this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2024
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Does it? We’ve pumped so much carbon and methane and other worse substances into the atmosphere (or into the earth, in the case of fracking) in pursuit of that profit and that’s directly affecting the severity and frequency of some of those natural disasters. Obviously natural disasters exist anyway, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t demonstrably making the situation worse.
Was the soviet union also pursuing profit? If we stopped having profit seeking, would that mean less carbon and other pollution?
If so, how do you figure? Do you not think economic activity would have happened if we’d been doing all our stuff from the goodness of our altruistic hearts?
Like, what kind of economic system doesn’t pollute?
The soviets were constantly trying to grow their economy to stay competitive with the US and to demonstrate affluence. They switched out the old capitalist factory owners for the new class of government bureaucrats and party elite, who then carried on running the system for themselves. The state owned the means of production. They pretended that everyone owned the state, but we know this wasn't the case. The soviet union was a state capitalist system.
If we stopped seeking profit, our economies would stop growing and subsequently our emissions would as well. Our system is built to rely on infinite growth. No bank gives out a loan without expecting that money to grow with interest. Infinite growth is incompatible with the material reality of a finite planet. What we would need to do now, would involve purposeful economic degrowth. I have no hope that this will ever happen since it would require a lot of people to consume less and we are used to a lot of bread and circuses. Whatever you define as "economic activity" is secondary to the survival of the species.