Capitalism Can't Solve Climate Change

[Barry Markson]

BY BRETT CHRISTOPHERS MARCH 20, 2024 9:00 AM EDT

Amidst the gathering gloom about climate change and continuing growth in global greenhouse-gas emissions, the one bright spot appears to be clean energy development. 2023 saw another, much-trumpeted record for renewables installations worldwide, with an estimated 507 GW of new generating capacity being nearly 50 percent higher than 2022’s figure.

The positivity is misplaced. Even on the transition from dirty to clean power, the world is still failing. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has estimated that both electricity generation from coal and gas, and total power-sector CO2 emissions, continued to grow in 2023, to all-time highs of 17,252 TWh and 13,575 Mt CO2, respectively. In other words, even as renewables are growing fast, they are not yet growing fast enough to displace dirty power generation, which remains the single largest source of greenhouse-gas emissions.

Worse still, the world is failing on the energy transition for reasons that strike at the heart of capitalist economies, and which will therefore be very difficult to surmount. The core issue here is easy to state. Most countries are relying predominantly on the private sector to drive faster renewables investment; private firms invest on the basis of expected profits; but profitability in renewables is rarely attractive.

Stick with an approach to climate change mitigation in which the private sector continues to be seen as the savior, and we are setting ourselves up to continue to fail.Veiled by discussion of headline global trends in new renewables capacity investment is the fact that almost all the incremental progress is currently being made in one country: China. Trumpeting 2023’s 50 percent growth in annual global capacity installations as a global achievement is wrongheaded, given that China by itself delivered nearly 80 percent of the increment.

Christophers is professor at Uppsala University in Sweden, and author The Price Is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet and Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World

And there you have it!
Either we become more like authoritarian China or the world as we know it will cease to exist.

https://time.com/6958606/climate-change-transition-capitalism/

[walkingman]

1. Regardless of what we want in the US it will never happen here. The fossil fuel

corporations have owned out elected officials for decades and they collude on a worldwide basis to maintain control.

Even worse than that there a still lots of people that do not believe Climate Change is human caused or that it is "god's will". The corporations have been successful with their propaganda machine since the 50s in convincing people it is all a scam. And the jobs alone are a barrier to change.

I do not believe anything meaningful will happen and this slow-moving disaster will continue.

My homeowners insurance doubled this year and I suspect the government will end up being the vendor of last resort.

[Brenda]

2. Agree except for the slow-moving disaster part. It's shifted into 3rd gear lately.

[hunter]

3. Nature doesn't care about human ideologies or religions.

When our world civilization hits rock bottom our exploitation of fossil fuels will cease, one way or another. As the paramedics say, the bleeding always stops.

We have all the technologies we need to quit fossil fuels today. The only question is how bad do things have to get before we do?

Rapid restructurings of large economies are not unprecedented. When the U.S.A. finally decided that Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany were actual threats to the U.S.A. itself our economy was rapidly transformed into a war machine. With a similar level of effort we could quit fossil fuels, possibly within a period of fifteen years or less.

The triggering event for this transformation will probably be something quite horrible.