip-dinosaurs-greenland/ https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/02/15/co2-dip-dinosau... > Until about 215 million years ago, the Triassic period had experienced extremely high CO2 levels, at around 4,000 parts per million — about 10 times higher than today. But between 215 and 212 million years ago, the CO2 concentration halved, dropping to about 2,000ppm. Nor would something equivalent to the asteroid that caused the last mass extinction The two things I know of are a solar flare that blows away the atmosphere and an astroid large enough to cause the surface to liquify (into molton rock)
- aussiesnack 4y ago
- dbingham 4y agoIt 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 whole, will come out the other side of this bottleneck and move on (unless we've tripped some unimaginable feedback loop). ...it's just likely we won't be included in that life. ...and a major extinction event on this scale is nothing to sneeze at either. Really it's chilling enough that we, as a species, are potentially having a similar impact on Earth's biodiversity as the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. There's really no need to exaggerate that.
- jay_kyburz 4y agoI 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.
- titzer 4y agoYes, a dead space rock with no resources will save us from our overconsumption of the resources of the one non-dead planet we know of.
- thwarted 4y agoConsidering 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 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.
- jshen 4y agoI think you are conflating a few things. The idea of property came into existence long before capitalism, which seems to be the linchpin of your take. Are you suggesting we return to being hunter gatherers? If not, I’m not sure what you are proposing.
- Supermancho 4y ago> The idea of property came into existence long before capitalism, which seems to be the linchpin of your take. That is not what I understood. I understood a simplified definition of property under modern capitalism. Capitalist property value is overwhelmingly limited to physical utility and not to consequence of consumption. There are a few exceptions, in various countries and industry, notwithstanding. I did not see a suggestion as to what to do about this.
- jshen 4y agoPrior to capitalism, I know of no system where “consequence of consumption” was a major aspect of the system. I’m trying to figure out where capitalism becomes a factor here.
- api 4y agoThis is pure ideology, nothing more than a religious screed. I’m not sure how people can not see this. If this were a fundamentalist Christian tirade against the decay of the “family” and the “gay agenda” it would be completely obvious. 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.
- aussiesnack 4y ago> stuff like this is the main reason I was once a big climate change skeptic That's the only ideological/religious (or perhaps more properly identitarian) statement here. Rather than assess statements about physical reality, you choose to follow your emotional reactions to what people you associate with a movement are saying (or what you interpret them as saying). Even if I had mentioned climate change (which I didn't) and my argument was just rubbish or purely ideological, what could that possibly have to do with your assessment of the gamut of climate change science? Why would you let commenters you don't respect affect your assessments of science? It's precisely the same "argument" forwarded by people who dismiss climate science because they don't like a US politician who once made a film about climate change. Emotional reactivity, nothing more. > Nature is simply that which is. Who mentioned 'nature'? Unless you're a metaphysical dualist, it's a concept we can ditch. It's really only of use to marketers. I'm talking about the planetary entropy increase caused by dismantling complex systems, evolved over thousands of years, to build crude technological ones, and falsely using the metaphor of 'growth' to describe this destructuring process. All this happens within 'nature', if you insist on the term. Viewed as a physical process (ie. ignoring its own virtual economic self-descriptions which are as unrelated to physical processes as are those of theology), this is what capitalism is.
- polotics 4y agoYes indeed. Capitalism is novel in as much as it actually puts a value on many more things than other economic systems, so you could even say that it could set the fair Net Present Value of growing a tree, or of scrubbing CO2 to stay below 400ppn: what time-discount should be applied, what level of risk is acceptable for whom (any Pakistanis here?) are just input variables...
- kbelder 4y ago>Capitalism is novel in as much as it actually puts a value on many more things than other economic systems Well, people do that, capitalism just recognizes it.
- otikik 4y agoThe cutting of most European forests happened very recently, in the time between the start of industrial revolution and the creation of natural reserves and national parks.
