So OSR, S019 and me have had this debate on capitalism and environmentalism? Who won the debate?

[LAKISYLVANIA]

Poll: 2 votes per user (if you think both OSR and S019 won the debate).



















Curious to see what other people think, because i just don't get "this kind of reasoning".

[Benjamin Frank]

Capitalism is the worst economic system...except for all the others.

One of the market failures/imperfections of capitalism is that it doesn't capture negative externalities in pricing. This is the reason for a carbon tax, to include a fuller total cost of the activity, including on third parties.

In regards to global warming, it seems clear that things have advanced to the stage that placing a price on GHG emissions now simply isn't enough to address the problem. So, this leads to requiring subsidies to further reduce GHG emissions beyond what carbon taxes do. (or, better yet, GHG taxes.)

This is the cold equations. Had climate change been started to be seriously addressed 30 years ago or so, the problem would not require so much effort now.

Of course, beyond that, reducing emmissions by itself also isn't enough, it's going to take mitigation actions as well which is going to require a great deal of money too.

Essentially, every dollar from productivity gains all around the world will likely have to go into abatement and mitigation in order to reduce climate refugees, a food production crisis, flooding, wildfires, mass animal extinction... for probably the next 30 years. All of these things are already occurring too, climate change isn't some future problem, but is a real problem right now.

I don't know how much advertising contributes to any harms of capitalism, but I do know that not pricing negative externalities also distorts markets and I know that the major reason climate change wasn't started to be addressed 30 or so years ago is because horrible people, especially fossil fuel industrialists like the Koch Brothers and media titans like Rupert Murdoch deliberately lied to the public that 'climate change is a hoax.'

I agree that most people are primarily self interested, but I also think that most people do want to 'do the right thing' most of the time and that without this lying 'climate hoax' campaign, many/most people starting 30 or so years ago would have made better decisions regarding buying more fuel efficient vehicles at the very least, even without carbon taxes, but even more so with carbon taxes. However, with this dishonest campaign, for a long time many people could justify buying Hummers or SUVs by thinking 'climate change isn't a real problem anway.'

But, here we are now.  In 30 years time, I'd expect that people in aggregate will be no wealthier than they are now, and possibly even poorer. That is, unless, of course, there is some 'black swan' event like massive breakthroughs in fusion power.

Of course, if mitigating (not stopping) climate change is 'unrealistic', it's also unrealistic to expect that humans can escape the mass animal extinction. As comedian George Carlin actually said about climate change: "Climate change won't kill the earth, the earth will be fine...It will kill the humans on the earth."

For anybody interested, this is the short science fiction story The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin from 1954.
https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-cold-equations/
I didn’t do anything to die for … I didn’t do anything …

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

Both of them get their R talking pts from each other and both were wrong on Fetterman losing I don't listen to either one of them at least Prez Johnson and Sir Muhammad doesn't constantly go on OH threads and say it's safe R

OH was a Carter, Clinton, Obama state and we will win it back eventually

You know you are gonna be scoreboard watching asD even  if you believe OH is safe R you hope it goes D

[Del Tachi]

oh my god who cares??

this [inks] is f'ing unreadable

learn to type in actual paragraphs

[OSR stands with Israel]

oh my god who cares??

this [inks] is f'ing unreadable

learn to type in actual paragraphs

This is how Discord works

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

I'm not reading that but S019.

[Interlocutor is just not there yet]

It's an online debate so I'm gonna say everyone lost

[Benjamin Frank]

It's an online debate so I'm gonna say everyone lost

How is that debate any different than debates here?

[Kamala's side hoe]

oh my god who cares??

this [inks] is f'ing unreadable

learn to type in actual paragraphs

This is how Discord works

Could be due to Laki’s screenshots but this discussion was relatively on-topic for a Discord channel.

Re: Laki’s point on electric cars- there’s more to the world of EVs than Tesla.

Won’t vote in the poll, but I will say this. Addressing aggregate demand and shifting consumer incentives will fundamentally require working with market forces. The philosophical debate between government planning and private property is a lot less relevant to emerging 21st century problems than a lot of Leipverse ideologues want to think.

Not my words but I agree with this: https://www.quora.com/Is-it-possible-to-be-anti-capitalist-without-being-socialist-or-communist/answer/KeAun

[Benjamin Frank]

oh my god who cares??

this [inks] is f'ing unreadable

learn to type in actual paragraphs

This is how Discord works

Could be due to Laki’s screenshots but this discussion was relatively on-topic for a Discord channel.

Re: Laki’s point on electric cars- there’s more to the world of EVs than Tesla.

Won’t vote in the poll, but I will say this. Addressing aggregate demand and shifting consumer incentives will fundamentally require working with market forces. The philosophical debate between government planning and private property is a lot less relevant to emerging 21st century problems than a lot of Leipverse ideologues want to think.

Not my words but I agree with this: https://www.quora.com/Is-it-possible-to-be-anti-capitalist-without-being-socialist-or-communist/answer/KeAun

A non socialist anti capitalist is somebody who recognizes the reality of market failures/imperfections and believes that it's the role of government to address them.

It's mostly in the United States the belief that to be pro capitalist you must be laissez faire. In most of the world, there is no contradiction between supporting free markets and supporting government addressing market failures/imperfections.

[bagelman]

tldr

[Upper Canada Tory]

It is neither capitalism nor socialism that is responsible for greenhouse gas emissions - industrialization is. Both capitalist and socialist economies have historically produced large amounts of GHG emissions, but we can't undo industrialization now, because it's essential to our standard of living. Capitalism has benefitted us greatly in the sense that in this day and age, we have the highest standard of living in all of human history, all thanks to capitalism.

However, as Benjamin Frank mentions, capitalism doesn't do a good job accounting for negative externalities. Negative externalities are costs resulting from the consumption of a good or service that are incurred by an uninvolved third party, rather than the two private parties making the transaction of the good or service.

However, under capitalism, there are potential policy-based solutions to this problem. One policy mechanism that exists under capitalism to reduce the harmful effects of negative externalities is known as a Pigouvian tax. Pigouvian taxes can be imposed for many different types of negative externalities, but the most famous example of this are the taxes that exist on greenhouse gas emissions in many jurisdictions around the world.

Now, there are challenges to this kind of policy mechanism, such as it being difficult to measure the social cost of a negative externality, the reciprocal cost problem (in the sense that the Pigouvian tax often imposes the cost disproportionately on one offender in a transaction that involves two parties that mutually benefit), the fact that environmental taxes can often be regressive and many others, however, in the case of climate change, I'd argue that imposing a tax on GHG emissions is preferable to the alternative, which is allow the problem to get to a point where it is unmanageable and has serious effects on our day-to-day life, human health and so on.

Taxes on negative externalities also provide an incentive to look for other alternatives. Nuclear power and renewable energy exists and the extent of their use is increasing in many parts of the world. Electric vehicles also exist and although they also have an environmental cost due to the extraction of lithium, the production of their batteries and the manufacturing process, they are still cleaner than the alternatives.