I found the following piece posted on a South African blog and opinion site. It’s filled with the usual misrepresentations of what capitalism is, and its relationship with the environment.
‘Issues on the current environmental crisis: Overpopulation, growth, technology and capitalism’.
Abstract: With environmental and economic uncertainties at an all time high, and the impact of the current capitalist agenda coming under fire, this paper attempts to investigate the present global environmental crisis in relation to the profit-driven economic discourse of capitalism, and examines how, without exception, capital and its overarching economic ideals have had a significant impact on the progression and escalation of global warming, deforestation and a variety of issues related to the existing environmental quandary. Based on the assertion that capitalism views the environment merely as a means to accumulate wealth, this paper goes on to suggest that certain initiatives surrounding legislation and military expenditure may provide some much needed ecological relief.
One thing I find amusing about this type of argument is it could have equally been applied to the pro-creating caveman as well. Anyone read Ishmael? Same kind of garbage, the idea that to save the planet we need to go back to tribalism.
First off, global warming is a load of bullshit. It’s a load of lies designed to give the government more power. I was hoping that the recent e-mail scandal would have exploded all over the news, but the MSM is keeping it under wraps.
Second off, when will people learn that this economic collapse was due to government, not the market?
Third, if forests were privately owned, they would be managed and not destroyed.
I wonder if the person who wrote this paper ever read Filters Against Folly, a book by Garrett Hardin, an ecologist? In it, he applies ecology’s rule, which is: “you can’t do just one thing” to all the social sciences, particularly economics. He remarks that leftist arguments against capitalism usually assume that if they could just change this one thing here and that one thing there that everything would be better and that capitalism is the enemy of change and yada yada yada. The point is that enviro-nazis often overlook the reality that the prosperity that the world has seen over the past two centuries is entirely due to capitalist systems and to…disassemble those now in the favor of “fixing this here and that there” threatens the way everything works. Because as the central law of ecology holds, you cannot do just one thing.
I enjoyed Ishmael, but the narrative about the takers vs the leavers is so flagrantly leftist and at its core ridiculous that the story, in my opinion, has to be taken with quite a large grain of salt.