PowerSwitch

https://patternsofmeaning.com/2021/10/1 ... apitalism/

The global conversation regarding climate change has, for the most part, ignored the elephant in the room.
That’s strange, because this particular elephant is so large, obvious, and all-encompassing that politicians and executives must contort themselves to avoid naming it publicly.
That elephant is called capitalism, and it is high time to face the fact that, as long as capitalism remains the dominant economic system of our globalized world, the climate crisis won’t be resolved.

As the crucial UN climate talks known as COP26 approach in early November, the public is becoming increasingly aware that the stakes have never been higher.
What were once ominous warnings of future climate shocks wrought by wildfires, floods, and droughts have now become a staple of the daily news. Yet governments are failing to meet their own emissions pledges from the Paris agreement six years ago, which were themselves acknowledged to be inadequate.
Increasingly, respected Earth scientists are warning, not just about the devastating effects of climate breakdown on our daily lives, but about the potential collapse of civilization itself unless we drastically change direction.

The elephant in the room might have been overlooked by some in this country but it is a major problem in the US where deniers say that global warming is just a made up excuse to attack capitalism. On any discussion board if you support climate change mitigation you will be attacked as a raving lefty who is trying to get rid of capitalism by mainly American posters.

As far as I am concerned the problem isn't capitalism but the lack of regulation of the capitalist system and mainly the banking system with its requirement for the charging and paying of interest. This means that the economy has to keep growing to earn the money to pay the interest as there is only enough money in the system at the time a loan is given to pay off the capital of the loan. The economy has to grow, earn more money, to pay off the interest.

A properly regulated capitalist system, where companies have to either pay for the cost of their pollution to be corrected by someone else or have to clean up their own pollution or not pollute at all, isn't a problem. The problem is everybody having to buy ever more stuff to pay for the interest on loans which means that companies have to keep producing stuff.

We have found in this country and many others that people can only buy so much stuff and when they reach a certain level of affluence they don't have enough children to replace themselves as purchasers so the answer is to import more people to keep the population growing. This immigration is OK as long as the world population and food supply is growing but when the world population stabilises and then starts to drop as is predicted by 2050 one country's immigration becomes the theft of the wealth of another country as you are stealing the grow of the donor country by reducing its population.

Then there is the problem of food provision in a world that is going to see huge problems with food production in the future as climate change adversely affects food production in most countries. Countries like the UK which are stealing people to maintain our own wealth and lifestyles and also rely on others to produce a large proportion of our food are going to have major problems in the future. and they are all based on the necessity to keep economic growth going to pay bank interest.

One industrial process or company can replace another process or company as designs and technology improve and we can go from the mass production necessary to produce endless short lived stuff and tat for growth to small scale batch production of good quality, long lived, repairable products which minimise material use and pollution. That can still be done under a regulated capitalist system as long as we stop having to pay interest on loans.

This just needs to be explained to the dullards who listen to the propaganda of the banks, billionaires and big corporations who know that they are going to lose out in the new world order.

To express a slightly different angle to what Ken has said above, the pertinent question is this: "Is a form of capitalism possible which does not require perpetual economic growth?" And I think the answer is that it probably is possible, although the resulting system would be so different to what has been known as "capitalism" that some people would insist the name needs to be changed. At which point the argument becomes purely semantic. IOW the fundamental problem is the systemic need for growth, not capitalism itself.