> the failure to distribute covid vaccines
The fact that we even have COVID vaccines in such a short time is an amazing accomplishment.
> mass hunger
Capitalism has proven way more capable at avoiding famine than planned economics
> mass homeless
Homelessness in wealthy countries in an issue of drug addiction and mental health, not inability to build housing.
I’d argue homelessness is heavily tied to an inability to build housing, but that’s a regulatory failure (zoning and building codes) not a market one.
As for Poland, it is thoroughly a capitalist country. All of the largest coal mining companies and energy companies there are publicly traded (although some, including PGE is majority [58%] owned by the state). It is safe to say that Poland’s continuing carbon emissions are more then happy to continue under a capitalist rule.
What do you base this on? Greenhouse effect was scientifically established in the 1800s and evidence of CO2 induced global warming in the mid 1900s. The IPCC was set up in 1988. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
> and engage in a mass disinformation campaign to keep increasing pollution at the cost of our climate. I’m sure they would have, but they’re government collapsed before they were able,
USSR may have have believed they would be a strategic winner in warming temperatures. At best they would not have been particularly inclined to sacrifice their energy and industrial development when their rivals were not.
> so, so far the climate crisis is a uniquely capitalist problem.
No it's not, even if you strangely ignore USSR's massive past contribution to atmospheric CO2. China emits more CO2 than all western countries combined, and plans to continue increasing output. You'll say China is capitalist to some degree, but its heavy industry, electricity generation, and fossil fuel industries (and more) are all under absolute control of the communist dictatorship.
The climate crisis is your average every day human problem, formally documented in feudal England (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons) but certainly the same condition existed pre-history.
The IPCC published their first report on climate change in 1990, the Rio conference took place in 1992, and the first real UN climate deceleration wasn’t until 1997 with the Kyoto protocol (I say real because this is the one where government promised to limit their greenhouse emissions; and then proceeded to fail). So I say that even thought the climate crises starts with the industrial revolution, 1997 is the year we start seeing the climate failure that will doom us all.
Just to state the obvious, if governments would have acted in 1997 like they promised to, then climate change probably wouldn’t have reached this catastrophic proportions which we are observing today. We had recently saved the ozone layer using similar measure, so there is no reason the Kyoto protocol failed other then the profit motive of fossil fuel companies which successfully lobbied against following through with the promises. The efforts of ignoring the Kyoto protocol were led by the USA which failed to ratify it. I believe there was significant lobbying involved from fossil fuel companies that influenced the senate’s decision to not even vote on it.
Bringing capitalism into it is just silly. "Capitalism" is not to blame, removing capitalism does not fix it, and people don't need to give up capitalism to improve global warming. It seems to be bringing an unrelated personal bias against capitalism in and tying it to global warming, which is really anti-scientific misinformation.
My statements was about fossil fuel companies internal scientists discovering the link, which resulted in them thinking only about their shareholders’ profits when it came time to react. You have no proof a similar situation ever happened inside the soviet union.
Off course there were scientists within the soviet union which knew about the link, and even some that realized the scale of the human impact before the political collapse. But stating how the soviet leadership would have acted in the wake of the Kyoto protocol is pure fiction that has nothing to do with the world we live in.
Communists certainly contributed to the climate disaster, and continue to do so today, but by the time push came to shove, and we were set up to enact the essential international agreements to prevent it becoming a disaster, it were capitalist countries, and capitalist countries alone, that resisted.
> Communists certainly contributed to the climate disaster, and continue to do so today, but by the time push came to shove, and we were set up to enact the essential international agreements to prevent it becoming a disaster, it were capitalist countries, and capitalist countries alone, that resisted.
Also incorrect. China is a strong resister. Of course they like treaties that puts restrictions on the west and allows them to continue increasing emissions, which is what they push for.
Western nations are responsible for the majority of historic emissions, and have gotten rich at the cost of everyone else’s future. They have the financial capacity to build out the required infrastructure with the money they have already made off of their pollution. This is the logic behind the exceptions to the Kyoto protocol. The US (or rather the oil lobby) touted this as unfair (which it isn’t) and instead continued to pollute at an accelerated rate. It was also always understood that the Kyoto protocol was a start which would get stronger in a later agreement, so China was never going to be exempt forever, and they knew that.
When the US killed the Kyoto protocol they killed every future prospects with it as well. The disagreement was always about this issue you point out, but COP after COP, non-western nations (including China) proposed a reduction (e.g. in COP 2009 China promised a 40-45% reduction from 2005 by 2020; this puts China in the same category as Europe with governments that promise action but fail to deliver) but COP after COP it was always the USA that brought up this as a disagreement and we continued to not make an agreement (COP-15 resulted in a non-binding agreement and China missed this target).
But this is all irrelevant when discussing capitalism as the only culprit of the climate disaster because most (all?) of China’s pollution companies are publicly traded either in Hong Kong Stock Exchange, or in the New York Stock Exchange, or both, with the Chinese state as its majority owner, for over a decade now. These companies operate for the profits of their share holders, not for the benefits of their workers like a communist entity would. These are firmly capitalist entities, one might call them state capitalist.
Sorry, I'm just not going to buy it. It just looks like you have a hatred of capitalism and trying to pin things to it. Better tighten up your argument a whole lot before you try it out on somebody else.
For two centuries, we have had exponentially increasing consumption, exponentially increasing production, and exponentially increasing waste.
Unbounded exponential growth is impossible in a finite planet. But capitalism requires unlimited exponential growth to function - "return on investment" is literally exponentiation.
Unfortunately, there is a multi decade lag between the causes and the effects.
Already, disaster is baked into the amount of carbon dioxide we have pumped into the atmosphere, and we aren't turning around. There are trillions of dollars of commitments for fossil fuel generation plants that will be still operating in 30 years and more.
The idea that people today will give up their standard of living so that their grand children will not experience catastrophe turns out to be completely unreasonable. No one will ever give up their standard of living. Technology will continue to advance, and this will continue to accelerate the growth of resource consumption and waste production.
> authoritarianism, monarchy, or feudalism.
I too find those systems enraging and unfair, but future historians will say, "They did not decimate the biosphere - only capitalism did that."
I'd argue we've always been dead in that way, as a species. The internet just makes it seem more apparent.
Capitalism just happens to be the least shitty system we have that's been proven at scale thus far.