Why Capitalism Cannot and Will Not Solve Climate Change

[Shogun]

I see Rhakim is going on diatribes and calling everyone who disagrees with him stupid again.

Hell of an approach to achieving libertarian socialism.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

You can't artificially increase scarcity. You can dictate access. That was foundational of socialist to defeat capitalism. It didn't work though because of militarism and the desire of humans to want.

You can artificially increase scarcity by creating artificial demand. For instance, diamonds were not scarce 100 years ago. Create a massive advertising campaign to convince every couple on Earth that diamonds are the best and you need a diamond to show your love, and the bigger diamond they get the better, and eventually the scarcity of diamonds becomes an issue.

Capitalism creates those artificial scarcities all the time. Water is far scarcer in California than need be because a small # of companies have spent decades purposely inflating the almond and other tree nut markets far over their previous level, creating massive water demand that didn't exist before. Planned obsolescence has increased the scarcity of rare minerals important to the manufacture of cell phones and other consumer electronics because businesses purposely create a market where phones and other devices need to be replaced every 1-2 years when maintaining a phone for 5-10 years is completely viable. From beef to bottled water to gold to flight miles, you can come up with numerous examples across the economy where the industry itself is doing everything possible to inflate demand for its product and therefore increase scarcities where none are necessary.

With regard to your model, it's based around limiting the destruction of finite resources as its main goal. I don't disagree with the concept, but you can't give concrete numbers about how much "access to convenience" humans should have.

Limiting the destruction and, in the case of renewable resources and other environmental positives (forestries, fisheries, fertile topsoil, clean water, clean air, etc.) enhancing the creation as well. It's important not to think of it as merely a negative when you can actually incentivize the creation of many of these resources.

I agree that concrete numbers are hard, but we're already in the business of trying to determine concrete numbers for these things. The government tries to determine concrete numbers for fisheries and forestries when it creates regulations for how many fish we can catch and trees we can cut down. It tries to determine concrete numbers for water extraction that is allowed and air pollution that can be released and oil that can be drilled. The farm bill already tries to determine ways to enhance the preservation of topsoil where its existence is threatened.

Regulators are already trying to determine these numbers and enforce them. The big issue is that they are constantly fighting against capitalism in the process, the capitalists are doing everything in their power to oppose and circumvent those regulations because the economic system and the regulation system are directly at odds with each other.

The difference between the current system, and the system Eisenstein proposes that I quoted in that post, is that the economy would actually serve and reinforce the regulation system rather than continuously being at odds with it. People would get rich by conserving shyt rather than by destroying it.

I see Rhakim is going on diatribes and calling everyone who disagrees with him stupid again.

Hell of an approach to achieving libertarian socialism.

That makes two threads in one day where all you're able to express is your own feelings of inadequacy. Pick someone else to troll if you don't want to discuss the issue in the thread.

 

[Pressure]

I see Rhakim is going on diatribes and calling everyone who disagrees with him stupid again.

Hell of an approach to achieving libertarian socialism.

His solution is trust me, I know what's best.