Paraphrase of a recent Jacobin article titled, "Crash and Burn: You can't have capitalist growth without environmental destruction".

I'm not sure how many of you read Jacobin; it's a very liberal journalism magazine covering the spectrum of politics and culture. As always, I strongly urge you to stop right here and read the article, but I've pulled out some important sections to comment on.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/04/fossil-fuels-decoupling-growth-oil-climate/

In fact, a close look at the decoupling studies shows how misleading they are. Global emissions have dropped, but they’re falling far more slowly than they should to cap warming at the 1.5 degrees called for at COP21; the studies’ carbon budget does not include aviation or transportation, artificially inflating decoupling’s gains; figures in both reports do not count methane, the greenhouse gas being released with new abandon by the global fracking boom; and with the exception of the United States and Uzbekistan, every country listed in the WRI study is European.

Emissions, in other words, aren’t plummeting — they’re being offshored. Old-fashioned, carbon-hungry growth has moved south as finance capital and a poorly-paying service sector bloom up north, made possible by armies of low-waged workers up and down commodity chains. The spoils of this low-carbon growth are reserved for a wealthy minority.

Capitalist growth has never been green or just. The decoupling studies are poor evidence that it could become either. Why not, as British economist Ann Pettifor has argued, abandon the concept of growth entirely?

As she explains, growth — as the go-to metric for economic prosperity — was invented in the 1960s to replace the Keynesian focus on “levels” of factors like unemployment and inflation.

Full employment in the United Kingdom was seen as insufficiently profitable, so “growth men” set new targets to be met with credit booms and deregulation. “While markets, banks, firms, and millions of individuals ‘crashed and burned,’ the economic theory and policies behind limitless growth were untouched,” Pettifor writes. As the planet itself threatens to crash and burn, benchmarks for growth remain intact.

Austerity, justified by capitalism’s growth-fueled booms and busts, could prove as harmful to the planet as climate-change denialism.

There are many more things wrong with the economy than its reliance on fossil fuels. Capitalism’s addiction to dirty energy is just one reason it is deeply unsustainable.

This is all pretty old news for me, but it's nice to have some good memes in circulation.

The problem with the writer in the article is they fail to give an easily obtainable change from what we have. What I mean is, shit like gas and other non-renewable energy sources are booming because at this time it's still easily obtainable, cheap, and works as it should. If you could find a cheap way of making alternative energy sources cheap, easy to use/access, and just as reliable; the free market would run non-renewable energy out of business.

/thread

This idea that infinite growth isn't possible is nonsense. There is no physical upper limit to our capacity to exploit resources, and we are constantly getting better at it as we develop technology. Energy consumption, for instance, falls as societies become more affluent as more efficient ways of exploiting energy production are invented.

The only 'real' constraint is the rate at which we develop technology, which is not only endogenous but is, at the moment, not really causing us any problems besides the exploitation of fossil fuels. . . And even then most of that is down to the political class not implementing the correct policies, and ridiculous amounts of scaremongering around nuclear energy.

The only 'real' constraint is the rate at which we develop technology, which is not only endogenous but is, at the moment, not really causing us any problems besides the exploitation of fossil fuels. . . And even then most of that is down to the political class not implementing the correct policies, and ridiculous amounts of scaremongering around nuclear energy.

I think that's what the author's getting at, underneath all the anti-capitalist angst. Though it seems like the author is asserting that those "correct policies" would contradict a free market, particularly in regard to regulating the oil, coal, and gas industries.