Waiting for Capitalism to Die Is Climate Suicide

The climate debate is riddled with people who, in one way or another, blame capitalism for climate change and therefore argue <a href="https://medium.com/@sjgenco/its-getting-to-look-a-lot-like-degrowth-part-1-5db04fd9e27c" rel="noopener">we must change capitalism or else we are doomed to climate catastrophe</a>. I know because I made this argument myself at one time. It seems pretty clear that without a capitalism built on the industrial-level burning of fossil fuels, we would not be facing this crisis. That’s true. But the converse — that we must end capitalism to solve climate change — is not true. Before I get to that last statement, however, let’s be clear. Capitalism is no friend of the environment. Its spectacular “success” in taking over the world has been built on debt used to drive growth, the burning of fossil fuels to get cheap energy, and the creation of so-called externalities — costs that are ignored in the accounting through socialization or pollution. As a capitalist, one gets to dump waste into a river and tell the government to clean up the downstream problem — at least, that is, until the government stops you. This dynamic leads to perpetual arguments about how much to protect through regulation and how much to live and let live to increase profits. Because profits are aggregated by corporate capitalists, and <a href="https://www.fec.gov/legal-resources/court-cases/citizens-united-v-fec/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">the US Supreme Court has equated money with political speech</a>, the capitalists get an outsized place at the table. Who loses? The environment, you, me, and society — anyone who is downstream in that river. <a href="https://medium.com/predict/waiting-for-capitalism-to-die-is-climate-suicide-8da9a968deb2">Learn More</a>