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Re:US-Canada heatwave 'virtually impossible' without warming by throwaway894345 on Thursday July 08, 2021 @08:43PM (#27779377)
> The supply chain is a symptom, not the disease. Our hypothetical billionaire could close down (or increase prices, for the same effect), but his piece would either be grabbed by another ruthless business man wanting to be a billionaire or simply merged with the existing competitors. Unless you make people change their lifestyle, closing carbon-intensive production lines is just playing whack-a-mole. So, in reality, he really has not that much more power than you.

That might be true if votes weren't for sale (lobbying, campaign contributions, etc), but they are and thus political power is proportional to wealth. Our hypothetical billionaire can advocate to preserve policies that allow him to profit by polluting the environment, which is to say plundering society (in that the environment is a shared resource--it belongs to all of society).

To use your metaphor, the disease is that there isn't a mechanism to decouple political power from wealth.

Re:US-Canada heatwave 'virtually impossible' without warming by Sebb767 on Thursday July 08, 2021 @10:06PM (#27779778)
That's a failing on the side of our political system, but yes. We can definitely agree that using you power to lobby for the greater disadvantage is morally far worse than falling in line.
Re:US-Canada heatwave 'virtually impossible' without warming by throwaway894345 on Friday July 09, 2021 @07:22AM (#27782542)
Yes, it is a failing on the side of our political system, but the political system sets the rules that constrain the market including whether or not corporations can pollute for free or rely on foreign pseudo-slave labor. And this means they have lobbied to maintain a market that penalizes companies who don’t exploit the environment and/or slave labor and due to a lack of transparency (i.e., there are virtually no reliable indicators to inform consumers how environmentally friendly or humaine a given product is—indeed many alleged certification programs are shams set up by industry groups to mislead customers into believing they are buying ethical products) make virtually everyone complicit. That’s a heck of a big difference between the hypothetical billionaire and the middleclass family struggling to keep a bit of buffer between themselves and poverty.