Tbf it's not that anybody saw that coming. Maybe Bakunin, Kropotkin, Malatesta and all the other anarchists but aside from them, nobody could have known it.
Except you oversimplified and it matters. The entire point of capitalism is to centralize money in the hands of a few at the expense of the rest. Capitalism itself demands continued growth, which is unsustainable.
All forms of government are subject to corruption, but only some forms of government are broken by design.
Capitalism itself demands continued growth, which is unsustainable.
Green energy is a growth industry. No reason why capitalists can't make money building and renting new green infrastructure.
If anything, we could use a huge injection of new capital spending. We're just not getting it into energy projects. We're getting it into fantasies and scams, like Crypto and AI
Why? Capitalism cannot solve Climate Change, as it depends on the highest possible profit margins and rampant consumerism. Transitioning from a profit-focused system to fulfilling uses and needs in Socialism, where the Proletariat is in charge and can collectively agree to tackle Climate Change, is the only path forward.
This seems like you just want to be edgy and doomerist with nothing to back yourself up.
Capitalism cannot solve Climate Change, as it depends on the highest possible profit margins and rampant consumerism.
It's definitely possible to do "Green Capitalism", so long as the profit margins of green capital exceed dirty capital.
But Americans have huge investments in old dirty infrastructure that they want to use until it falls apart. That's the real difficulty. How do you convince people with a $1B pipeline through the West Texas gas fields to scrape that project and build lower-profit windmills/solar farms and HVDC cable lines instead?
Our current leadership could subsidize green energy to move the market. But this would force existing businesses to build new capital rather than rent seeking on existing capital.
Compare the US to France, which has a huge legacy investment in nuclear power. They're capitalist, too, but they aren't in a rush to burn more fossil fuels.
The funny thing is that you'll have a hard time defending that the North Europe ones are governed by the property owning class... So this one is actually false. But it does apply to all countries that call themselves communist.
Anyway, it's a very rare oddity for a country to have such a strong middle class that rich people can not reign free. Good for those few ones that managed it.
(And yeah, talk about non-sequitur on the 4rt one. It's ridiculous. Yeah, the best way to fight climate change is by supporting a revolution lead by the OP's favorite fascists. No explanation needed.)
The funny thing is that you'll have a hard time defending that the North Europe ones are governed by the property owning class... So this one is actually false. But it does apply to all countries that call themselves communist.
All of the Nordic Countries are Dictatorships of the Bourgeoisie, they have seen sliding worker protections over time and increased disparity. Occasionally, Capitalists will make concessions to keep their power for longer, that's what happened in the Nordics.
You are correct about Communist countries, they are directed by the Proletariat, who now owns the property. I doubt that's what you were meaning, though.
Anyway, it's a very rare oddity for a country to have such a strong middle class that rich people can not reign free. Good for those few ones that managed it.
It's not really rare, it happened in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. Social Democracy is not fascism, but the idea of the Middle and Upper classes collaborating, ie the petite bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie against the proletariat, is something Social Democracy shares with fascism.
(And yeah, talk about non-sequitur on the 4rt one. It's ridiculous. Yeah, the best way to fight climate change is by supporting a revolution lead by the OP's favorite fascists. No explanation needed.)
Can you explain how OP is supporting fascism? Is Marxism "fascist" to you? Why?
Our government was corrupted the moment the courts accepted the "Corporations are people/ Money is speech" arguments. At that moment, the government stopped representing the needs of ordinary people and only represented the needs of billionaires and their lobbyists.
It's taking a long time to play out but it's going to end badly.
Our government was corrupted long before that. Harlow Vs Fitzgerald in 1982 comes to mind as the SCOTUS unintentionally legislated from the bench due to some southern revisionist in 1874.
I don't know how to get everyone I know to really understand this. Every time I bring it up in conversation, the other person just puts their hands up and explains that they're powerless to address it, so it's not even worth talking about.
I don't know how to respond to the apathy.
With reasonable, actionable steps. If you don't have those, then they kind of have a point, don't they? It's like the Newton's flaming laser sword of politics.
To be honest i offen feel the same, just helpless and too insignificant to change it in my own. But thats the point, we are not allone! I just try to show them undenieble facts, the already very present effect of climate crisis or just statistics of how the money is distributed in our country.
