this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2024
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[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

From my experience capitalism and climate activism are incompatible ideologies. Capitalism is entirely, without a doubt, entirely focused on the bottom line. If it doesn't make them more money and/or costs them more money, they're against it. That's why something as universally bad as smoking took so long to be essentially outed as a problem, and something people should actively avoid. Just watch "thank you for smoking" for more detail on that one.

Cleaning up factory emissions and by-products/waste, doesn't earn companies any money. It's the right thing to do, but it's far easier and cheaper to simply dump the raw waste into the environment. Whether thats chemical runoff, or toxic fumes, or carbon emissions, etc. To safely collect and dispose of the by-products is an expensive process.

Any efforts from companies that are "green" is either that they can offer you a marginally less-bad (environmentally) product at a reduced cost to them. Whether that is because they passed those costs onto the consumer, or because the "green" alternative is actually cheaper, is the only question. As soon as the "green" alternative costs them more and they can't justify an increase in product cost for being "green", they simply won't do it. Anything outside of this scope is simply a PR stunt to try to gain favor with the more environmentally conscious consumers to try to pull them away from their current brand loyalties, over to your brand.

Pretty much all pr stunts of this sort are one-offs, to give the illusion of making an effort, while doing essentially nothing actually helpful.

Unless they can somehow make a profit from "saving the planet" then they won't do it. It's against their very nature.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

the conclusion is correct, but might I also add that it's because of short term profit, today not tomorrow.

if capitalism just focused on long term profit, then climate would be tackled, as well as health issues like smoking. these things are all unprofitable.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

This is completely valid. I didn't want to get into the economics of short term vs long term gains, etc.

There's a paradox in environmental activism, like with many other things. Basically, if you do everything in your power to avoid an environmental catastrophe, and that catastrophe does not happen, then, did it simply not happen because it never would have happened? Or did your impact avoid the issue?

There's no way to know.

You know what you can tell really quickly? This quarters profits.... Something that seems to be a focus of every capitalist ever.

Drive the earth into becoming an unlivable hellscape, but for a short time, create a lot of value for the shareholders.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 4 months ago (2 children)

There's no stopping climate change in capitalism.

And nothing was done in the way of ending capitalism. Asking "pretty please stop using oil we will paint things" to a capitalist government is ridiculous. The only way to end emissions is being us the ones who control the industry.

So, from my point of view was a useless, possibly counter productive, action.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

To some extent communism could be trading one problem for another authoritarian that doesn’t care. Powerfully influencing culture to be altruistic and not money hungry is probably the real solution but the tangible one would be a big step back toward democratic socialism. Jus my 2 cents

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago

They also demand system change not climate change. But resting on "if we don't abolish capitalism, everything else is useless" we will never abolish capitalism. It is not a binary switch. It is a long and hard process for which every action counts. And defying the capitalist order and narrative of the corrupt and immoral government is an important step towards that.

Nobody will be more capitalist and more for the use of fossil fuels after he read whatever Murdoch tabloid complained about this. And who was like "well now i am against climate action" was just looking for an excuse, but always on the wrong side already.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

The only protests I agree with are the ones that don't bother me, are out my way, and have no impact on actually changing things. Also any form of action from a protest should be stopped by the police.

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