
What’s Behind the World’s Biggest Climate Victory? Capitalism - pseudolus
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-can-renewable-energy-power-the-world/
======
mikelyons
Better title: Wind turbines dominate the landscape at the Avangrid Renewables’
Baffin Wind Power Project in Sarita, Texas

~~~
woah
Why is it better?

~~~
arthurcolle
1) it contains more information.

2) it isn't a completely clickbait title.

------
licebmi__at__
Well, duh. What a surprise that in a world where capitalism is the main mode
of production and economy framework, renewable energies follow a capitalist
growth model.

Still, is undeniable that the market forces worked against renewable energies
for a lot of time, the article fails to demonstrate (it doesn't even
speculate) how this adoption it's better under capitalism than in other
economic frameworks. For all we can tell from the article, maybe renewable
energies thrived despite capitalism.

And yet, the article provides interesting data, it's a shame it's framed as
propaganda for the Markets Cult.

------
pasabagi
Somehow I doubt that future generations will think that capitalism has much to
do with any mitigations of the climate change catastrophe it spent the last
fifty years charging into.

A society that cooks itself in its own gasses is obviously sick. Healthy
societies don't charge headlong at their own destruction. It's an obvious
failure of thinking, organization, and culture.

If capitalism is the organizing principle of a society, then capitalism is
responsible for that society's problems. If they are small, then that is to
capitalism's credit. If they are gigantic, catastrophic, senseless, and
avoidable, but unstoppable due to systemic roadblocks, and cultural
derangement - then there's no way to spin it - it does not reflect well on
capitalism.

~~~
anm89
This attitude is baffling to me. We have a government which has spent the last
half century giving special incentives and privileges and essentially free
money in the form of tax incentives to the fossil fuels industry (ie the exact
opposite of capitalism in the free markets sense) and then people complain
that because "our society is capitalist" that capitalism is at fault.

No way it could have been 50 years of idiotic policy. Yeah it was the free
exchange of good and services for money.

~~~
cairo_x
This sounds like something someone would say to curtail responsibility.

You realize it all comes back to capitalism right, whether it's a communist
dictatorship giving your company permission to pump shit into the atmosphere,
or the bastian of democracy, the US, giving companies permission to sell bombs
to dictators, and so on.

It still comes back to the companies themselves. And if the communist
state(aka state-capitalism), or the representative democracy refuses to give
them permission they will move to another place and try again, or turn to
aggressive lobbying, because capitalism.

In case you've forgotten, capitalism is when you reward the investors over the
workers with the surplus value the workers created, moreover, the investors
control the company. The capitalist gets their investment back, and then they
continue to get a chunk of the surplus created at the expense of the people
who actually created said surplus, who instead get a wage. Oh yeah, and they
control how the surplus is spent. What is the alternative? A co-op. In a co-op
the workers do not get a wage, they get profits from the value they were
responsible for, minus funding needed to purchase the next round of raw
materials. In a co-op the company functions as a direct-democracy. The workers
literally control the surplus and the way it is re-invested into the company.

In case you weren't aware, the majority of companies responsible for large
chunks of the climate change pie, are/were driven by investors (and/or states)
looking for profits without regards to the health and future of the people who
produce said profits, the health of the locales in which they operate, or the
health of the planet. The worker/citizen does not get a say, because they are
kept on a wage, and because they literally have no say. This is why state-
owned collectives are also the worst kind of capitalism. It's as if there is
one company who holds the monopoly (the state) and the state is not 'the
people' but a small number of, again, psychopaths who have nothing but quotas
and profits to fulfill and positions to maintain.

A large portion of climate change is driven by a psychopathic disregard for
both the worker and their environment.

~~~
anm89
> "the communist state(aka state-capitalism)"

Well at least you show your hand here. "Communism is capitalism when something
bad is happening." I would love to hear you layout your definitions of
capitalism and communism in a rigorous way.

You've replaced "person doing something I don't like" with "capitalist". Well
in that case yeah, not hard to understand how you see capitalism as causing
the world's problems.

~~~
gattilorenz
> Communism is capitalism when something bad is happening

Well, not the OP, but even the USSR did not call itself "communist" (it was a
"socialist state on its way to communism" or something like that). I don't
think it's unfair to make a distinction between "communism" as described by
Marx and the "communist countries" which were/are at best socialist (at worst
plain capitalist with a veneer of state participation) and ruled by a
"communist party".

And I also think you can say that without attaching any value judgment to
either cases: I'm not defending Marx's communism, it's an unreachable utopia
and trying to implement it can only degenerate into the horrible examples we
have seen.

~~~
anm89
Fair, but my argument would be what wouldn't be capitalism by this definition.
Literally every government post feudalism was capitalist if you are going to
say Stalin, and the US and everything idealogically in between were
capitalist.

At that point I'd argue, whatever it is that this person dislikes, capitalism
is just an empty word to represent it. "Reality", or "the world" would appear
more accurate to me.

~~~
pasabagi
I think the point was, the socialist states of the soviet bloc were explicitly
'capitalist', and that was something they said about themselves. The point is,
they thought about capitalism as something they were transitioning out of, and
trying to actively replace.

Capitalism is a pretty clear idea - it's a society characterized by wage
labour. Non-capitalist societies don't have the concept of selling your
labour-time for a wage. That's why feudal societies aren't capitalist (they
didn't have clocks, for one thing). That's why the soviet block _was_
capitalist.

------
vangelis
Is it capitalism or subsidies that got the industry going in the first place?
The article can't seem to choose.

Also, paywall.

~~~
rumanator
> Is it capitalism or subsidies that got the industry going in the first
> place?

Where do you see any difference or contradiction? Subsidies were used to jump-
start and increase demand and thus supply was created and adapted. That's
textbook supply & demand, a hallmark of capitalism.

~~~
jfengel
The Wall Street Journal in particular seems to define any kind of government
interference in markets as "socialism". For example, this is what they said in
July:

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-reality-check-for-solar-
and-w...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-reality-check-for-solar-and-
wind-11563741088)

The successes are capitalism by definition; the costs are socialism by
definition.

~~~
rumanator
> The Wall Street Journal in particular seems to define

It's a Bloomberg article. There is no need to throw petty ideological jabs.

------
benlivengood
What's really behind improvements in solar and wind efficiency? R&D work. It
doesn't matter who pays the bills if the goal is greater efficiency and
incentives are aligned to reward it. That capitalism rewards power generation
efficiency is more of a side-effect than a feature. If it was more profitable
to improve energy extraction then the R&D funding would go there instead. It
can be strongly argued that this literally happened; we got fracking before we
got cheap wind power, despite the technology for efficient wind being
available for decades (quibbling about computer modeling acknowledged), and we
still flare methane from oil wells instead of capturing it. That capitalism
rewarded clean energy efficiency instead of, say, dirty risky cheap nuclear
fission efficiency is entirely due to regulation.

