Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Does Capitalism contribute to global warming? Australian Green Party Candidate Jim Casey wants to revive the debate – so lets start by agreeing with him, that increasing the efficiency of Capitalist systems increases anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
Thanks Daily Telegraph, I welcome a debate about the overthrow of capitalism
In an old tweet, I framed capitalism as an idea that could be overthrown. On reflection, it is something that is more likely to collapse under its own weight.
The Daily Telegraph published an old tweet of mine on Wednesday (as part of its front-page endorsement of my opponent, Labor’s Anthony Albanese, for the seat of Grayndler) that said: “Overthrow of capitalism – you don’t hear this often enough”
Who knew an old tweet could spark such a necessary debate but as a Greens candidate taking on Labor member Anthony Albanese at this election, I guess I can expect greater scrutiny. I appreciate the reminder and welcome the debate. Frankly, we don’t have this discussion often enough and what better time to have it than when political parties are selling their stories in the marketplace of ideas?
As a union leader used to speaking shorthand to comrades, I framed capitalism as an idea that could be overthrown. On reflection, it is something that is more likely to collapse under its own weight – we cannot adhere to a belief that is so obviously unable to make the transition into the future that awaits many of us and all of our children.
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We must challenge the durability of capitalism in the face of three overriding realities: climate change, growing inequality and resource depletion.
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Competition drives business to continually increase its profitability. How does it do that? By driving down costs of production. The main cost of production for most businesses is labour.
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While the smart kids in Silicon Valley may claim that data, artificial intelligence and new technologies like block chain will turbo charge technology and solve that old problem of resource depletion – I argue it won’t. The robots won’t save us from water scarcity, the loss of arable land or indeed the loss of fish stocks as the oceans become more acidic.
Why do I think Capitalism increases CO2 emissions? After all, the vast Soviet industrial estates produced CO2 and toxic waste on a heroic scale. But I would argue that the Soviets were an exception. Most socialist economies, places like Cuba, Venezuela, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, don’t produce a lot of economic activity. Starving wretches picking at stubble for a few grains of wheat, don’t emit CO2 on anything like the same scale as a freeway commuter working in an air conditioned office.
So I guess it really comes down to choosing what kind of future we want – a value judgement.
If we embrace socialist economic stagnation, or more dramatically, a shift back to a primitive subsistence economy, there is no doubt we would substantially cut global anthropogenic CO2 emissions – especially when famine slashes world population. Chemical fertilisers and pesticides, utterly essential for modern levels of food production, are the products of a highly industrialised, CO2 intensive economy.
If we embrace a future of robots, artificial intelligence, endless exponential economic growth, we really might run out of a resource we can’t replace. I don’t think it likely, but the whole house of cards actually could come tumbling down. But is the possibility technological civilisation might fall down really a justification for giving it a hard shove? The bleak end result of such a collapse – survivors clinging to life through primitive subsistence farming – doesn’t sound all that different to the future greens seem to think we should all embrace as our first choice.
Personally I like my modern lifestyle – air conditioning, downloadable movies and TV, a fridge to keep the food fresh. So I’ll cling on to the “evil” conveniences of Capitalism, as long as the Earth can sustain my way of life. And when this planet can no longer produce everything needed to keep the economy running, I hope my descendants have the simple common sense to look beyond our planet for the resources they need, to keep those modern conveniences flowing. Because there is no doubt we already have the technology to affordably reach beyond our planet on an industrial scale, when the need arises to do so.
@Phil Salmon
…Economic / technological growth, especially if unconstrained by false idealism from lazy armchair misanthropes, will also – together with population stabilisation – cause resource use to level off…
You really don’t get the argument, do you?
Cut the people back, and we really will have resource problems. With few people to run things, we won’t be able to afford all the technology which keeps us ever-improving. Think about it. When we had few people – say, back in the 1950s – we had famines because we couldn’t grow enough food. Now we have around 3 times the number of people, and we have so much food that we waste it, and we are also much richer in possessions.
The economy is NOT a zero-sum game. It grows as the people grow. If we double the world population a few times, we’ll all be rolling in wealth and resources. It’s this that the Greens don’t want to understand…
You got most of it right, but we are 80% toward a stable peak population in ~2050 or so. That is when paradise can start. Our ingenuity will keep growing, our resources are boundless (ingenuity) and we will be enriching a population that isn’t growing instead of keeping up with expanding population. Re resources:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/05/14/greens-are-right-about-capitalism-and-co2-emissions/comment-page-1/#comment-2215354
we will have more than enough. This is the dilemma for socialists. Their harping on running out of resources has been going on for a couple of centuries. They know their days are numbered and that is why there is so much hysteria and fear generation to get their system in place before it is too late.
My only disagreement is that I believe the population peak will be 2030 if not sooner. It may have happened already.
Our energy supply would never run out, not before the Sun turns into a red giant and Earth becomes uninhabitable. One ton of ordinary granite, the default stuff continents are made of, contains as much retrievable energy, as fifty tons of coal and the technology to do that was available even sixty years ago.
