Just three days ago there was an open thread on climate change here at C99%. At any rate, climate change isn't going away, regardless of how fiercely the local Barnes and Noble outlet promotes the newest fashion in climate denial. Just to get into it a bit, here, Corsi's book, The Truth About Energy, Global Warming, and Climate Change, appears to be about an incoherent premise, and here I quote from Corsi's publisher:

This book exposes the truth that the climate change hoax is a political movement aimed at eliminating capitalism by spreading alarming disinformation that in order to “save the Earth” from global warming, we must reduce carbon dioxide emissions by switching from hydrocarbon fuels to renewable energies.

Since nobody is arguing that, by itself, "switching from hydrocarbon fuels to renewable energies" will by itself eliminate capitalism, this appears as a bit of concentrated nonsense. But the new fashion in political anger appears to be incoherence. This is why we elect presidents like Trump and Biden, perhaps because people like their incoherence. I suppose the primary advantage of being incoherent in an arena for political debate is that it's hard to argue against someone if you don't really know what they're talking about.

At any rate, the standard climate denier trope is to invoke capitalism as soon as the denier is assured an audience. Climate change must be a hoax because capitalism! the likes of Jerome Corsi will tell us. At any rate, when one brings up climate change in a bigger forum than c99%, one can expect booming voices to tell everyone: CAPITALISM. Rational voices might respond: huh?

It would seem that to understand the idea of capitalism as necessarily linked to the idea of climate change, we must enter the realm of the unconscious. The capitalists must know that their activities are bringing down the planet. They are turning the planet into an aggregate of trash heaps, and our neighborhoods into polluted slums. But this cannot be admitted. Instead it is commonly imagined that endless exploitation of a finite planet is possible. In the capitalist imagination, the working class will gladly suffer indefinite impoverishment, the forests will renew themselves promptly, the topsoil can be renewed endlessly, and the symptoms of life with an additional 50% added to Earth's atmospheric carbon dioxide endowment can be brushed away. The scientists can be safely ignored. Instead, an imagined "far left" is named as a scapegoat. The "far left" is a convenient term: since nobody is in fact in this "far left," everyone can happily point to someone else while singing Dylan's "It Ain't Me, Babe." The "far left" stands for those nagging unconscious thoughts which insinuate that maybe we ought to DO SOMETHING about the global crisis which recurs every Northern-Hemisphere summer or early fall. So, yes, the "far left" is that imagined place where the abrupt-climate-change unconscious has been shoved away.

(As a footnote, it doesn't help matters that the mainstream discourse about climate change is about "reducing carbon emissions." It should be readily apparent today that carbon emissions are NEVER going to be reduced in any linear fashion -- rather, carbon emissions would in fact go up if the human race were to embark upon a transformed world in which it could do more than bicker about reducing carbon emissions a few percent here or there. Six years ago Camila Moreno called the mainstream obsession with carbon emissions "carbon metrics." It's an appropriate name.)

We are at a point where very few people believe anymore in the Conference of Parties process. So it's easy to predict what will come next. The standard apologetics for the capitalist system will occupy the debate about climate change left, right, and center. So let's go through these apologetics, so we can know what to expect. It will be argued, loudly, that:

1) "It is human nature to do cost-benefit analysis, thus people are naturally capitalists." It is human nature to respond to situations, thus the capitalists' triumph in history was conditioned by enabling conditions, developed in the last 550 years, enriching a merchant class. These enabling conditions (specifically property law, accounting law, infrastructure, and the capitalist social imaginary) reign supreme today. They do not help capitalists cope with climate change.

(Here one wants to observe: for the first 199,450 years of human existence on planet Earth, capitalism did not reign supreme. Was that a denial of "human nature"?)

Human nature is actually a lot more versatile than the apologists for capitalism would have you believe. Much of this versatility is discussed in detail in a volume titled "Complexities" (eds. Susan McKinnon and Sydel Silverman).

2) "Capitalism is the most efficient economic system." As Richard Wolff argues, we can do better. Capitalism's wastefulness is what got us to the point of having to do something about climate change.

3) "Capitalism is the best system for innovation." Here it is best to ask: what does capitalist innovation consist of? Capitalist innovation is innovation in sales. First, let's ask: who are, therefore, the beneficiaries of capitalist innovation? The beneficiaries of capitalist innovation are people with money to spend. They aren't the great mass of people who are barely making ends meet -- which is to say, the great mass of people existing in the US and elsewhere today.

A related question is: what is the foundation for capitalist innovation? A brief glance at the history of invention will tell you this. The foundations for capitalist innovation were developed in the last half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. The key invention, the One Ring to rule them all, was the large-scale power plant, invented by Thomas Edison in 1882; once you have an electrical grid you can plug all number of invented appliances into it. (Perhaps the automobile, invented separately by Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler in 1886 in Germany, gets second place here.) The last of these innovations, the Internet, was the product of the US Department of Defense, and not of any capitalist firm.

This sort of innovation isn't going to be repeated in future history, because you can't discover a thing twice. Rather, today there is a need for the sort of innovation which capitalism cannot satisfy. That innovation will be in innovating a society which can mitigate climate change. That was the point of the piece "Climate Change Mitigation in Fantasy and Reality" (password to open the PDF: AddletonAP2009).

4) "Capitalism is about freedom." Freedom (and its synonym liberty) is a big thing for today's front and center apologists for capitalism, the neoliberals. Their foundational texts include titles such as Milton Friedman's "Free to Choose" and Friedrich Hayek's "The Constitution of Liberty." But as indicated by the above discussion of human nature, capitalism's idea of freedom is based on enabling conditions, which limit actual "freedom" in capitalist society to the freedom of consumers to spend their surplus cash. If you are homeless, for instance, or destitute, you do not meet those enabling conditions, and are therefore not free in real life.

More specifically, capitalist freedom is for the consumers of capital -- this freedom is what the neoliberals most specifically celebrate -- which is to say, investors. In today's economic environment, investor freedom is in fact the freedom of investors to invest in fossil fuels and fossil fuel technologies, such as are today compounding the problem of climate change.

In this regard, the goals of those who are NOT blanketing the debates with apologetics for capitalism should to design a future society in which we might survive, one in which freedom means freedom to be someone other than a fossil fuel investor, with an accompanying infrastructure designed to promote freedoms which are ecologically sustainable.

Okay?