[lbo-talk] East Coast Climate War

Wojtek S wsoko52 at gmail.com
Wed Oct 31 07:30:30 PDT 2012


Eleutherios: "It really is true that climate change may be the single greatest example of market failure. It caused this and one response is to ravenously, rapaciously immediately and without any consideration exploit the new energy resources that the warming it caused made available, thereafter pushing the climate and ecosystems past the brink. From their perspective and in their insular social circles it makes sense to do so. Capitalism uses all resources to exhaustion until acted upon by a sufficient "outside" force, be it labor or social action, or resource constraints. "To hunt a species to extinction is not logical" but "whoever said the human race is logical?" (other than orthodox economic models). Sometimes internal market developments can escape or at least postpone this process, such as new oil exploitation techniques and exploration, but this cannot be counted on and obviously only applies in certain narrow realms.

[WS:] Yup, but capitalism does not hold a monopoly for this - cf. Jared Diamond's "Collapse". If Diamond's analysis is to be believed, the so called modern civilization is going the way the Easter islanders, Meso-American Indians, and Norse colonists in Greenland did - over exploitation of the environment and a collapse. The mechanism that produces these results is competition - and it is the holy grail cum sacred cow of capitalism, especially the Anglo-variety.

-- Wojtek

"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."



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