Soaring temperatures. Unusually hot oceans. Record high levels of carbon pollution in the atmosphere and record low Antarctic ice. We’re only halfway through 2023 and so many climate records are being broken.
Soaring temperatures. Unusually hot oceans. Record high levels of carbon pollution in the atmosphere and record low Antarctic ice. We’re only halfway through 2023 and so many climate records are being broken.
It is not how capitalism works. At first individuals should start prefer local production and production of more green companies. And only after that corporations change their politics. For example, there is a yearly rating of green electronics (how much green electricity company uses, how clean production is, etc.) but customers do not care. And if customers do not care, why corporations should care?
That’s one way capitalism can work. Capitalism, like anything created by humans, is complex. The way you described how capitalism works seems to put all the blame on the people with the least power or knowledge in the whole process.
Corporations have the money to advertise their products, bribe politicians, lobby governments, threaten or deal with whistleblowers, suppress information and research or destroy foreign environments for resources to continually gain more power. That’s not a complete list either. The things these entities would do to exploit everything to increase their quaterly profits is horrifying.
Where I live, our regional government official works hand in hand with businesses and corporations to completely gut health care and education while giving away all our green land to build more expensive homes.
If individuals truly had control over capitalism as you suggest, then they will soon be too tired from being over worked, sick from lack of healthcare, possibly homeless, and under educated to know any better to make better decisions, or fight back.
Corporations have the wealth to change things but it seems ruthless manipulation and exploitation are their favourite tools. I don’t see how these tools can continue endlessly on this finite planet. You can’t exploit a lifeless planet with dead slaves but they just can’t see past their quarterly profits.
Let me just buy a locally sourced phone from the local farmers market! Hmm while I’m at it I’ll switch my power supplier to one that uses renewable energy instead of a coal fired power plant! And for my business trip I think I’ll fly on magic carpet!
Wow! Pollution and global climate change really is the fault of selfish individuals and not unregulated capitalist as I initially thought!
You are not considering that not everybody can know how everything is produced.
I am more than 30 years into this life and don’t know exactly how many things that I buy are produced, how the resources are gained, how far parts were shipped, etc.
On top of that companies go far lengths to hide things that would have a bad public feedback. They even do research only to sow doubt in science. And they print fake green labels and proudly advertise with it.
That’s why ideally the government steps in to bring transparency and safety for their citizen.
But guess what? Companies are paying nice money and other benefits for politicians to be able to lead the customers by their noses.
customers caring about a thing doesn’t guarantee that corporations will care
like perhaps the issue is that we need to basically petition and beg giant corporations to stop killing us
maybe the system shouldn’t be such that that’s all we can do
I think expecting each person to trace the incredibly complex chains of businesses and processes that result in every product they buy is unrealistic. Sure, some stuff is obvious, but plenty is not.
It reminds of of an episode of the Good Place where an angel buys a tomato at the supermarket and inadvertently commits like 14 sins due to the deep chains of unethical practices that brought the tomatoes to the store - which of course no one could possibly know when they picked it up.
IMO corporations aren’t going to self-regulate and consumers arent going to do 2 hours of research on everything the buy - it’s supposed to be the governments job to spend the time identifying pollution sources and regulating them away - but with regulatory capture and corruption that doesn’t usually happen either.
Capitalism also works to keep prices as high as possible and wages as low as possible leaving most of the population not in a position to make ethical desicions over affordability decisions.