Unfortunately it seems like those words have largely lost all meaning regardless of the political leanings of the user. So many times I see someone blame environmental destruction or poverty or warfare or whatever on “capitalism” and I wonder if they’ve ever heard of 90% of the history of humanity. You don’t need capitalism for any of that.
Industrial productivity comes at the cost of the environment. It’s just a fact that snark won’t change, or who owns the means of production.
Like, that’s just how mining works. You take stuff out of the ground and it doesn’t grow back, and, spoilers, mine tailings were some toxic shit even in antiquity.
Logging at least has the option of reforestation but that requires humans to stop building on the clear cut land.
Even industrial pollution isn’t a new concern. The scale might be, but traditional tanneries and smitheries would poison the rivers and land of cities.
Your comment is a good example of two of the classic global warming denial tactics.
You’re claim about industrial productivity causing unavoidable damage to the environment is setting up a binary in order to pretend the badness is unavoidable. In reality, different industrial procedures have vastly varying effects on the environment. One procedure might have an incredibly small effect relative to another, but if we listen to your claim, we would lump them all together and shrug our shoulders because it’s necessary to have industry in modern society.
And then there’s the scale argument. Well, the scale argument is another kind of deflection. I think the background assumption is that because human beings have done things on a small scale for the past few hundred years, we shouldn’t worry that things have been ramped up in the last half century. Of course that doesn’t make sense because the world population has risen massively, and the effects of increased climate change end up causing irreversible damage, damage that wasn’t even close to being caused a hundred years ago.
And finally, the fatalistic tone itself is a deflection tactic. In fact we have created a lot of legislation to fix problems created by pollution. We have successfully regulated a ton of environmental problems away. So if we’re trying to use history as a measure of how to create the future, let’s get even more regulation into place.
It’s also setting up the fallacy that capitalism is completely unregulated. We have tons of regulations setting up the marketplace that capital works within, and that should certainly include societal goals like “clean up after yourself”. You don’t get to abdicate your responsibility, then blame it on capitalism
Industrial productivity comes at the cost of the environment.
There’s no industrial productivity that comes from sustainability. You can only harvest to exhaustion. And you can never give back any more than you take.
This is the nature of industry and not at all the nature of profit chasing.
Like, that’s just how mining works.
No mining but strip mining.
Even industrial pollution isn’t a new concern.
An unsolvable concern. Certainly not one that industrial recycling and waste mitigation can address.
More recent and concrete examples: The Aral Sea, victim of the infamously capitalist Soviet Union. The Great Chinese Famine, precipitated by the notoriously capitalistic excesses of the Chinese Communist Party.
Pointing out the devastating results of communism attempts in the past is usually met with outright denial or disclaimers about those not being true attempts at communism, which probably has some validity. However the unfortunate part is that real, true communism simply can’t work because of how selfish and tribal humans are, how easily they create enemies of others, in groups and out groups. Communism inevitably devolves into an authoritarian regime, which is an utter failure of the principle of Communism. People in this thread want to bash conservatives for being stupid and not understanding communism, but the reality is that most conservatives simply don’t believe that it works. These irreconcilable views are all the evidence you need that communism simply isn’t viable unless there is a fundamental change in how humans work.
So many times I see someone blame environmental destruction or poverty or warfare or whatever on “capitalism”
Can’t imagine what the BP Horizon rig explosion or the economic emiseration caused by prison privatization or the MIC arms export industry would have to do with capitalism.
These people are probably just on too much TikTok.
Obviously bad stuff like that happens. The point is that it’s not caused by capitalism, but by more basic and general human nature. The people who think “if only we could get rid of capitalism these bad things wouldn’t happen” are being ridiculous.
In that sense, capitalism is absolutely responsible for Net Increase In Per Capita Pollution.