- asdff 4y agoThis depends on where in europe. The various sea powers that were over history stripped plenty of islands and coastal Mediterranean areas bare of their forests for the sake of building ships that went on to rot in the sea. Roman sources tell of crops that were harvested to the point of extinction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium
- asdff 4y agoIts not a problem but a fact of life. Symbiotic relationships are most commonly parasitic. It takes a lot of evolutionary fine tuning for a mutually beneficial system to emerge. Plenty of things have gone extinct over the course of life due to other species doing. Perhaps the worst event was the great oxygenation event, when photosynthetic life emerged and polluted the earth with oxygen to the point of mass extinction of the previously dominant anaerobic life forms. We humans are no different than what came before. We are a parasite to most species we rely upon. We pollute the air to the point that it harms other species much like earlier forms of life have done. Solving this 'problem' for good will amount to an evolutionary change in our species. I say problem in quotes because its only a problem for humans and any of the current crop of species making up the biomass on earth who are harmed by our actions. Extinction exposes opportunities for other phenotypes or species to take advantage of the earths resources at least. One thing that is certain is that life on earth moves on as always.
- thepangolino 4y ago
- Nomentatus 4y agotldr; an okay summary of why we shouldn't expect system change to result in a better approach to the environment - extraordinary Soviet excesses, Chinese words vs reality; followed by a sui generis clarion call for system change. ?!?!? I'm reminded of a recent study showing that autocratic systems lie and claim more than twice the economic growth they're actually getting; with China the lead liar. Includes a nice graph. You can believe the same is true of autocratic reports about how nice they are to the environment; because bad news isn't passed up the chain of command.
- LatteLazy 4y agoCapitalism 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...
- happytoexplain 4y agoThe 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.
- n4r9 4y agoThat'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.
- titzer 4y ago> Capitalism just values what people value. Except capitalism's built-in incentives keep causing this huge megaphone to blare out CONSUME at a deafening volume 24/7...
- philosopher1234 4y agoBut capitalism changes people
- spaetzleesser 4y ago“ Capitalism just values what people value. ” Capitalism values what capitalists value.
- mrchucklepants 4y agoIt doesn't matter what the "capitalists" value if they have no customers.
- anm89 4y agoWhat part of elected governments printing money and handing it out to large companies is the part where capitalism killed the environment? We don't have capitalism as much as China isn't socialist or communist. We have corporate socialism with a tiny bread and circuses welfare state bolted on for optics. We have elected to annihilate our planet by decree. It's not capitalism that people hate. It's humanity
- happytoexplain 4y agoFrankly, most of the state of things, good and bad, is a direct result of capitalism and the particular algorithm by which it processes the values of every individual human into a single aggregate.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- anon291 4y agoCapitalism can t value anything. It is not conscious People value things.
- bArray 4y agoWhich is why regulation is important for capitalism to work correctly. Regulation is used to capture values outside of economic gains. 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.
- titzer 4y agoNah, 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 everywhere, the externalities aren't felt locally, and not until much later. The consequences that would change behavior just aren't there, and consequences are the only thing that changes behavior.
- datadata 4y agoThe 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.
- titzer 4y agoYes! This is one of the many bad incentives.
- datadata 4y agoI don't disagree, but I think the Darwinian part transcends the idea of incentives. You wouldn't say that a tree has an incentive to reproduce, as a byproduct of a Darwinian natural selection they are guaranteed to have that property. Similarly, civilizations that have economic activity are guaranteed (in a Darwinian sense) to have economic growth.
- otikik 4y agoNot if all the nations do it together.
- arsome 4y agoAh 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.
- yrgulation 4y ago
- resoluteteeth 4y agoWhere 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 leading to the emissions. You're also conflating localized pollution with co2 emissions.
- galacticaactual 4y agoDo they not use computers or smartphones in China?
- Jensson 4y ago> Where do you think all the products manufactured in China are going? China consumes most of what they are making today. What do you think is happening? China is very different today than 20 years ago.
