We’ve been able to put a man on the moon, build nanometer scale transistors, and created tools to collaborate effectively without having to physically meet (for example, Git). Wouldn’t it be possible too to solve global warming?
There is no missing piece. We all know we need to drastically cut carbon emissions, capture as much carbon as we can, and use energy sources that do not emit carbon into the atmosphere. That's pretty much it.
So the only argument for "this will lower quality of life" is that things might become more expensive. But renewable energy in fairly cheap, so I'm not convinced that on average quality of life will suffer. Some things will get more expensive, others will get cheaper.
You're missing one of the biggest contributors: construction. Cement and steel are both huge sources of carbon emissions. There are potential solutions to this, but it's another very difficult area to transition.
- Every single place on the earth up to the year 2000 had an average temperature as well as a max and min temperature, along with a variance of predictability along those days. What do we need for our communities to stay stable if the max goes up, the min goes down, the variance of predictability goes up (and continues to go up every year)?
[1] Which are hard enough to solve without malicious actors actively undermining us.
We "unchanged" are a exponential curve, bumping against a linear ceiling and this needs to fixed first, to even have the mental tooling and stability to handle grand projects.
I guess that's true in the technical sense, but it doesn't mean much. Electric cars were a thing in the 19th century, yet it was only in the past decade or so that they gotten popular. Would you characterize the failure of electric cars to get traction as "The problem isn't technological, it's political"?
The first result for "cost to decarbonize"[1] says it would cost $340T, compared to global GDP of $80T. You could argue that it's a political problem that we're not allocating our budget towards that goal, but at the same time you could argue that if technology improved it would be a much easier pill to swallow.
[1] https://boereport.com/2019/02/26/the-cost-of-decarbonization...
https://www.npr.org/2022/06/30/1103595898/supreme-court-epa-...
But those systems and beliefs are orthogonal. Corporatists just picks the parts of capitalism they like and ignores the rest.
Corporatists = greedy
But why though?
Can you really ascribe character traits to these groups with a single brush?
The only way I can think of is that communism frequently devolves into a dictatorship and if that dictator is more motivated to solve climate change than the democracy he'll do a better job solving it.
That and communist countries tend to be really poor which usually results in less carbon use per person.
Anyway you don't even need to endorse communism per se to point out that the current setup is pretty fucked and entirely incapable of cleaning up the mess it has created.
The conflation of democracy/capitalism and dictatorship/communism is dated and not very useful either. We haven't seen a new communist state rise in a generation or more so it's not clear if that cold war logic holds. Meanwhile we've seen plenty of capitalist dictatorships, and an increasingly authoritarian swerve in a lot of solidly market-based economies so idk. Doesn't seem like a strong link to me.
Because even dictators realized that free markets are very effective. Just like science is very effective.
Trying to run a country without free markets is like trying to run a country without science. You can try but you'll be doomed to insignificance and pushed to the margins of the world.
It's completely deranged to think there is exactly one economic structure that can function. Capitalism won, absolutely, I wouldn't dispute that. But taking its victory as inevitable and permanent is such a failure of imagination.
Like thinking cats are the only viable mammals because lions dominate their ecosystems. There are other ecosystems! Mice still exist. Carnivores are vulnerable to their ecosystems changing and boooooy are the ecosystems changing.
You talk of imagination but you haven't even described your solution or why it would be better than the well studied economics concepts of free markets with carbon taxes.
At the same time I'm not a scholar, historian, economist, politician, or powerful military leader. My capacity to conceive of another future, or author it, is constrained. My ability to condemn evil where I find it is not, however.
It's like a diabetic stopping their insulin in the hopes something better will come along.
They said we must replace capitalism because of the horrors it perpetrates.
That is a very strong statement.
But I guess they could be saying "we are morally compelled to replace capitalism with a system that may or not work exist that may or may not solve the problems we have attributed to capitalism without showing that any other workable system fixes these problems, only that they happen to exist under our current system."
Which doesn't strike me as the most useful criticism of capitalism.
The person you're replying to has already expressed doubt about whether it's a simple capitalism/communism dichotomy. Responding to a communist straw man of your own creation isn't helpful.
No idea if it would work in practice, but we need to move beyond this mindset that there are only two possible options for how to structure an economy.
Which also doesn't prevent inequality. If software engineers own Google, and baristas own Starbucks, what with Google being way more profitable, the software engineers will still be much richer than the baristas.
Free markets with a tax funded social safety net seems like a much more efficient way of reducing inequality to me.
What other ways are there to organize markets or the economy have there been that we've seen at a country scale?
>Anyway you don't even need to endorse communism per se to point out that the current setup is pretty fucked and entirely incapable of cleaning up the mess it has created.
I think it's easy to blame every woe that we have such as climate change on "capitalism" without offering an alternative. The reason we have emitted a lot of carbon is capitalism made us a rich, and we don't care enough to stop it. Capitalism is at fault only in the sense that it made us rich.
> The conflation of democracy/capitalism and dictatorship/communism is dated and not very useful either. We haven't seen a new communist state rise in a generation or more so it's not clear if that cold war logic holds. Meanwhile we've seen plenty of capitalist dictatorships, and an increasingly authoritarian swerve in a lot of solidly market-based economies so idk. Doesn't seem like a strong link to me.
There are plenty of market based economies that more or less function like a democracy. I'm not aware of any communist countries that function like a democracy.
How do you propose to implement and maintain your communism without some system of government that's up at the totalitarian end of the spectrum?
Are non-capitalist economies any better? ie. are there non-capitalist economies out there with fossil fuel reserves that aren't extracting/burning them?
You do realize their impact is very small.