In theory private companies have no incentive to destroy the environment, as their shareholders are human beings that live in the world more than anyone else. And there’s no reason that worker-owned co-ops can’t also degrade the environment. Some of the biggest co-ops in the US are composed of factory farms.
The rest? You’re not applying even scrutiny. You ascribe the failures of capitalism to its intrinsic nature, but every other economic system gets excuses.
Yes, you can say that “capitalism is driven by a desire to produce as many goods and services as possible without much regard to its consequences.” But the same could be said for any economic or political system. The ancient hunter-gatherers hunted the megafauna to extinction because they were driven by a desire to obtain food without regard to its consequences. The Maya exhausted their farmland through excessive slash-and-burn agriculture because their leaders were driven by a desire to obtain wealth and power without regards for consequences. Soviet planners destroyed the Aral Sea because they wanted to make their quotas and receive their incentives, regardless of the consequences. You excuse their activities saying it had nothing to do with their economic system, but the same could be said for capitalism! Companies aren’t Captain Planet villains; they don’t pollute for the sake of pollution. Pollution is a byproduct, not a goal, of every economic system.
You do have a point about China and its renewable production, but remember it was capitalist economies that did the decades worth of preceding work on renewables before China really ramped up manufacturing. And of course, China is doing all of that renewable rollout through capitalist enterprises, rather than through some centrally planned system. And the US has seen a major recovery in its forests. (Well I’m sure in the cases of both China and the US, most of the ‘forests’ are tree farms.) But in terms of raw numbers of trees, there are as many trees in the US in 2026 as there were in 1900.
Don’t mistake me for some huge proponent of capitalism, I’m not. But I bristle at lazy thinking that blames complex problems on simple solutions. Humans, regardless of the economic system, have proven talented at exploiting resources beyond their sustainable level. Most of what gets lazily ascribed to capitalism this way is just human nature.
It’s Occam’s razor. If we observe environmental destruction from every economic system humankind has ever created, that’s a damn good sign that humans just by nature can often damage the environments we live in. The economic system is irrelevant.
In theory private companies have no incentive to destroy the environment, as their shareholders are human beings that live in the world more than anyone else. And there’s no reason that worker-owned co-ops can’t also degrade the environment. Some of the biggest co-ops in the US are composed of factory farms.
The rest? You’re not applying even scrutiny. You ascribe the failures of capitalism to its intrinsic nature, but every other economic system gets excuses.
Yes, you can say that “capitalism is driven by a desire to produce as many goods and services as possible without much regard to its consequences.” But the same could be said for any economic or political system. The ancient hunter-gatherers hunted the megafauna to extinction because they were driven by a desire to obtain food without regard to its consequences. The Maya exhausted their farmland through excessive slash-and-burn agriculture because their leaders were driven by a desire to obtain wealth and power without regards for consequences. Soviet planners destroyed the Aral Sea because they wanted to make their quotas and receive their incentives, regardless of the consequences. You excuse their activities saying it had nothing to do with their economic system, but the same could be said for capitalism! Companies aren’t Captain Planet villains; they don’t pollute for the sake of pollution. Pollution is a byproduct, not a goal, of every economic system.
You do have a point about China and its renewable production, but remember it was capitalist economies that did the decades worth of preceding work on renewables before China really ramped up manufacturing. And of course, China is doing all of that renewable rollout through capitalist enterprises, rather than through some centrally planned system. And the US has seen a major recovery in its forests. (Well I’m sure in the cases of both China and the US, most of the ‘forests’ are tree farms.) But in terms of raw numbers of trees, there are as many trees in the US in 2026 as there were in 1900.
Don’t mistake me for some huge proponent of capitalism, I’m not. But I bristle at lazy thinking that blames complex problems on simple solutions. Humans, regardless of the economic system, have proven talented at exploiting resources beyond their sustainable level. Most of what gets lazily ascribed to capitalism this way is just human nature.
It’s Occam’s razor. If we observe environmental destruction from every economic system humankind has ever created, that’s a damn good sign that humans just by nature can often damage the environments we live in. The economic system is irrelevant.