Reply To: Climate Crisis: Our Last Chance
This is more like it:
https://boingboing.net/2016/01/12/keep-your-scythe-the-real-gre.html
Love the title of the book being reviewed: Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts. It seems to make some good points too:
…[G]rowth under market conditions also requires pollution/extraction/waste/overproduction:
“The firm not be able to pay for new materials or labour or the upkeep of its machines and will go out of business. This is why capitalists, left to their own devices, have no choice but to pollute or extract or pump out CO2 or catch fish at a rate that is heedless of what remains of our store of resources. It is not that they are evil or greedy. If one capitalist says to herself “To hell with the profits! The planet is more important!” then she will quickly be beaten by a rival who is not so scrupulous. To keep going, they will have to give up on such high-minded thoughts. And this is true regardless of size, whether a globe-rogering, $11-bajillion-market-cap, Taibbian vampire-squid investment bank or a mom-and-pop corner shop that sells nothing but thimbles of rosewater-scented whimsy and hand-sewn felt puppets of characters from Wes Anderson films. If right next door, a big-box chain-store Whimsy-Mart opens up with vats of all-you-can-eat cut-price Owen Wilson dolls and that small business doesn’t toughen up, then they’re fucked.”
Companies can only abstain from harmful conduct when the market is regulated — no longer “free” — and they are required to do or not do certain things that the state has banned. If all companies are required to follow the rules, then following them won’t mean being undercut by a competitor. But regulation can’t solve the problem, because it’s always fighting a rear-guard action:
“…[H]owever much we want to regulate capitalism, there will always be some new commodity or market inadvertently ‘polluting’ that has yet to be regulated. So the regulator is always playing catch-up. Further, capital’s need for self-valorisation tends to strain at the leash of regulatory restraint, as there is always some jurisdiction where this regulation does not exist. Which means that there is a force in the economy constantly pushing toward pollution that we are forever trying to push back against, a beast we cannot tame or cage. This is why social democracy goes further toward preventing pollution than less regulated forms of capitalism, but cannot absolutely prevent the problem.”