Hear me out for a moment:
We can solve a big chunk of this. Politicians want to be elected, so they do what the people want. Under capitalism, every receipt is a ballot paper. Our shopping, toys and short vacations are only possible through exploitation and destruction. If we understand this, we can make different choices and simply let things be. We change our minds, we stop doing it! That's harder than moaning about politics, the economy and the system on the internet, because you really have to change something about yourself. Paying more money for products that are also available cheaply. But as long as we remain greedy, spoiled bargain hunters, nothing will change around us.
Bonus points if you talk about it and go protest.
And oil companies are still bribing politicians to make things even worse so they can make more money. At what point do we take over the evil companies to stop them from destroying the planet we all live on?
Only way to make people the rich change their ways
Most people will stop doing something if you show them how it hurts others. Not so the wealthy and powerful.
Being rich actually causes neurological changes, reducing your capacity for empathy and making your brain look more like someone born with psychopathy. 'Power Corrupts' is a biological fact. To be powerful is to be more capable of evil.
I don't get much into doctrinal differences, but I feel like this is pretty core to a lot of anarchist thought. I vaguely recall a quote from engels, something about anarchists believing you need to abolish heirarchy in order to abolish injustice, vs socialists believing vice versa. I think neuroscience shows that power differentials will always create human misery.
I've though about this a lot.
I suspect evolution tilts a little towards psycopathy when wealthy.
Hard to say if theres a mechanism for that encoded in DNA, but if there is, Im betting it would get naturally selected for.
If an individual is in a position of power, then being a self-entitled asshole rapist will reduce competition and increase the spread of genes... Especially if the individual is a male
Assuming this has a negative effect of society, cultural evolution would hopefully respond with counters to this...
Which I think is what we see time and again all over the world.
Society gets living situations relatively reliable. Assholes rise making things worse, society either crumbles into weakness or rejects new situation and removes assholes, encodes new ethics into societal norms and works towards gettingliiving situations reliable, repeat.
When more people are fed abd housed, theres more resources to devote towards economic and war engines, so I think this makes asshole removal naturally selected for on a cultural level.
This loop seems to be getting more frequent and I'd love if we could skip the parts where folks are miserable and dying.
I think it's the whole capitalist system that enables and rewards people with sociopathic traits. Which is why they are more successful in this system.
NIMQE - Not in my quarterly earnings!
Pronounced Nimquee
Example usage:
The CEO, upon receiving word of a new bill that would drastically help reduce carbon emissions but also create a temporary negative pressure on their multinational's earnings per share, pulled a suitcase full of cash from their file cabinet and walked out the door, calling up the governor to arrage a round of golf where they would declare NIMQE.
It might cost more overall but it will be different people paying that cost (taxpayers and poor, mostly) whereas if we took action now it would be the capitalists paying for it.
The economic damage wrought by climate change is six times worse than previously thought, with global heating set to shrink wealth at a rate consistent with the level of financial losses of a continuing permanent war, research has found.
A 1C increase in global temperature leads to a 12% decline in world gross domestic product (GDP), the researchers found, a far higher estimate than that of previous analyses. The world has already warmed by more than 1C (1.8F) since pre-industrial times and many climate scientists predict a 3C (5.4F) rise will occur by the end of this century due to the ongoing burning of fossil fuels, a scenario that the new working paper, yet to be peer-reviewed, states will come with an enormous economic cost.
A 3C temperature increase will cause “precipitous declines in output, capital and consumption that exceed 50% by 2100” the paper states. This economic loss is so severe that it is “comparable to the economic damage caused by fighting a war domestically and permanently”, it adds.
“There will still be some economic growth happening but by the end of the century people may well be 50% poorer than they would’ve been if it wasn’t for climate change,” said Adrien Bilal, an economist at Harvard who wrote the paper with Diego Känzig, an economist at Northwestern University.
“I think everyone could imagine what they would do with an income that is twice as large as it is now. It would change people’s lives.”
Bilal said that purchasing power, which is how much people are able to buy with their money, would already be 37% higher than it is now without global heating seen over the past 50 years. This lost wealth will spiral if the climate crisis deepens, comparable to the sort of economic drain often seen during wartime.
“Let’s be clear that the comparison to war is only in terms of consumption and GDP – all the suffering and death of war is the important thing and isn’t included in this analysis,” Bilal said. “The comparison may seem shocking, but in terms of pure GDP there is an analogy there. It’s a worrying thought.”
The paper places a much higher estimate on economic losses than previous research, calculating a social cost of carbon, which is the cost in dollars of damage done per each additional ton of carbon emissions, to be $1,056 per ton. This compares to a range set out by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that estimates the cost to be around $190 per ton.
Bilal said the new research takes a more “holistic” look at the economic cost of climate change by analyzing it on a global scale, rather than on an individual country basis. This approach, he said, captured the interconnected nature of the impact of heatwaves, storms, floods and other worsening climate impacts that damage crop yields, reduce worker productivity and reduce capital investment.
“They have taken a step back and linking local impacts with global temperatures,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia University who wasn’t involved in the work and said it was significant. “If the results hold up, and I have no reason to believe they wouldn’t, they will make a massive difference in the overall climate damage estimates.”
The paper found that the economic impact of the climate crisis will be surprisingly uniform around the world, albeit with lower-income countries starting at a lower point in wealth. This should spur wealthy countries such as the US, the paper points out, to take action on reducing planet-heating emissions in its own economic interest.
Even with steep emissions cuts, however, climate change will bear a heavy economic cost, the paper finds. Even if global heating was restrained to little more than 1.5C (2.7F) by the end of the century, a globally agreed-upon goal that now appears to have slipped from reach, the GDP losses are still around 15%.
“That is still substantial,” said Bilal. “The economy may keep growing but less than it would because of climate change. It will be a slow-moving phenomenon, although the impacts will be felt acutely when they hit.”
The paper follows separate research released last month that found average incomes will fall by almost a fifth within the next 26 years compared to what they would’ve been without the climate crisis. Rising temperatures, heavier rainfall and more frequent and intense extreme weather are projected to cause $38tn of destruction each year by mid-century, according to the research.
Both papers make clear that the cost of transitioning away from fossil fuels and curbing the impacts of climate change, while not trivial, pale in comparison to the cost of climate change itself. “Unmitigated climate change is a lot more costly than not doing anything about it, that is clear,” said Wagner.
