> best system we know of so far
It's hard to look at the trajectory of society and the world right now and expect the prosperity boom of capitalism to continue. A lot of people just don't see that boom at all. They're living objectively miserable lives under capitalism, and there's no capitalist incentive to change that.
Market based capitalism can handle the negative effects of climate change if producers are forced to pay for the negative impacts they produce.
>it's built-in wealth-concentrating tendencies.
Which economic system doesn't have this?
>A lot of people just don't see that boom at all. They're living objectively miserable lives under capitalism, and there's no capitalist incentive to change that.
>A lot of people just don't see that boom at all.
Who do you have in mind here?
Market-based capitalism could have handled climate change if we had perfect advance information about the infinite horizon adverse effects before it started, and had priced that into actions by pigovian taxes from the beginning of the industrial revolution.
We don't have that information now, and the people against whom such costs would be assessed have incentive to (and actively expend resources) preventing consensus based on the information we do have to prevent the information we do have from being applied that way.
I mean, there are many branches of socialism devoted quite strongly to this. You could call them a core tenet.
> Who do you have in mind here?
You have to have a serious failure of imagination to believe that everyone's just having a party under capitalism. To pick just one example out of thousands, have you heard of the homeless?
Your incredulity is painfully inauthentic and detracts from whatever argument you think you're making.
It never ceases to amaze me just how absurd capitalism can be. It's the best system we know of so far but it falls massively short of good enough in its current form.
What you've said follows perfect capitalist logic. And yet, what you've said incentivises those plant operators to ensure there's more outages. Nothing they can do - whether that be to make their operation leaner or make their generation more efficient or whatever else, nothing can compare to a 350x increase in pay per megawatt hour produced for $0 investment.