Monday, November 28, 2016

Economic ideology of climate change

I posted a comment at Truthout:

The most neglected aspect of the climate crisis is its economic root. It's in the interest of the highly profitable fossil fuel industry to (1) push climate denial to preempt the cost of mitigation and/or loss of sales/profits; (2) promote pipeline projects to decrease their transportation costs, thus boost profits; (3) find more sources of fossil fuels to extract and sell for profit and (4) sell as much fossil fuel products as possible to maximize profit (this includes minimizing energy efficiency).

Economic ideology is the primary driver of human behavior and, as it stands now, corporate capitalism rules. Regardless of the [good] intentions of bioconservatism, it cannot override the powerful forces of fossil fuel capitalism. The only way to specifically target the fossil fuel industry is to make it unprofitable. Another way is to redirect current economic ideology away from power concentration in the elite class (oligarchs and the 1%-ers).

The biggest problem with industrial pollution (includes climate change) is scale. Large powerful nations enable large powerful corporations which extend their reach into international markets to become international conglomerates. By pooling the monies of many investors, small numbers of executives have the power to use and do use these huge sums to profit at any means and that includes polluting the environment with their toxic outputs. If economies were structured so that power is  disseminated in a way that prevents it from being concentrated in the hands of a few elites, industry could only operate on a small scale. And small scale produces less pollution.


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