this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2024
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Fossil fuel companies knew about global warming since at least the 1970s. Those companies have used their enormous wealth to reverse trends towards public transit (e.g. Los Angeles used to have street cars...), halt the green energy transition until very recently, and spread misinformation and buy politicians.
Edit: also think about how all of those oil spills, mountain top removal, air and water pollution, cancers, asthma, heart disease that were "necessary for the economy" over the past couple of decades. When instead we could have already had fully sustainable energy systems with similar economic growth. Vote for politicians willing to do something about it.
Filed as not a bug. Thatβs capitalism working as intended.
While I agree there are issues with capitalism. I disagree this was capitalism working as intended. If it were, the better/more innovative technology (green/cheap energy) would have surpassed the worse technology (dirty energy reliant on continued investment and extraction) because as we are finally seeing, there is more money to be made with green energy than fossil fuels. Suppression of green energy took active anti-capitalist anti-competitive efforts to preserve the edge of fossil fuels.
The purpose of a system is what it does. The way that capitalism is advertised to work and the way that it actually works are quite different. To understand how it actually works, one might turn to Marx, Lenin, Sweezy & Baran, and Michael Hudson.