5 ms·

> 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'

> 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 ago
The 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 ago
    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 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 ago
      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.
      - titzer 4y ago
        Yes, 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 ago
        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 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.
      - sulcate 4y ago
        This is irrelevant and misses the point. Even a completely 'trashed' earth that renders billions displaced or suffering amidst ecological catastrophe is still infinitely more hospitable to life than celestial bodies that are completely devoid of that benefit in the first place.
        jay_kyburz 4y ago
        I was responding to the op saying that humans face extinction. I don't think that true. I think we could have the tech to live in "moon bases" here on earth once it has been rendered a desolate rock. And yes, billions will die.
    - verdverm 4y ago
      Unlike the other instances, we have the potential to reverse the trend. Blaming capitalism does not help, it's just how we organize economically, to which there is no known better alternative
- titzer 4y ago
  > astroid large enough to cause the surface to liquify (into molton rock) Well, asteroid collisions follow a power law; the bigger the collision, the less often they happen. They get rarer the older the solar system gets, as they are consumed (AFAWCT). But asteroids aren't self-replicating and they don't tell themselves how moral it is to eat everything in sight for the sake of some three letter acronym called GDP.
jshen 4y ago
I 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 ago
    Prior 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.
    - otikik 4y ago
      Well if you hunted in the King’s forest, they chopped your head off. That’s a clear consequence of consumption.
      - jshen 4y ago
        That’s not about consumption, it’s about property rights.
        otikik 4y ago
        Well maybe we should modify property rights so that they include externalities.
api 4y ago
This 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.

verdverm 4y ago

The 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 ago
  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 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 ago
    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.
    - titzer 4y ago
      Yes, 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 ago
      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 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.
    - sulcate 4y ago
      This is irrelevant and misses the point. Even a completely 'trashed' earth that renders billions displaced or suffering amidst ecological catastrophe is still infinitely more hospitable to life than celestial bodies that are completely devoid of that benefit in the first place.
      - jay_kyburz 4y ago
        I was responding to the op saying that humans face extinction. I don't think that true. I think we could have the tech to live in "moon bases" here on earth once it has been rendered a desolate rock. And yes, billions will die.
  - verdverm 4y ago
    Unlike the other instances, we have the potential to reverse the trend. Blaming capitalism does not help, it's just how we organize economically, to which there is no known better alternative
titzer 4y ago
> astroid large enough to cause the surface to liquify (into molton rock) Well, asteroid collisions follow a power law; the bigger the collision, the less often they happen. They get rarer the older the solar system gets, as they are consumed (AFAWCT). But asteroids aren't self-replicating and they don't tell themselves how moral it is to eat everything in sight for the sake of some three letter acronym called GDP.

jshen 4y ago

I 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 ago
  Prior 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.
  - otikik 4y ago
    Well if you hunted in the King’s forest, they chopped your head off. That’s a clear consequence of consumption.
    - jshen 4y ago
      That’s not about consumption, it’s about property rights.
      - otikik 4y ago
        Well maybe we should modify property rights so that they include externalities.

api 4y ago

This 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.