Capitalism drives the conversion of everything into money, so it's no surprise to me when anything from votes to the air we breathe are turned into money.
We generate a lot of carbon dioxide but the consequences of that are more long term, not experienced as contamination of things we interact with day to day.
Even members of US Congress are extremely responsive to issues they think will get them kicked out of office.
There's no reason it cannot reduce pollution to tolerable levels.
> removing capitalism does not automatically mean to give more power to governments
Yes, it does. Who/what else is going to prevent people from trading for a profit?
There are several social and economical theories that consider a central government, and thus the state, unnecessary. Historically the anarchism movement is maybe the most known, but recently other schools of thoughts are getting relatively important, such as communalism and democratic confederalism (mostly relevant in the context of the revolution in northern Syria).
Even communism in its final form (i.e. past the dictatorship of proletariat transitioning phase) should be a stateless and classless society, however historically "communist" states failed to get past this transitioning phase (due to a refusal to give up power by the State, I guess) and ended up in a State Capitalism system, as in the USSR and in China.
However, to be honest I don't know this topic in detail enough to teach anyone, so I can only suggest you to look for more info in case you're interested.
Regarding anarchism, it's known that the reason it didn't work out in the attempts so far has not been an inherent flaw in the system, but external ingerence.
In the two cases that are most known to the public, i.e. anarchist Catalogna and Free territories of Ukraine, the reason why the revolution finally failed has been in both cases the intervention of Soviet Russia, that in the first case supported an antagonist faction (i.e. communists front in the Spanish Civil War) and in the second case it invaded the free territories.
I think in general it's not possible to disregard some ideologies on the basis that they never managed to be implemented, without looking at the context. In today's world, which is dominated by capital, it would be even harder to establish a non-capitalist society, but that doesn't mean that such a society would be less fair, free or just than capitalism.
Two reasons why hierarchical structures show up:
1. If you want to even have someone looking at the "big picture", due to limits of human cognition, you have to build a hierarchy.
2. Hierarchy shows up as a natural solution to coordination problems. Consider e.g. various forms of the tragedy of commons. The solution to that[0] is that all actors involved agree to be governed by an independent one. This is something that humans end up rediscovering all the time.
Basically, hierarchical governance is what lets humanity build societies larger than couple dozen people.
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[0] - in larger systems, i.e. beyond few people who know each other personally and can mutually agree not to be assholes to one another; we have a strongly developed social skills to handle such issues in small groups.
(A part of) the world already did some good progress on this front with the gradual switch from absolute monarchies to democracies, and I hope it will eventually be able to continue on the path towards a more just world.
No, I'm not sure. But we're talking about private companies now, not governments. Governments and companies in the end are two faces of the same coin: the first aim at power, the latter aim at profit (with some exceptions of course).
Moreover, many proposed alternatives to capitalism consider the governments (as we know them today) harmful and unnecessary. I'm not saying I agree, just wanted to point out that removing capitalism does not automatically mean to give more power to governments.
> Anyhow, the way to deal with pollution in a market based economy is to tax it.
Sure, but that doesn't solve the problem, it just reduces its impact. And in a world that runs on profit, limiting your local companies may in the end give an advantage to the foreign ones, so this solution may not always be practicable, unless a truly global coordinated action gets taken.