As long as energy is plentiful and cheap, we can synthesize arbitrary molecular structures at will, provided the elements are available. And even extremely rare elements can be retrieved at an affordable cost, because the thermodynamic limit of energy use is proportional to the logarithm of their scarcity. That is, one only needs fifty percent more energy to enrich an element which is present at 1 ppb concentration than one at 1 ppm. Molecular sorters for example are supposed to operate pretty close to the thermodynamic limit.
Of course, an endless exponential growth in utilizing any single resource would lead to disaster eventually, but that never happens. Quantity of horse manure used to grow exponentially in cities for a time, but it is an extremely rare occurrence by now. Neither we use whale oil any more, in spite of the fact its final depletion was in sight when suddenly the economy switched to mineral oil.
That point is especially silly. We have plenty of water in the oceans and desalination plants rely on known technologies, they are even in use on a commercial scale at some locations. They only need energy to produce fresh water. And it is one of the few applications, where solar power may be sufficient, because the end product can be stored behind dams at night or under heavy clouds until it becomes sunny again.
See http://www.lavoisier.com.au/articles/climate-policy/science-and-policy/backtothe19C.pdf for some predictions of life under these green socialists.
Why would we worry about Capitalism increasing CO2 when all that we can see CO2 do is increase the abilities and growth of vegetation which loves to suck it up if we increase its level in the atmosphere..
“The robots won’t save us from water scarcity, the loss of arable land or indeed the loss of fish stocks as the oceans become more acidic.”
It occurs to me that we are fighting the socialist movement in the wrong way.
As noted earlier, the photo above emphasis that the socialist movement is primarily supported by young adults, many of whom are still in college. We should AGREE with their position. However, we should point out, society will be reluctant to change unless it fully understands how socialism would work. Since there are is significant support for socialism among college students, they should adopt socialism in their environment to set an example for all society.
They all ‘work’. Their production is all the classwork they perform, papers they write, tests and exams they complete. They are all doing the same things. Their ‘pay’ are the grades that are given out. Now convert this to a socialist program. Demand that administrators handle production of work and distribution of grades using socialist doctrine. Every student commits to producing, and all are ‘paid’ equally. Everyone shares everything equally. If the college is really ‘progressive’, this system could be expanded to include professors and staff (resulting in footbal coaches in the US taking a huge pay cut!).
Then stand back and watch what happens, first with a decline in ‘production’, followed by ‘pay’ cuts.
If the students have a problem with this, then certainly they cannot expect socialism to succed in a nationwide economy.
Now THAT is a brilliant idea. I expect deep down they know it would fail and they will all have excuses for why they “can’t” – a bit like they have their reasons now for using computers, cars, modern gadgets and all things made thanks to fossil fuels.
All the same, I’d love to see this idea put into motion. Surely if enough people suggested it, the idea might take root…? If various schools, universities and other institutions so keen to see change in our social structure didn’t comply, wouldn’t that show the world they were insincere?
🙂
+1.
This is what it’s really all about. You think all these activists give a crap about climate because of the environment? Come on, be serious. They care because they see it as a vehicle for their agendas. Thanks again to Naomi Klein for coming clean on this so we can talk about the real issues openly now.
what is with me and malformed links these days. Here:
https://leapmanifesto.org/en/the-leap-manifesto/
Show me a command economy that has ever been successful. Command economies are extremely wasteful, inefficient, and subject to extreme corruption.
There is not one country where innovation thrives that is under a command economy. The common mistake that communist and socialist make is that whatever exist in the present can never be improved upon or replaced. Indeed that is simply not in the architecture of those systems. A scythe is no match for a modern combine.
The entire focus of CAGW is to destroy the west. By their own calculations that if we were to have completely shut down everything 20 years ago, it would have made little difference. (As CAGW says the co2 lasts hundred of years in the atmosphere ) As a semi famous, semi American said in support of the climate change agenda , ” there is no dissenting in North Korea” .
Chinese economic growth is mostly due to their willingness to abandon socialism/communism when it gets in the way of the leaders making money.
“the loss of fish stocks as the oceans become more acidic.”
I call BS on this one. Even NOAA admits that they cannot locate any area of the oceans that is becoming more acidic. Seawater is a complex buffer system, photosynthesis is an alkalizing process, raising the pH on a sunny day up to 9 or 10. Clearly these organisms are less sensitive to pH than the Greenie bed-wetting whiners are.
Eric Worrall: … when this planet can no longer produce everything needed … I hope my descendants have the simple common sense to look beyond our planet …
What about the simple common sense to see the planet is getting hotter right now due to more CO2:
http://berkeleyearth.org/temperature-reports/april-2016/
Dennis, what does “On Record Mean to you? Do you think in 1950 and 1951 they were using NASA Satellites to study ground temperatures? How accurate were the measuring devices as compared to now? .1 to .2 degrees could really be the potential for error. 95% confidence interval?
