I missed this, because I wasn’t expecting this bold move…
Could you ballpark how much faith the liberals have that their program will succeed… say 76-99%, 51-74%, 25-50%, 1-24%?
How about you, how confident are you personally that the liberal program will succeed?
ETA: What about the leaders of the liberals? Can you cite any of them handicapping the the odds of: can the governments, in fact, ‘well regulate’ the capitalists? Has J.Biden ever said something like “We got a 58% chance of regulating the oil companies so as to avoid environmental collapse?”
This fascinates me, as I’ve never ever heard a liberal express any doubt here. So… let’s do a poll…
If the governments of the world put their efforts into it, the chances they could ‘well regulate’ enough to keep the capitalists from ending life on earth is…
“By the time the fire season waned at the end of last month, the blazes had emitted a record 244 megatonnes of carbon dioxide — that’s 35% more than last year, which also set records. One culprit, scientists say, could be peatlands that are burning as the top of the world melts. By the time the fire season waned at the end of last month, the blazes had emitted a record 244 megatonnes of carbon dioxide — that’s 35% more than last year, which also set records. One culprit, scientists say, could be peatlands that are burning as the top of the world melts.“
In an attempt to increase the band-width, but being ever vigilante to avoid “inadvertent strawmanning” (like I foolish did above regarding the level of confidence that the liberals have in the governments), I got a few more Qs.
First, I’d hope we can at least agree that the capitalists need to be dealt out, or at the very minimum substantially suppressed, one way or the other, if life is to continue on earth. Second, have the governments ever successfully ‘well regulated’ the capitalists in the past? A good benchmark date would be 1962. That’s the year R.Carson’s Silent Spring was published, which is often credited with kicking off the modern environmental movement.
Q10: odds the capitalists can be ‘regulated’ IRL >= 50%
Q11: the capitalists were ‘regulated’ at times < 1962.
Q12: the capitalists were ‘regulated’ at times 1962-2020.
Q13: if left alone, the capitalists will destroy life on earth?
All this shit about capitalism vs non-capitalism in the context of environmentalism is just you assuming that a socialist state would be better environmentally than a capitalist one, but there is no reason to suppose this. I’m not an expert but I’d say the environmental record of the Soviet Union between 1962 and its dissolution was worse than that of the United States. It was dogshit, anyway.
Climate change is a tough problem because fixing it involves substantial economic pain, because its devastating effects will not become obvious until it’s too late, and because unilateral action on the part of any one government probably isn’t enough to fix it anyway. Switching the economic system to socialism won’t do anything about any of this. It’s just tough to have a democratic system and expect people to vote against their immediate material interest based on what to them is just some abstraction.
Yeah, so? The question was about capitalism and climate change. You don’t think wealth, consumption, production and waste all have something to do with capitalism?
We’re just flat out lucky that renewables are cheaper than coal and oil and electric motors are superior to internal combustion. If those things weren’t true, we’d have no hope.
LOL no. The Commies are just as bad. It’s not socialist states -vs- capitalist states. ZOMG… are we back in the Cold War or something.
As I’ve mentioned, the liberals think life is ordering off a menu. They imagine they can order up this option, or that other option, like side dishes. The world doesn’t work that way.
The problem is one of hierarchy, absentee ownership and the estrangement of those effected. Any system that has these attributes is not environmentally sustainable. Since absentee ownership is integral to capitalism, it is not environmentally sustainable. QED.
There is no need to figure ‘socialist states’ into this truth at all. That’s all cold war era what-about-ism.
So, can we put a fork in this ‘socialist state’ derail?
You peeps get so hung up on your labels and definitions, to the point of forgetting WTF you are even talking about.
Let’s try this…
The ‘glerbo’ system features absentee ownership for profit extraction.
All systems that feature absentee ownership for profit extraction are environmentally unsustainable.
Therefore the ‘glerbo’ system is unsustainable.
Note: Regarding #1: It’s not relevant if the ‘glerbo’ system == capitalism. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Either way, it doesn’t change the truth value of the above proposition. Regarding #3: it necessarily follows from #1 and #2, if they hold.
The crux of the matter is #2. The liberals feel #2 is false. We know #1 is true. If there is a “rigorous debate” to be had… it would be a debate regarding the truth value of #2 alone.
I’ve been thinking about the line in Star Trek where Picard is talking about why humans use to go to war. Paraphrasing but he basically talks about religion, resources, and believe it or not economic systems.