It isn’t merely that bad things happen. It is that in a private model, the economic benefit of production is given priority over the social cost of ecological degradation. Soviet central planned economies, operating as a holistic body, must account for waste. And while they can have a tolerance of it in pursuit of longer term goals, they cannot ignore ecological costs indefinitely. The Dengist industrial period is a perfect case in point. Although, under Lenin at least, the Russian Soviets gave ecological preservation a priority not known since at least Catherine the Great.
“Capitalism” in the functional sense is an ecological moral hazard. Westward expansion is uniformly recognized as an ecological blight, with a number of very plain incentives to wage war through ecological destruction, most notably during the Indian Wars. And plantation ecology was nearly as bad as its labor practice, with southern tobacco farming rapidly depleting the soil and causing crop failure that even 18th century rural aristocrats couldn’t ignore.
These two economic systems are not the same in this regard.
Irrelevant, they were around when the things I linked to happened.
I’m a little surprised you didn’t pivot to China.
I’ve mentioned China in one of my other comments in this thread, specifically the Great Chinese Famine. I’m not interested in making an exhaustive list when a few counterexamples prove the point fine on their own.
My point has never been that only capitalist/non-capitalist countries do awful things to the environment or economy or whatnot. My point is the opposite, in fact. There’s no particular correlation, people are selfish and short-sighted regardless of what economic system they’re working within. Because people remain people.
Yes, the Great Chinese Famine, in which tens of millions of people starved to death due to botched agricultural policies under a communist government. A collectivist agricultural system, in which the farms were very much not “privatized.”
Unfortunately it seems like those words have largely lost all meaning regardless of the political leanings of the user. So many times I see someone blame environmental destruction or poverty or warfare or whatever on “capitalism” and I wonder if they’ve ever heard of 90% of the history of humanity. You don’t need capitalism for any of that.
Yes, who can forget the famous Babylonian mountains of plastic, or the chemical spills of 300BC. Ancient Greece was never the same after that.
Industrial productivity comes at the cost of the environment. It’s just a fact that snark won’t change, or who owns the means of production.
Like, that’s just how mining works. You take stuff out of the ground and it doesn’t grow back, and, spoilers, mine tailings were some toxic shit even in antiquity.
Logging at least has the option of reforestation but that requires humans to stop building on the clear cut land.
Even industrial pollution isn’t a new concern. The scale might be, but traditional tanneries and smitheries would poison the rivers and land of cities.
Your comment is a good example of two of the classic global warming denial tactics.
You’re claim about industrial productivity causing unavoidable damage to the environment is setting up a binary in order to pretend the badness is unavoidable. In reality, different industrial procedures have vastly varying effects on the environment. One procedure might have an incredibly small effect relative to another, but if we listen to your claim, we would lump them all together and shrug our shoulders because it’s necessary to have industry in modern society.
And then there’s the scale argument. Well, the scale argument is another kind of deflection. I think the background assumption is that because human beings have done things on a small scale for the past few hundred years, we shouldn’t worry that things have been ramped up in the last half century. Of course that doesn’t make sense because the world population has risen massively, and the effects of increased climate change end up causing irreversible damage, damage that wasn’t even close to being caused a hundred years ago.
And finally, the fatalistic tone itself is a deflection tactic. In fact we have created a lot of legislation to fix problems created by pollution. We have successfully regulated a ton of environmental problems away. So if we’re trying to use history as a measure of how to create the future, let’s get even more regulation into place.
It’s also setting up the fallacy that capitalism is completely unregulated. We have tons of regulations setting up the marketplace that capital works within, and that should certainly include societal goals like “clean up after yourself”. You don’t get to abdicate your responsibility, then blame it on capitalism
Talk about deflection, lol
There’s no industrial productivity that comes from sustainability. You can only harvest to exhaustion. And you can never give back any more than you take.
This is the nature of industry and not at all the nature of profit chasing.
No mining but strip mining.
An unsolvable concern. Certainly not one that industrial recycling and waste mitigation can address.
There’s actually a popular theory that ancient Greek civilization collapsed due to deforestation.
