this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
393 points (100.0% liked)
Asklemmy
1454 readers
60 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Climate change cannot be addressed under capitalism.
Huh? How do you explain the ban on ozone-depleting gasses? How do you explain carbon trading?
Of course climate change can be addressed under capitalism. It just canβt be addresses without regulation.
Capitalism didn't ban ozone depleting gases. It invented them.
The only reason we successfully banned CFCs, is because the more environmentally friendly replacement was cheaper.
If the motivations for fighting climate change (or any problem, really) don't align with the profit motive of the affected corporations, nothing will be done.
Regulated capitalism can direct capital to innovation in low/zero emission technologies and disincentivize investment in polluting technology very effectively,. More effectively than a corrupt command economy could do it. Fossil fuel companies have fought against interventions to push the market towards alternatives but the biggest failure has been on the political class and voters who haven't done enough to push the market in the correct direction. Photo voltaics, storage technology and wind turbines have received a lot of investment and are growing rapidly despite the work of the big polluters to stall action.
Sure, it directs money towards alternatives, while doing absolutelyfucking nothing about actually reducing the harmful technologies. We may have more solar and wind (neither of which is perfect, nothing is), which is then used as propaganda to show "Oh, look at all the progress we're making!", while still mostly keeping oil and coal.
And, of course, everything is the fault of regular people, struggling to get by, companies are blameless.
Capitalism is what got us here my lemon.