- jkhgkjghkhj 4y ago
- turtlebits 4y ago
- _8j50 4y agoHear me out: "Climate change" is a terrible phrase, of course climate changes, when talking to regular people that's like saying "water flow" to describe flooding. "Climate destabilization" or something akin to that would communicate what is happening better to the people that vote.
- geenew 4y agoAt this point, there's been - Inadvertent climate modification* - Global Warming - Anthropogenic Global Warming - Global Heating - Climate Change - Climate Crisis - Climate Emergency I don't disagree with the thrust of your point, but the same argument you make against 'climate change' could also be made against 'climate destabilizaiton', since destabilization can have human and non-human causes (for example, the rise of plant life, asteroids, or the periodic advancement and retreat of the glaciers).. The first term in the list above seems to capture the point a bit better, since 'inadvertent' strongly implies human agency is involved. In practice, 'human caused' is implied in the terms 'global warming' and 'climate change'. For my money it's better to stick with those terms, and add 'anthropogenic' if there is potential for confusion. * Thanks, wikipedia!
- _8j50 4y agoA lot of people (anti-vaxx types) don't buy it because of supposed incorrect past predictions bu science, they believe science is misinterpreting the cause of the change, so it is important to emphasize that you are not unsure about the cause and it is a very serious thing. Most people believe things when people they trust say so, since they know they lack the expertise themselves. So getting important people, politicians, celebrities use the best possible term I think is crucial.
- HKH2 4y ago> So getting important people, politicians, celebrities use the best possible term I think is crucial. Getting them to be consistent in their messaging is even more important.
- nsxwolf 4y agoCOVID 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.
- myth_drannon 4y agoWFH reduced the number of vehicles on the road and the traffic is still well below pre-Covid level.
- 2muchcoffeeman 4y agoAre 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.
- asdff 4y agoIt improved local air quality significantly when cars were no longer on the road: https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/air-quality-a-year-after-covid-lockdowns https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/air-quality-a-year-after-...
- _jal 4y ago> 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.
- datadata 4y agoArguably nuclear is more abundant and lower cost.
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- civilized 4y agoThe slow, halting pace at which we are addressing climate change is the product of human stupidity and selfishness, as well as the immense difficulty of rebuilding our energy infrastructure from scratch. None of that is inherent to capitalism. 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.
- Schroedingersat 4y agoThere are no capitalist nuclear reactors. They're all funded through government intervention for non-market reasons. The general trend is for more private intervention leading to them being less successful and more likely not to even be built. The EDF was a public entity when they built most of their reactors, and Flamanville was an absolute debacle. Capitalism is fundamentally incapable of building for the future and paying for its externalities in the way required to build safe nuclear power. This is exactly the same problem that leads to climate change. Thankfully we have solar panels which are compatable with capitalism.
- civilized 4y agoI agree that government is needed for the biggest "capital" expenditures. Separate point from the article, which is just more cliche "once we somehow stop believing in the capitalism ideology (and believe in my preferred ideology instead) people will stop being bad and there will be sunshine and rainbows"
- Schroedingersat 4y agoNo. It's the same point. Capitalism is fundamentally incompatable with the commons, long term good, managing externalities, or wellbeing for all. If we don't control capital it will continue exactly the same destruction it always has. How we do that and to what extent is an open question, but first we have to acknowledge the reality of problems that markets are the wrong tool for.
- galacticaactual 4y agoI'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 to manifest itself at global scale.
- otikik 4y agoRussia and China are capitalist. Communism is an attire they wear when they like.
- epistasis 4y agoIs 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."
- toastercat 4y ago> Is every form of industrialization, from the USSR to the UK to the US to China, capitalist? Can't say if every form of industrialization is capitalist, but the USSR and Communist China were/are state capitalist.
