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Give Climate Change the Name It Deserves: Fossil-Fueled Destruction
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this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
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Capitalism
You could have a non-capitalist society burning fossil fuels in the same way, and it would have the same consequences.
Probably, but probably there wouldn't be a push for keeping things as they are. No wait! Let's burn even more carbon
Maybe, maybe not. You get what you measure. Bad incentives are a major contributor to the corruption that ultimately led to the downfall of the USSR.
Good policy and incentives make the difference. Capitalism and communism aren't all that different. In practice, they are still largely hierarchical with a few controlling things.
The Soviet Union sure wasn’t capitalist by any reasonable definition of the word but still jumped from one major environmental catastrophe to another, to the point where there are still plenty of large areas to deadly to inhabit unprotected.
Even climate change wise it was effectively a petro state which relied heavily on useing and selling cheap oil at every opportunity.
I mean I may be a democratic socialist but even I admit that not everything can be blamed solely on capitalism. Even a fully democratic state operating in the best interest of its poorest people could well decide that it’s in their best interest to make thier lives better by focusing on material growth if it thought that that the consequences for its own people were minor enough.