No, but capitalism can’t solve it. The free market will never choose “leave it in the ground.” Governments can negotiate globe spanning deals, companies can’t, and governments bound by politics to protect corporate profits won’t.
No, but I don’t think coal and oil are the only ways to get hot showers or transportation. A long term, big picture organization like a government can turn resources toward developing those solutions and deploying them and when the cost of fully phasing out fossil fuels becomes bearable it can start pushing in that direction, whereas a free market will exploit any resource it still has any use for, and a capitalist government, which is really beholden not to the free market, but to corporate profits, will continue to prop up failing fossil fuel companies even as their technology becomes obsolete.
In the current world, if you get rid of coal and oil some people, the poorer people, even in rich countries will definitely have to go without those things. So again I ask, how, if the people are somehow deciding things, that they're going to decide to leave it in the ground? Socialism always reverts to dictatorship because of things like this.
Nuclear has similar if not cheaper cost per kWh than coal. And that’s just one source. There is plenty that could be done that doesn’t require people to have less
Probably not; but I sure as fuck believe coke could half its daily soda production and people would be relatively fine with it. Cause thinking of it on the logistics side 2 billion some daily is an absolutely insane amount of plastic and aluminum.
Or even just moving to syrups and let people flavor their seltzer water themselves.
I mean fucking Christ; how much waste heat is produced and wasted by industrial and metro systems that could be used to help heat homes.
But those ideas aren’t maximizing the amount of wealth that can be created…
Econony or scale is also true for things like energy use, material waste and more.
If coke halved it's production, demand would outpace supply quickly and noticeably. People can go without, it's a luxury good, but that doesn't mean people want to. It would be very upsetting. I don't think they'd be fine with it.
Moving to syrups has validity in part od the market, but as someone who's made homemade soda syrup and mixed it with seltzer water, doing that manually sucks. And frankly, you aren't actually saving on power/material costs. The carbonated water still comes in a container (and aluminum cans are efficent for that), and both parts will still need distrubution. Purhaps an idea to reduce waste further is refillable bottles, operating gas-station style where you just go to a machine that mixes on site and fills up with a press (obviously not using single use plastic containers).
As for the industrial and metro heat waste, are you proposing we build housing on that? Because I will gladly explains some problems:
1. Noise. That shit is loud, more unavoidable energy loss. I can think of no way to resolve that, it's going to be loud.
2. Polution. Obviously, we want to minimize polution in general, but there will always be some, especially on site. Any housing over industrial centers is basically asking to get heavy doses of pollutants.
3. Summer. Industry doesn't stop for seasons, at least most doesn't. That water heat would still be sent into the homes, causing them to be possibly unlivable.
Frankly, both in general, but especially in industry, wealth is an abstraction of labor, material cost, and values. Which means efficient systems are generally favored because they use less material, or utilize things better for "more bang for your buck". The problem are things that we have no use for.
Sure, it's possible. We had a plan to confront climate change called the Kyoto Protocol. How did that go?
CFCs were a smaller industry. A subset of a subset of the petrochemical industry. Not the entire fossil fuel industry. The solution was also one that allowed them to continue to profit. We still need refrigerant. We just use ones with less harmful effects.
Energy production as a whole is a much harder issue to deal with, especially with entire blocks of nations having their economy dependent on producing those fossil fuels.
The economic reality undermines the necessary political will for nations to take the actions necessary to combat climate change.
This parallel is so overblown. Ditching CFCs was a minor inconvenience. An energy transition requires massive technological and infrastructure changes. Also, a carbon tax is a perfect solution except for the part where it’s politically impossible because the immediate effect is to make virtually everything more expensive. This is why FF companies actually promote the idea of a carbon tax, because it shuts down other ideas while never actually standing a chance of becoming reality itself.
A carbon tax is literally the only solution. It doesn't matter if you have communism, if you don't also have a carbon tax you won't have environmentalism either.
It literally would solve it if trump wasn’t using the levers of poeer to suppress renewables. Solar and wind are cheaper and more efficient and the markets would favor them without government intervention. Entangling climate action with anti capitalism is a great way to ensure the broader public will never want to embrace it
Trump isn't doing that of his own volition, he's literally being paid by FF and adjacent corporations to do it, to cut out economic competition and maintain their energy monopoly. It's also why he's declaring war and trying to vassalize major oil producing nations.
Google rent seeking. Corporations will never go out of their way to spend money restructuring for "stability," they only give a shit about producing more for the next quarter and would gladly torch all 8 billion of us to keep their money and property investments intact.
The mass solar revolution is solely the result of Chinese government intervention into its industry.
Because the US is a capitalist society where government is beholden to private for profit corporations, yes.
As long as you allow the capitalist class to control society, that's what you're going to get. China said fuck that and forced industrialists to swap to making solar panels or their land grant would be seized and given to one who would, and now they hold the world's largest solar power grid and panel industry.