- chaostheory 4y agoThere’s no denying that capitalism is “grow or die”, but so is socialism. Like capitalism, socialism needs working adults to outnumber both retired seniors and non working age children. The only way socialism can avoid the constant growth requirement is if they have a “you only eat if you work” rule. Historically, socialism’s rate of pollution is on par with capitalism
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- nyokodo 4y ago> Soviet-type societies were destructive of the environment on a level comparable to the West, and turned into repressive class societies sui generis (of their own type). Indeed Russia had an explosion of greenhouse gas emissions during the Soviet period that it hasn’t equaled in the 3 decades since. [1] So this article reads like anti-capitalist propaganda that explicitly blames capitalism except when it briefly and begrudgingly mentions the Soviets who weren’t real socialists like the author. 1. https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/russia https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/russia
- amelius 4y agoTragedy of the commons, basically.
- dan-robertson 4y ago> Today’s planetary ecological crisis is due first and foremost to the increasing scale of the capitalist world economy This is sort of true except that there isn’t some significant alternative thing which is also getting people out of poverty and improving their material standards of living with things like more and more varied food and larger houses and manufactured goods and electrical lighting and smartphones and air conditioners and cars and office buildings and suchlike. There are a few small communist states (excluding China for having a mostly ‘capitalist world economy’ system just with a lot of state ownership and meddling) and some war-torn countries and a few failed states but these are not doing much climate change. I think I would write that climate change is mostly caused by people getting richer and improving their material standards of living. (When the USSR was around being more communist, they were also causing climate change). When you put it like that, the idea which is hinted at (but not written down and maybe not really believed by the interviewee) of ‘just stop capitalism/economic growth’ translates to ‘freeze worldwide GDP per capita at its current level’ and means either keeping poor people at their very low standards of living or having people in western countries drop to a much lower standard of living such that others may come up, and that also ignores the future growing population. Ignoring the obvious reasons that that idea is stupid, it’s worth noting that: - richer countries have falling emissions (even when accounting for trade/outsourcing) and still manage to grow so wanting economic growth needn’t imply climate change. - there is also an expected need to remove existing CO2 from the atmosphere and suiciding the economy of rich countries is not going to be good for developing and paying for the solutions.
- t0bia_s 4y agoSo what? We should get back to socialism? Give me a break.
- adrianmonk 4y agoWe all want to find a bogeyman to pin climate change on. Especially if that bogeyman is someone we already like hating. Popular targets of hate which might be compatible include: capitalism, corporations, oil companies, our government, someone else's government, and someone else's generation. But, if you choose to frame it in terms of guilt, the truth is we are all "guilty". We all benefited from it. Some definitely share more guilt than others, but honestly we let many of them get away with it on purpose so we could get the benefits. Internal combustion engines (and before that external combustion engines) are how industrialization happened. It's how we got to our current level of development. We, the human race, used energy to lift ourselves out of what we'd now consider poverty, and we created that energy by burning whatever we could get our hands on that would burn. And I really think there was no other way at the time. If you are able to read this message through the magic of the internet, or if you have access to a reliable source of food and some choice of what to eat, or if you're wearing clothes you didn't sew yourself, or if you received modern healthcare, or if you lived in a society that was prosperous enough that it could give you an education, all that was to a large degree made possible by the industrial revolution and fossil fuels. What's more, if you have a solar panel on your roof, or if you are able to buy electricity that comes from wind energy, or if you drive an electric car, all of that was also made possible by fossil fuels. Clean technology didn't invent itself. We had to get to the point where we could invent it, and that is the result of humanity having the resources available for centuries to invest in developing science, math, engineering, and manufacturing. Now, of course, we've put ourselves in a situation which is unsustainable, and we have to move on to the next phase and basically discard half the world's infrastructure and start over. It absolutely has to be done, but it's going to be crazy expensive and disruptive, and that's a tough pill to swallow. But making it about guilt and blame doesn't actually help get it done. The only thing it does is help you feel better if you believe the guilt rests on someone else. You can tell yourself, "We're screwed, but it's not my fault." Even if it's true, the value of that consolation prize isn't much.
- Markoff 4y agoRight, because climate change didn't happen before capitalism in past. There is no climate changing on planets uninhabited by people... Do you know a story about boy who cried wolf all the time? Good job activists, you done it.
- keeperoftruth 4y ago
- keeperoftruth 4y ago