The Koch brothers* and the leader of Brazil are not environmentalists who let themselves get taken over by capitalists. They ARE the capitalists on the other side who don’t give a crap about the environment. Certainly people like Richard Branson and Al Gore haven’t sold out to them.
This is basically another aspect of the far left mistakenly believing that they’ve been sold out by mainstream left leaders, and no matter how hard I try to understand I don’t get where they’re coming from. I’ll stick to the US since that’s the scene I’m most familiar with, but I bet this scenario I’m going to outline is the same in representative governments worldwide. Let’s set the starting point as a period of time when the mainstream left is in power, such as just after the election of Obama here in the US. Obviously he didn’t singlehandedly turn around the problem of global warming, because that’s going to take time. Unfortunately those on the far left expected instant results, and when they didn’t get them they threw a hissy fit that resulted in the right wing taking over the legislature in 2010, the effects of which we are still dealing with today. Not only that, but to then turn around and point at the leaders on the mainstream left and say they sold out is beyond ridiculous. Obama, Pelosi, and Schumer (and their equivalents in other countries) didn’t sell out. They lost power to the right wing and thus were unable to further enact the environmentalist agenda. Hillary Clinton most definitely didn’t sell out, and didn’t even have the opportunity to do so. But these people on the far left really want to continue to blame mainstream liberals for selling out? It pisses me off that even now they continue down that path :mad:. If these people are going to blame Al Gore (and presumably Obama) for things that the Koch Brothers* and Jair Bolsonaro (the Brazilian president who allows and even encourages the aforementioned rainforest to be burned, mainly for cattle farming rather than growing sugarcane) are doing to ruin the environment, as if they are all on the same team, how can one even have a reasonable conversation with them ?
To make a long story short, this is just another example of the far left blaming the mainstream left for the actions of the far right.
*Yes, I’m aware that one of the Koch brothers has passed.
If we have capitalists who are making a profit by helping the environment and capitalists who are making a profit by harming the environment, we shouldn’t be opposing all capitalists. We should distinguish between the two groups and only oppose those who are harming the environment.
The same argument applies to socialists and anarchists and any other group of ideologues. The environmental movement should be focused on protecting the environment, not on advancing some political or economic ideology.
I have a friend who’s gay and transgendered and pretty far to the left of the political spectrum. She complained one time about corporate appropriation of the LBGTQ movement. I told her she should accept it as a sign of the movement’s success; LBGTQ people were now part of the mainstream and corporations therefore wanted to make a profit off them just like they did everyone else.
The only way a movement can avoid capitalism is to fail. Any movement that succeeds will grow big enough for capitalists to want to join in so they can sell t-shirts. The movement shouldn’t try to fight this. They should accept the capitalists into their ranks, take their money, and use it to further the cause. The only time capitalism becomes a problem is if the movement begins to cater to the capitalists and starts making decisions based on increasing profits rather than advancing the cause.
I police-up litter, generate minimal trash, and otherwise fulfill my Green Party membership all on my own. No corporation bribes me. Am I missing out?
If I were a long-term pragmatist I would encourage despoliation of Terra’s biosphere. More smog! More plastic! More carcinogens! Because unless the environment goes to shit we won’t be impelled to escape the planet before the next extinction-event asteroid whacks us. We can’t conquer the universe then.
But if extinction doesn’t put us out of our misery, maybe we’d better clean up. Deniers must hate their grandkids.
The environment going to shit would have zero value as an incentive to escape the planet. No matter how bad the Earth gets, making Earth habitable again is always going to be easier than making Mars habitable. Any planet other than Mars, even harder yet.
I have worked on bioenergy on and off since the early 2000. Mostly worked on feasibility analysis, return on investment analysis, etc. Have done work with many large corporations and many many other research institutions / universities.
In my experience, corporations were always hesitant to go ahead with these projects because the numbers never added up. It was the Scientists and the Professors that were most gung-ho on selling this technology, getting grants from the government and generally “green washing” these technologies.
Most major universities setup multiple labs, research institutions… some even started making and selling biofuels. Some would argue that that’s what research / Scientists are supposed to do, but I personally know of many instances where voices of dissent among scientists were ruthlessly crushed.
So just blaming capitalists for this is sheer stupidity, the Scientists / Researchers / Academics are equally to blame and I wish they have the moral courage to stand up and admit that they were wrong.
Even now as we speak, people all over the US are “recycling” household plastics and paper. All environmentalists fully know that these are not getting recycled but are headed to landfills for the last 2 years. But the environmentalists won’t tell the ordinary folks to stop paying for recycling services. And ordinary folks will keep wasting water cleaning up recycling plastic, trucks will run around collecting recyclables making more CO2 … you know the drill.
Agree fully - but then there was the scientists lobbying the government to give subsidies / incentivize “green technologies” . They even made up fancy terms like “woody biomass” and “non-cellulosic biomass” and even incentivized people to plant Jatropha and what not.