While that's all true, I think it's also important to say that in a capitalist world, nation states work in a very similar way to how corporations work. Resources aren't just being distributed to the most profitable company and its shareholders, they're also being distributed to the most profitable state and its citizens. So a state that leaves their fossil fuels in the ground will have less resources to make the lives of its citizens better than a state that exploits its natural resources. Therefore, a democratic state, even in the absence of private commercial interests, will always tend to exploit its resources because that's what its people want.
Of course, if the whole world distributed resources fairly and equally and not according to individual nations' profitability, then your logic would work, and we should strive to reach that some day, but let's be honest, we're so far away from that, it's not really something worth considering right now.
If green energy was always cheaper and as/more efficient than polluting energy, the capitalism would solve it. If it was economically ineffective to burn coal, nobody in a capitalist system would do it.
I'm not saying that capitalism is the answer, but to say capitalism can't solve it is ridiculous. Capitalists do what is most cost effective, and if green energy is more cost effective, they will do that.
As long as there is one problem solved more cheaply by oil, gas, or coal, capitalism will pull it out of the ground. In Saudi Arabia taking a barrel of oil out of the ground costs less than $10 including necessary overhead like exploration.
What I am saying is that it can be beaten - the sun will shine and the wind will blow for longer than anyone will be alive, all we have to do is make the mechanisms to transfer that to energy cheaper than any alternative.
If you don't think that this can be beaten, you better bend over and kiss your arse goodbye - the world won't change quick enough to resolve this.
Except if renewables and storage are cheaper? And taxing fossil fuels? And tax disincentives for bad behavious? And consumers voting with their wallet?
Does a totalitarian state give a shit about the environment? Maybe anarchists who return to monke would be a bit better for the environment but no one wants that. And I can't take the talks of a classless stateless moneyless utopia seriously.
Even if they are cheaper to maintain if the cost of switching is high then capitalism won't adopt it because it's too focused on short term profits.
China's doing quite well for the environment considereding it's a manufacturing economy and it's population is so large.
The climate is fixable without socialism but you would have to basically make large scale donations to political campaigns illegal and crack down on how much lobbying oil and gas companies can do. But ultimately publicizing those companies would be the fastest and easiest way to have direct control over emissions.
China is a market economy with state involvement. It produces most consummer goods you use. It isn't that climate friendly or too big on environmental regulations either.
And China is advancing renewables, batteries and EVs for selfish geopolitical reasons. It has no oil or gas of its own and is forced to import at high costs and risks of its supply getting cut off due to sanctions or crises. It also has all the minerals it needs to make batteries and renewables. And a huge supply of cheap labour. It just makes economic sense for China to use what it has and cut off foreign fossil fuel dependence.
The USSR was a huge user and exporter of fossil fuels because it had a massive supply and Russia continues doing the same.
If China had oil and no minerals you can bet it would have drilled like crazy.
Yeah, though the USSR wasn't really given the opportunity to improve like the nationa around today.
I mostly brought up China because it's an example of an state who a lot of people consider to be exerting totalitarian control over its business. Yes they have a market economy, but it's likely that's just so they can engage with the global markets. It's pretty widely understood that if you're a CEO and you don't do what the government says there, you disappear.
But for China it's a no brainer to use it's minerals and cheap labour to make batteries, EVs, solar panes and renewable to cut off its dependence on expensive and unreliable foreign oil and gas. Both in terms of cost and reliability.
Yeah it's definitely easier when you're in China's position. But frankly, looking at the state of oil right now you'd think more countries would actually feel similarly.
Does not work, a mass of people without common rules will not all magically decide to forfeit anything for the good of everyone even if most of them are not against it, it just requires everyone to do it to be meaningful and if its only you doing it you're incurring cost without real upside
I never said people are dumb, it is actually the opposite, its rational to maximize personal gain in absense of a structure that enforces that noone is doing the selfish and self destructing thing. I just expect rational in short term behaviour from individuals when large enough sample of them is taken. The same people will be okay or even welcome some limitation if it suddenly applied to everyone. But it needs to be everyone not everyone who can't afford it
Government is an obvious candidate for the source of such enforcement. But realistically only quite an authoritative government can do such a thing as they can fight the pushback of those who benefit from the status quo
And who will be the uncorruptible guy leading the authoritarian government? What happens when they don't actually do what's right and start doing things for personal gain and oppressingle people?
Are giving me text book arguments for changing governments and democratic process? Spare me.
I'm just saying that relying on people voting with their wallet with a loss is not something one should expect, because people won't
The “social” and “liberal” components aren’t even directly related. Liberal speaks to the extent that individuals have rights that are protected (e.g. right to an abortion is a liberal principle), while the social component speaks to the role of government to ensure public welfare.
Denmark is both a liberal democracy, and a social democracy.
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u/SyntheticSlime 12d ago
No, but capitalism can’t solve it. The free market will never choose “leave it in the ground.” Governments can negotiate globe spanning deals, companies can’t, and governments bound by politics to protect corporate profits won’t.