> 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

> 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.