Meanwhile my small gas operated blower kept choking up on ethanol added gasoline (another story of sheer scientific faulty foresight and Unpragmatic environmentalism).
This might be true in some regions, but to claim that this is true across the US is false, and becoming falser by the day as supply chains figure out how to recover from the shocks of China simply turning off the receiving spigot. There was an article about the local adjustments that have been taken on in northwest around recycling just a week or so ago.
I would take this even further, it’s only a problem if catering to the capitalists is antithetical to the cause. If market demand and government regulations make the pro-environment decision the same as the most profitable decision, capitalism will do all the work for you.
In my area sawlogs are going for $400 per thousand board feet (mbf) scribner. If I convert the pulp price of $35 a ton to mbf I get $245 per mbf. Biomass is the shit they can’t make pulp out of. Rot, bark, hog fuel.
Wow - that article gave me a glimmer of hope. It mentions the company doing their paper recycling (Norpac), glass recycling but not plastic recycling.
Anyways - I went on to read about NORPAC. Then I read this article.
Summary :smack:: NORPAC is owned by a NY Hedge fund company and they lobbied to get tariffs placed on Canadian paper to make themselves profitable. Meanwhile, Newspapers which were already on thin ice have to pay extra for paper.
Another example of the capitalist “green washing” the OP is talking about.
I lost my appetite to further check on the glass recycling company
I also found many gaping gaps in the Michael Moore “documentary”'s narrative.
This TEDx Talk may be more intelligent. Formerly an environmentalist favoring solar and wind power, Michael Shellenberger deplores their environmental costs and has come around to embrace nuclear power. He even makes an (outrageous?) claim that oil companies encourage solar and wind power because they know countries that adopt them, unlike countries with nuclear, will need carbon-powered plants to keep the grid up.
There are certain situations where it’s possible for the marginal unit of renewable generating capacity can result in positive marginal emissions due to use of inefficient peakers, but I don’t find that argument persuasive. It’s easier to deal with if emissions are disincentivized, as opposed to incentivizing individual technologies.
As someone who is personally sanguine about fission, I find the use of waste to criticize any other technology highly suspect.
But yes, there is a delayed waste stream from solar power. It’s important that we don’t ignore the costs. There is no energy technology where the only waste stream is rainbows and laughter. But there are plenty that are better than the incumbents.
I meant to reply on this sooner, but it got lost in a stack of stuff to do. Just got around to reading the apnews article you linked.
I’m not going to defend NORPAC here. It’s obvious that they’re slimy. But it’s also obvious that after the jolt from China no longer importing recyclables, the domestic supply chain is starting to handle the flow. It’s just false that it’s all being landfilled.
But one thing you’re certainly right about is that this is similar to what the OP is talking about! Like the movie, it’s falsely applying a standard of purity when the questions should be is it (recycling/green energy) better than the alternatives, and does it provide a path forward for further improvement. And the answers to both appear to be yes.
I agree with you on this. I think that it won't happens as fast we we might like but as we are speaking technology is developing and will continue. When it becomes viable we will all happily make the switch.
Agree - that’s what I was driving towards. I am an immigrant and see people divided into two rigid camps of liberals and conservatives BOTH quite oblivious to the ground realities of environmentalism. Recently I was looking at a feasibility project to incinerate (burn) plastic waste. It got cancelled after a protest from one camp. The reason cited was dioxane emissions. Meanwhile, the Aluminum recycling plant, a few blocks away is happily emitting dioxanes. Both facilities were going to use similar controls BTW.
There is actually pretty good technology out there. You can make clean power from coal, from natural gas, from oil with 0% CO2 emissions. You can also do nuclear like others have pointed out. Since Coal or Natural gas has inherent domestic security assurance, a small number of such fossil fuel plants maybe of strategic interest.
One of the major problem with many of these projects are the same as above : Liberals versus Conservatives politics. Big projects like these take 3-5 years to get permits, and another 5 years or so to begin production. For nuclear it takes 10-15 years.
For Capitalism to work In the energy sector, you need long term predictability of the market. If you go for something incentivized by Government A, it will most likely get reversed by the next government. You can’t have investors when you are uncertain on the rate of return.
This is the reason why many power companies go for plants that can be quickly constructed and brought online. (Within the time frame of any single Government). Most often it is gas or oil that wins.
The broader point is that the capitalism framework coexists with social and political framework. Capitalism produces “a local optimum solution” taking into account the other pressures. Capitalism by itself is no messiah that will drive societies towards well being.
And despite the Ayn Rand idealism readily embraced by me in college years, I’ve found real life to be quite different.
That is, large corporations shifting to energy that is not exactly green nor efficient from energy that was not green but more efficient. The only thing not mentioned is peak oil.
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