Interesting article..although Jay Hanson was on to this a long time ago; and political economists have been on to it long before that.

In Hanson's--admittedly glib, but wonderfully pithy--phrase: "Capitalism is simply taking natural resources and turning them into garbage."

My own corollary: "with a nice profit for the people making the garbage, and the people selling it."

There are other ways to organize human society. There always have been. We don't *have* to be slaves to our genes here (even if Hanson and Dawkins would argue differently)..we could organize ourselves very differently.

Hanson's "Society of Sloth" has always been an intriguing idea. Half-baked, at this writing, but still offering some very interesting ideas. See it as part of a larger paper: http://dieoff.org/page168.htm

The problem, as always, is that the Alpha Males have a strong vested interest in the way things are organized now. They will fight to the death to maintain things as they are now, alas.

But it is surely the case that capitalism is not the only way to go. Turning natural resources into garbage (including carbon waste) is not the only way to go. It's just the way our DNA finds most comfortable.

It is really quite remarkable that human beings, given half a chance, managed to find the quickest way to destroy the planet, because of their plains-ape genes. The only reason we haven't used nukes yet is because even we can see that they're self-defeating. But it's been a sore temptation to some of the Alphas among us--think Curtis LeMay, a crazy Alpha if ever there was one. A few more of those in the wrong place at the wrong time, and who knows what the hell we'll do? All to preserve our perfect right to turn natural resources into garbage.

Turning natural resources into garbage is fundamental to metabolism - you can't get away from that and still be human. (Or machine.) Of course, there are also many instances of garbage being turned into natural resources.

It's too simplistic to be a useful paradigm no matter how you try to spin it.

Little cheap, don'tcha think, Pyrian?

I wasn't proposing that we could somehow repeal the second law of thermodynamics, rather, that capitalism at its most efficient converts natural resources into garbage at such a rate that we'll all be up to our eyeballs in shit before too long. Some places in the world, capitalism (of the crony variety) has already achieved exactly that.

If you don't like Jay's formulation, what would *you* call capitalism?

Looks to me as if after 100 years of a big, fat splurge, we're about to wake up with a very big hangover, and we can blame capitalism (and our genetic propensity for it) for the pain.

The notion that environmental degradation is an example of market failure is not exactly new, and has been around for a long time, as evidenced by proposals for a carbon trading market to regulate emissions. The problem is negative externalities: in the absence of regulation, polluters are free to impose negative effects of their actions outside the closed loop of their economic system, making society as a whole bear the costs. In contrast, businesses and individuals are not free to dispose solid waste onto the property of others, or onto public property, for free. Since most businesses have to pay a per unit rate to discharge solid waste, there is an incentive to reduce the amount of waste generated.

To say that environmental degradation is a consequence of market-based capitalism is utter nonsense. The true problem is the tragedy of the commons: since clean air and water do not belong to anyone individually, no individual has much incentive to preserve them. The solution is to find appropriate economic incentives for action, regardless of the system of government or economics. Totalitarian communism produced much greater environmental degradation in Eastern Europe and Asia than free-market capitalism produced in the West. The early settlers of Iceland inflicted permanent and irreversible damage upon their environment hundreds of years before the advent of capitalism.

Clearly, climate change demands a clear philosophical choice about the role of government. As in all aspects of social life, the proper role of government is to prevent actors from inflicting harm to others, either in an economic sense or the infliction of physical injury. The problem is not in convincing naysayers that government regulation is appropriate to prevent harm, but in demonstrating that environmental damage is harm at all.

All economic systems turn natural resources into waste, not just systems where the means of production are owned by individuals. Communism turns natural resources into waste, socialism turns natural resources into waste. Tribal communal life turns natural resources into waste.

What use is a definition if it applies just as well to all mutually exlusive cases?

It is nice that the report labeled Climate Change as a market failure, since it clearly is. The price of fossil fuels most certainly does not incorporate the environmental damage it causes, so it's no surprise that the market has led to overproduction of carbon. Maybe this will lead head-in-the-sand types to consider that environmental protection and economic efficiency are not enemies, and perhaps it will lead hippie-BS spouting "Paradigm Shift" solution types to consider that it's the incentive structure of markets that are the problem (see Tragedy of the Commons), and not the markets themselves.

I stopped reading this article because of the author's failure to express himself in sentences.

You say - there is a school of thought that market capitalism causes environmental degradation.

I say - I just had to click through three full page adverts to read this. If this is supposed to be the alternative to capitalism, I'm a convert. To capitalism.

Posters who dismiss Jay Hanson's formulation about capitalism miss the point.

Again, neither he, nor I, propose to repeal the second law of thermodynamics. You make too literal an interpretation of Jay's comment for the purpose of dismissing it.

Rather, if human beings had used their big forebrains to devise ways to live in a sustainable fashion on planet earth, we wouldn't be in the pickle we are so obviously in. The Commons would be preserved as a matter of rational planning.

Problem is, we can't stop humans from reproducing (short of violence of one sort or another), and we can't stop humans from deriving pleasure from aquisition--brain-chemical production arising from aquisition and domination.

These seem, currently, insurmountable problems. And crony-capitalism certainly doesn't help. That's the point of the article. Markets are too stupid to understand a finite resource, and economists are too stupid to account for finite resources. Both are too stupid to bother with the costs of pollution--or, rather they're too self-interested to bother with it.

They, and markets, assume we can find resource-substitutes forever, and this is patently not true, since, last I checked, the earth is a sphere, finite and bounded.