Everything You’re Told About Green Capitalism Is Wrong | The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet

9 comments

1. I recently spent hours arguing with people here that private capital will not flow to cheap clean energy because it simply isn’t profitable enough. This guy has written a whole book about this and, in the video linked here, he makes the argument clearly and in depth.

   Capitalism is not built to do what we have to do on energy. Period. Which is why we are watching it fail.

2. I’m sure capitalism would have already done something about this if it could.

3. 1. Plenty of people wrote books. Bill O’Reilly wrote 33 books.

   2. This guy is a geographer.

   3. Capitalist markets are actually highly efficient, when incentive structures are coherent. If you look at Europe, they decarbonized 20% of their electrical grid in one year in response to increased fuel prices due to the Ukraine war. This indicates that fossil fuel use, in electricity, anyway, is highly price elastic. That would imply that carbon pricing schemes like a carbon tax or carbon fee and dividend (which are all recommended by economists) would likely lead to massive decarbonization in other markets, as well.

   There is massive inertia in markets, and the externalities of co2 are not appropriately priced in in such a way as to signal rational consumers to change to efficiency. But that doesn’t mean that capitalist market interactions can’t be leveraged to meaningful change.

4. Not much of an article here tbh. But lack of profitability in renewable energy is a big barrier to capitalist development of said energy.

   I do think that climate change will be the issue that breaks capitalism eventually, as market forces hit the finite limits of what our world can handle

5. Of course it could, with the right sort of regulation. But some don’t think that’s even capitalism. Actually it is. The highest form.

6. Most of the people arguing otherwise seem to be fixated on CO2, and not planetary boundaries in general. Fixing CO2 emissions with capitalistic incentives is probably distantly feasible. Solving the biodiversity and bio geochemical waste problems will be 10x harder with the incentives of the current system.

7. You can mandate through law or you can show people the path to money. I have been advising that farmers are likely to see the new 40b regulations as permanent, because the ag lobby has an awful lot of influence, and when they have been shown the money, they’ll use there immense lobbying power to keep the reg in place.

   The energy transition will succeed because people will make money from capturing or displacing emissions, not because it’s being forced on them. Of course, either way, all the costs will end up as more expensive good for everyone else. Welcome to inflation

8. We all know this instinctively

9. The problem with capitalism is the rich have bribed their way into not being regulated.