More recent and concrete examples: The Aral Sea, victim of the infamously capitalist Soviet Union. The Great Chinese Famine, precipitated by the notoriously capitalistic excesses of the Chinese Communist Party.
Pointing out the devastating results of communism attempts in the past is usually met with outright denial or disclaimers about those not being true attempts at communism, which probably has some validity. However the unfortunate part is that real, true communism simply can’t work because of how selfish and tribal humans are, how easily they create enemies of others, in groups and out groups. Communism inevitably devolves into an authoritarian regime, which is an utter failure of the principle of Communism. People in this thread want to bash conservatives for being stupid and not understanding communism, but the reality is that most conservatives simply don’t believe that it works. These irreconcilable views are all the evidence you need that communism simply isn’t viable unless there is a fundamental change in how humans work.
https://youtu.be/Qc7HmhrgTuQ?si=K5HPcmjtur5utD2i
Can’t imagine what the BP Horizon rig explosion or the economic emiseration caused by prison privatization or the MIC arms export industry would have to do with capitalism.
These people are probably just on too much TikTok.
So for example the Soviet Union never had environmental disasters, prison labor and slavery, or its own military-industrial complex?
Obviously bad stuff like that happens. The point is that it’s not caused by capitalism, but by more basic and general human nature. The people who think “if only we could get rid of capitalism these bad things wouldn’t happen” are being ridiculous.
The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. So certainly not since then.
I’m a little surprised you didn’t pivot to China. But then you might have to ask what they’ve been up to in the Gobi Desert or with their domestic air pollution or in pursuit of zero-emissions international bulk shipping
In fact China is one of the only countries set to OVERACHIEVE its climate goals by 2030
If we’re just running the numbers, we’ll consistently find that privatization consistently increases the rate of pollution despite reducing gross productive volumes.
In that sense, capitalism is absolutely responsible for Net Increase In Per Capita Pollution.
It isn’t merely that bad things happen. It is that in a private model, the economic benefit of production is given priority over the social cost of ecological degradation. Soviet central planned economies, operating as a holistic body, must account for waste. And while they can have a tolerance of it in pursuit of longer term goals, they cannot ignore ecological costs indefinitely. The Dengist industrial period is a perfect case in point. Although, under Lenin at least, the Russian Soviets gave ecological preservation a priority not known since at least Catherine the Great.
“Capitalism” in the functional sense is an ecological moral hazard. Westward expansion is uniformly recognized as an ecological blight, with a number of very plain incentives to wage war through ecological destruction, most notably during the Indian Wars. And plantation ecology was nearly as bad as its labor practice, with southern tobacco farming rapidly depleting the soil and causing crop failure that even 18th century rural aristocrats couldn’t ignore.
These two economic systems are not the same in this regard.
Irrelevant, they were around when the things I linked to happened.
I’ve mentioned China in one of my other comments in this thread, specifically the Great Chinese Famine. I’m not interested in making an exhaustive list when a few counterexamples prove the point fine on their own.
My point has never been that only capitalist/non-capitalist countries do awful things to the environment or economy or whatnot. My point is the opposite, in fact. There’s no particular correlation, people are selfish and short-sighted regardless of what economic system they’re working within. Because people remain people.
Might want to consult the recent history of plastics and the per capita rate of fossil fuel consumption before and after.
The Last Chinese Famine? The one right before Chinese industrial agriculture ended famines in the country ever since?
Whatever policy you have or practice you perform, privatization makes the ecological harm worse.
Once you decouple the cost of waste from the surplus of production, your industrial practices get worse.
That means capitalism is directly leading to excess waste.
Yes, the Great Chinese Famine, in which tens of millions of people starved to death due to botched agricultural policies under a communist government. A collectivist agricultural system, in which the farms were very much not “privatized.”
The botched agricultural policies in China were the same adopted in Western states for decades.
Are you seriously arguing the problem with China in 1959 was a lack of landlords?
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