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Thread: Two Approaches to Climate Change Solutions

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    Two Approaches to Climate Change Solutions

    There's the solutions that for all intents and purposes are thinly disguised socialist attacks on communism.

    Capitalism Is the Key to Fixing Climate Change

    ...Naomi Klein made this point crystal clear in her 2014 book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Speaking with New York magazine this week, Klein claimed that "taking climate change seriously decimates the entire neoliberal project because you can't have a laissez-faire attitude, where it's having your emissions in 11 years; you actually need to regulate your way out of it. And yeah, you can have a few market mechanisms in place, but the market is not going to do it for you."

    The science, insists Klein, "says our future is radical. The present is pretty radical too. The idea that there is some sort of gradual, incremental, let's-split-the-difference pathway to respond to this crisis is silly at this point."

    A headline in The Guardian put it even more forthrightly: "Ending climate change requires ending capitalism."...
    But these fail to match observation:

    Scientists call this the environmental Kuznets curve. Environmental commons tend to deteriorate as countries begin to develop economically—but once per-capita income reaches a certain level, the public starts to demand a cleanup. It's a U-shaped pattern: Economic growth initially hurts the environment, but after a point it makes things cleaner. By then, slowing or stopping economic growth will delay environmental improvement, including efforts to mitigate the problem of man-made global warming.

    The MIT economist Andrew McAfee explains the process in a forthcoming book, More from Less:

    We have finally learned how to tread more lightly on our planet….In America—a large rich country that accounts for about 25 percent of the global economy—we're now generally using less for most resources year after year, even as our economy and population continue to grow. What's more, we're also polluting the air and water less, emitting fewer greenhouse gases, and seeing population increases in many animals that had almost vanished. America, in short, is post-peak in its exploitation of the earth. The situation is similar in many other rich countries, and even developing countries such as China are now taking better care of the planet in important ways.
    How did this happen? Through more capitalism, not less:

    The strangest aspect of the story is that we didn't make any radical course changes to eliminate the trade-off between human prosperity and planetary health. Instead, we just got a lot better at doing things we'd already been doing. In particular, we got better at combining technological progress with capitalism to satisfy human wants and needs.
    Here is climate luke warmist Bjørn Lomborg on the "Economics of climate change innovation"

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    Pollution, climate change, general mistreatment of the planet all share a common denominator. Our complete failure to manage population growth as a species. But most models ignore this in at least some ways. Our footprint will be greater with 14 billion large mammals not living sustainably than it is with 7 billion large mammals not living sustainably. Every other critter on the globe, save us and our pets lives sustainably.

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    Quote Originally Posted by donttread View Post
    Pollution, climate change, general mistreatment of the planet all share a common denominator. Our complete failure to manage population growth as a species. But most models ignore this in at least some ways. Our footprint will be greater with 14 billion large mammals not living sustainably than it is with 7 billion large mammals not living sustainably. Every other critter on the globe, save us and our pets lives sustainably.
    Perhaps the problem is we try to manage things were incapable of managing in an effort to always get ahead, always advance, always change.
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

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