Political Memes

Your comment is a good example of two of the classic global warming denial tactics.

You're claim about industrial productivity causing unavoidable damage to the environment is setting up a binary in order to pretend the badness is unavoidable. In reality, different industrial procedures have vastly varying effects on the environment. One procedure might have an incredibly small effect relative to another, but if we listen to your claim, we would lump them all together and shrug our shoulders because it's necessary to have industry in modern society.

And then there's the scale argument. Well, the scale argument is another kind of deflection. I think the background assumption is that because human beings have done things on a small scale for the past few hundred years, we shouldn't worry that things have been ramped up in the last half century. Of course that doesn't make sense because the world population has risen massively, and the effects of increased climate change end up causing irreversible damage, damage that wasn't even close to being caused a hundred years ago.

And finally, the fatalistic tone itself is a deflection tactic. In fact we have created a lot of legislation to fix problems created by pollution. We have successfully regulated a ton of environmental problems away. So if we're trying to use history as a measure of how to create the future, let's get even more regulation into place.

Industrial productivity comes at the cost of the environment.

There's no industrial productivity that comes from sustainability. You can only harvest to exhaustion. And you can never give back any more than you take.

This is the nature of industry and not at all the nature of profit chasing.

Like, that’s just how mining works.

No mining but strip mining.

Even industrial pollution isn’t a new concern.

An unsolvable concern. Certainly not one that industrial recycling and waste mitigation can address.

So for example the Soviet Union never had environmental disasters, prison labor and slavery, or its own military-industrial complex?

The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. So certainly not since then.

I'm a little surprised you didn't pivot to China. But then you might have to ask what they've been up to in the Gobi Desert or with their domestic air pollution or in pursuit of zero-emissions international bulk shipping

In fact China is one of the only countries set to OVERACHIEVE its climate goals by 2030

Obviously bad stuff like that happens.

If we're just running the numbers, we'll consistently find that privatization consistently increases the rate of pollution despite reducing gross productive volumes.

In that sense, capitalism is absolutely responsible for Net Increase In Per Capita Pollution.

It isn't merely that bad things happen. It is that in a private model, the economic benefit of production is given priority over the social cost of ecological degradation. Soviet central planned economies, operating as a holistic body, must account for waste. And while they can have a tolerance of it in pursuit of longer term goals, they cannot ignore ecological costs indefinitely. The Dengist industrial period is a perfect case in point. Although, under Lenin at least, the Russian Soviets gave ecological preservation a priority not known since at least Catherine the Great.

"Capitalism" in the functional sense is an ecological moral hazard. Westward expansion is uniformly recognized as an ecological blight, with a number of very plain incentives to wage war through ecological destruction, most notably during the Indian Wars. And plantation ecology was nearly as bad as its labor practice, with southern tobacco farming rapidly depleting the soil and causing crop failure that even 18th century rural aristocrats couldn't ignore.

These two economic systems are not the same in this regard.