I don’t know about where you live but many were complaining how cold it was here in so. Florida and places like New York City this winter. I myself loved it. It was still a bit cool last week; perfect. I’ve been living here all my life and temperatures seem pretty much the same to me. Some years colder, some years hotter. How do you measure something that is constantly changing and that is influenced by so many things we may not even fully understand yet, such as the earths electro-gravitational field(s) in relation to our moon, our planets and other solar systems and their EG Fields, or volcanic ridges underneath the north and south poles we don’t even know about yet? You are giving science more validity then it warrants. Stop thinking we know so much about how the world works. We are still children in our relative learning curve to what our world offers and we are continuously learning things, sometimes still by pure accident. Can you imagine the measurement quality of the thermometers back in 1860? Probably close, but not like today.
hskiprob,
This is for you and other readers, not for D. Horne, whose mind is closed to any information that contradicts his eco-religion. It’s a waste of time posting links for him. But I’m happy to have a conversation with you.
First, the recent global warming is natural, since exactly the same thing happened beginning around 1900, before CO2 was a factor. And in the 1940’s, the planet cooled until the 1970’s — when CO2 was ramping up.
Going back to the 1800’s we see the same natural step changes, again before human emissions could have had an effect:
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/hadley/Hadley-global-temps-1850-2010-web.jpg
That chart was produced from data collected by Dr. Phil Jones, an arch-Warmist.
Here is another view, again from the 1800’s until now. We see the usual natural step changes, as the planet recovers from the Little Ice Age — one of the coldest events of the entire Holocene. We also see the cooling that occurred during the past mid-century.
Next, this chart shows the planet’s long, steady recovery from the LIA. It also shows that there has been no recent acceleration of global warming — the falsified ‘fingerprint of global warming’ prediction — made by the same climate alarmists who have never accurately predicted any of the scary events that were supposed to happen. ALL of their alarming predictions were wrong. No exceptions.
Next, the recent natural global warming is entirely beneficial, since the warming occurs by raising the minimum temperatures, without much affecting the maximum temperatures:
http://www.science20.com/files/images/global.png
Since Mr. Horne is from Australia, he would be much better off being a skeptic rather than a climate alarmist, because the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) ‘adjusts’ the temperature record, thus erasing the actual cooling, and replacing it with artificially fabricated global warming:
http://media.tumblr.com/4066164c2d0d941bae09db84f96b55a7/tumblr_inline_navky4nA2j1qij8k6.jpg
The global temperature record shows that there is nothing unusual — and certainly nothing unprecedented — happening. Everything we observe now has happened before, and to a much greater degree, during times when CO2 was much lower.
That’s why scientific skepticism is so critical to making informed decisions. Without skepticism, it’s easy to believe whatever someone with a self-serving, vested interest tells you. But those who are scientific skeptics find it easy to see through the ‘carbon is evil’ propaganda.
Once again, this documentary was ahead of its time. His clip highlights what climate change is really about. It is an anti-capitalism movement.
?w=720&h=538
https://youtu.be/QowL2BiGK7o?t=50m6s
db, .01 degree? Tha is waht one of your charts noted. I wish I could trust the measurements, the accumulation of data, the formulations and modeling of the data. One scientist feeding off the other. If the first guy is a bit off and the second scientists relies on the first, and so on and so forth? If you read many of their papers, they’re often relying on the data of others.
A strong wind and long period of overcast, that can be caused by a host of things, can skew your final calculations. Do we just say it all works out some how magically to some weighted average temp? I don’t know, I’m just a layperson, but I have been reading this stuff for some forty years now. The more I read, the more uncertainty I have gained. Lol
I guess I just can’t imagine trying to measure the temperature of the entire planet for anything other than to see what the weather looks like tomorrow. I can look outside and see what’s happening right now. Even then the forecasters are often wrong here in Florida because of a slew of issues.
Measuring the temperature of the world over a prolonged period of time, looking for a singular numeric result to compare with other periods of time, is a monumental undertaking in time, manpower and costs. Then you have to be prepared that because there are so many things that could effect all aspects of the study, that final data could be skewed just enough to make it all worthless.
I wish it was warming, I’m tired of hearing all the whining about the snow from the New Yorkers having to going back home. If it’s so great there, why are the here in the 1st place.
“Cars can run on salt water.”
They are call ‘sailboats’, Dearie, and they won’t go uphill.
At the demise of Capitalism, who gets all the money?
“Once upon a time there was a king named Midas. Even by kingly standards, Midas was a greedy king. All he cared about was gold, gold, gold, and let’s see, oh yes, gold.”…
http://www.brownielocks.com/kingmidas.html
tadchem – It would be impossible for capitalism to die. People will trade, even if there are only 25 people remaining on earth. That’s all capitalism is. People trading, free of the confines of bureaucracies who wish only to get a piece of the action for doing nothing, always under some fraudulent guise of altruism or protection. I just looked at a 136 page list of the young men from Florida, my home State who died in the Viet Nam War. It was an unjust war predicated on the false pretense of the Domino Theory, even though more countries at the time were becoming capitalistic then communistic. The wealthy profit from both the natural resources acquired through contracts and by selling military hardware and supplies to the government, which is really the taxpayer. You can join them in their greedy pursuits under the various guises, progressives boldly stated and you can be well compensated for this. It is merely and issue of right and wrong. The idea that we are capitalistic or that capitalism can die, however either shows your ignorance or you sociopathy, I know not which.