The thing I struggle most with them is their bad feith in people. For example many welfare programs or in the extreme the concept of unconditional income by the state gets always used to argue that people are lazy and it would not work because no one would get a job anymore, which i disagree with
The best way to counter this is to point out the laziness at the top. Corporate welfare is way more damaging to society than the few million lazy people at the bottom. It would cost a lot less to write them off than to pay CEOs 2000 times as much as the average worker.
Include, in your politics, actionable steps. The most important step is to create worker coops and supporting institutions, so you aren't giving the fruits of your labor to capitalists with what you do everyday @memes
Corruption in politics was described to me once as the grease that keeps the cogs of government turning. The importance difference is what type of grease is used. A government with low corruption uses a small amount of very clean grease, just enough, and only in the right places, to make the sticky gears turn. A government with high corruption will just drench every gear with very dirty crude oil, and if the gears seizes up they won't even notice.
In an ideal world the machine of government wouldn't need any corrupt grease or oil to keep turning but no one truely lives in that world, yet.
Hey if a bunch of scientists say otherwise then, yah, they know better. But I thought we were basically beyond preventing catastrophic climate disaster?
Also this is the first I'm seeing the big Gritty brain meme format and I love it!
Lots of solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear energy investment in the public sector. Huge investments in mass transit and electric engines. Conversion of old coal powered steel production to electric. Dense urban real estate department. Disposable waste reduction. Big efforts at tree planting along the Gobi Desert.
They've been very "all options on the table" about climate change. Some work. Some don't. But the progress is undeniable.
In China, 47.4GW of coal power capacity came online in 2023, GEM says. This increase accounted for two-thirds of the global rise in operating coal power capacity, which climbed 2% to 2,130GW.
China’s 70.2GW of new construction getting underway in 2023 represents 19-times more than the rest of the world’s 3.7GW. As the figure below highlights, the country’s trajectory (red line) is diverging significantly from the rest of the world (orange line).
We couldn't have non capitalist state with imperialism
However, if we consider countries without state, we shall consider EZLN and the Democnatic Confederation in Rojava. Both have very interesting approach of eco-socialism.
What are the non-capitalist countries doing to fight climate change?
Hunting and gathering, mostly. When the superpowers are capitalists, everyone is capitalist. Anyone who thinks China isn't capitalist hasn't bought anything off Amazon in the last decade.
I would usually say this is going too far, but this winter didn't seem nearly as cold as usual, and that was concerning. Feels like in the next two decades the planet might not have winter... And might have a deadly season that was formerly summer.
I remember when it was so cold out that my car overheated in the winter because all of the coolant (rated to below zero Fahrenheit), froze. Now, I'm damn near blasting the AC in winter because it's so damn warm.
Come change is happening. IDK how much more proof people really need... The argument of winter still being cold isn't applicable anymore.
Yeah, it was crazy how warm last winter was. I live in Edmonton which is the most northern city with 1 million people in North America, and even through December we would have no snow on the ground when regularly there would be a couple inches to a foot everywhere.
The weather is also much more sporadic than I ever remember it being which is fun. It's either unusually warm or stupidly cold. We had only about a week of really cold weather and heavy snow last winter
Yesterday 21th of July was the hottest day in recorded global history. This year's February, April and June were the hottest respective months in recorded history. Just putting this out there
A whole lot of food needs to be pollinated by insects. Those insects have a time when they get out of their eggs in spring. But what if the tree blossoms before the insects are here? No pollination. This means it dies a blossom, never to be turned into food. Continue this for some years and the insects die out, some more and the final plant will die.
It’s always happened, yes, but it’s too fast.
The people will die, the planet recovers.
And what’s a planet if there’s no people to enjoy it.
we’re all gonna die if we don’t make sure people without money have a voice too, and convince powerful people not to keep polluting
You cannot convince Capitalists to "do the right thing." That was the common through-line of Utopian Socialist failures. I recommend reading Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.
That's not a bad thing, we all come to new things not understanding them at first, especially topics that we don't get a good grasp on until we're into adulthood and no longer have a structured education system to guide us. Subjects like politics, economics, sociology etc.
We all come to these daunting subjects with various levels of knowledge and ability, all we can do is try to dip our toes in to a subject that feels important to understand, get reading, watching videos, whatever works best for you, and go from there :-)