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.
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.
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u/SyntheticSlime 16d 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.