All ~~capitalist~~ countries...
Fixed it for you
this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2024
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Yep, just slapping a "communist party" sticker on the property owning class doesn't make a difference
Tbf it's not that anybody saw that coming. Maybe Bakunin, Kropotkin, Malatesta and all the other anarchists but aside from them, nobody could have known it.
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Why do you want to break Lemmy
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Except you oversimplified and it matters. The entire point of capitalism is to centralize money in the hands of a few at the expense of the rest. Capitalism itself demands continued growth, which is unsustainable.
All forms of government are subject to corruption, but only some forms of government are broken by design.
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All nation states
I'm 13 and this is deep.
Why? Capitalism cannot solve Climate Change, as it depends on the highest possible profit margins and rampant consumerism. Transitioning from a profit-focused system to fulfilling uses and needs in Socialism, where the Proletariat is in charge and can collectively agree to tackle Climate Change, is the only path forward.
This seems like you just want to be edgy and doomerist with nothing to back yourself up.
Capitalism cannot solve Climate Change, as it depends on the highest possible profit margins and rampant consumerism.
It's definitely possible to do "Green Capitalism", so long as the profit margins of green capital exceed dirty capital.
But Americans have huge investments in old dirty infrastructure that they want to use until it falls apart. That's the real difficulty. How do you convince people with a $1B pipeline through the West Texas gas fields to scrape that project and build lower-profit windmills/solar farms and HVDC cable lines instead?
Our current leadership could subsidize green energy to move the market. But this would force existing businesses to build new capital rather than rent seeking on existing capital.
Compare the US to France, which has a huge legacy investment in nuclear power. They're capitalist, too, but they aren't in a rush to burn more fossil fuels.
Capitalism can't do green. If you were to make an accounting of all of the environmental damage that capitalist industry has done to the ecosystem, the cost to clean it all up would dwarf the revenue. Capitalist economists are incapable of calculating such "negative externalities" because they don't understand basic thermodynamics. I used to work in environmental remediation and am happy to talk more about this if there is interest.
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Our government was corrupted the moment the courts accepted the "Corporations are people/ Money is speech" arguments. At that moment, the government stopped representing the needs of ordinary people and only represented the needs of billionaires and their lobbyists.
It's taking a long time to play out but it's going to end badly.
It was corrupted as soon as the country was founded, it was meant to service white slave owning men.
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Our government was corrupted long before that. Harlow Vs Fitzgerald in 1982 comes to mind as the SCOTUS unintentionally legislated from the bench due to some southern revisionist in 1874.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/15/us/politics/qualified-immunity-supreme-court.html
Woodrow "literally wrote Southern Revisionism" Wilson is where I would point my finger at where the corruption actually took root.
I don't know how to get everyone I know to really understand this. Every time I bring it up in conversation, the other person just puts their hands up and explains that they're powerless to address it, so it's not even worth talking about. I don't know how to respond to the apathy.
To be honest i offen feel the same, just helpless and too insignificant to change it in my own. But thats the point, we are not allone! I just try to show them undenieble facts, the already very present effect of climate crisis or just statistics of how the money is distributed in our country. The thing I struggle most with them is their bad feith in people. For example many welfare programs or in the extreme the concept of unconditional income by the state gets always used to argue that people are lazy and it would not work because no one would get a job anymore, which i disagree with
The best way to counter this is to point out the laziness at the top. Corporate welfare is way more damaging to society than the few million lazy people at the bottom. It would cost a lot less to write them off than to pay CEOs 2000 times as much as the average worker.
With reasonable, actionable steps. If you don't have those, then they kind of have a point, don't they? It's like the Newton's flaming laser sword of politics.
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All first world governments have some degree of corruption from money in politics, but don't kid yourselves: USA is much worse than most
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Hey if a bunch of scientists say otherwise then, yah, they know better. But I thought we were basically beyond preventing catastrophic climate disaster?
Also this is the first I'm seeing the big Gritty brain meme format and I love it!
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Huh, some commenters raise a good question. What are the non-capitalist countries doing to fight climate change?
China is building out massive renewables and massive coal.
My list is short, please add to it.
What are the non-capitalist countries doing to fight climate change?
Lots of solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear energy investment in the public sector. Huge investments in mass transit and electric engines. Conversion of old coal powered steel production to electric. Dense urban real estate department. Disposable waste reduction. Big efforts at tree planting along the Gobi Desert.
They've been very "all options on the table" about climate change. Some work. Some don't. But the progress is undeniable.
"Massive coal" was twenty years ago. India is "massive coal" now.
They have an electric car that costs $10,000.
They are quickly switching from Li batteries to Na, which will not require Ni or Co either.
They have a mixture of capitalism and central planning, so it's not entirely fair to call them "non-capitalist".
Not far in the past.
In China, 47.4GW of coal power capacity came online in 2023, GEM says. This increase accounted for two-thirds of the global rise in operating coal power capacity, which climbed 2% to 2,130GW.
China’s 70.2GW of new construction getting underway in 2023 represents 19-times more than the rest of the world’s 3.7GW. As the figure below highlights, the country’s trajectory (red line) is diverging significantly from the rest of the world (orange line).
I was considerably happier before I knew this. Hopefully coal prices will continue to increase, and they won't end up burning more coal even though their capacity has increased. From what I've read, it's mainly provincial governments trying to boost their economic statistics that are responsible for this building spree.
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I would usually say this is going too far, but this winter didn't seem nearly as cold as usual, and that was concerning. Feels like in the next two decades the planet might not have winter... And might have a deadly season that was formerly summer.
I remember when it was so cold out that my car overheated in the winter because all of the coolant (rated to below zero Fahrenheit), froze. Now, I'm damn near blasting the AC in winter because it's so damn warm.
Come change is happening. IDK how much more proof people really need... The argument of winter still being cold isn't applicable anymore.
Yeah, it was crazy how warm last winter was. I live in Edmonton which is the most northern city with 1 million people in North America, and even through December we would have no snow on the ground when regularly there would be a couple inches to a foot everywhere.
The weather is also much more sporadic than I ever remember it being which is fun. It's either unusually warm or stupidly cold. We had only about a week of really cold weather and heavy snow last winter
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the meme format doesn't make any sense
The crooked third caption may cause mental distress
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