[AnthonyMouse]

Capitalism has only been the dominant mode of production for approximately 2 centuries but feudalism lasted for ~6, so what if you want to do something about climate change sooner than ~400 years from now?

It's also not obvious what you propose to replace it with, because the world has seen communist governments and they do not have a sterling environmental record.

"Up to its collapse in 1991, the Soviet Union generated 1.5 times as much pollution per unit of GNP as the United States." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_issues_in_Russia)

[badtension]

It is always the same argument: things are not perfect, ok, but what we replace it with? Noone know, so we keep the thing going.

I think this is what the parent commenter had in mind - we are just incapable of solving this problem, doesn't matter how we put it. Our climate will be gone and as a skeptic I would only ask: will we manage a slow degrowth or have a rapid system collapse?

[AnthonyMouse]

You don't have to replace it with anything. The capitalist solution to climate change is a carbon tax. You price the externality and then the market takes care of minimizing it efficiently.

The problem is actually the governments failing to institute one. The problem isn't capitalism, it's democracy -- too many people work in the oil and coal industries to easily pass a law to delete them.

But degrowth is an even more ridiculous fantasy, because nobody is going to put up with that. It's probably the least palatable proposal to voters of any of the crazy nonsense people come up with. Not least because it isn't necessary -- it's just as good to install 100 GW capacity worth of solar panels or nuclear reactors than to reduce consumption by 100 GW.

Let's do the math here. The US power grid has about 800 GW of generating capacity from natural gas and coal. A 1 GW nuclear reactor, one of the more expensive methods at present, costs about $5.4B. So to replace the entire US fossil fuel generating capacity exclusively with nuclear would cost $4320B, amortized over 50 years this is $86B/year. By contrast, the COVID stimulus in one year was $5T, or more than the amount needed to decarbonize the entire US power grid. And mind you this is the total cost, not the incremental cost over the alternative (continuing to build and fuel carbon-burning power plants).

So the high end of that cost would be 0.3% of US GDP. There is no way you are going to eliminate 60% of US power consumption for less than that amount of money.