There is no meaningful response to climate change without massive social change. A cap on this and a quota on the other won't do it. Tinker at the edges as we may, we cannot sustain earth's life-support systems within the present economic system.

Capitalism is not sustainable by its very nature. It is predicated on infinitely expanding markets, faster consumption and bigger production in a finite planet. And yet this ideological model remains the central organising principle of our lives, and as long as it continues to be so it will automatically undo (with its invisible hand) every single green initiative anybody cares to come up with.

Much discussion of energy, with never a word about power, leads to the fallacy of a low-impact, green capitalism somehow put at the service of environmentalism. In reality, power concentrates around wealth. Private ownership of trade and industry means that the decisive political force in the world is private power. The corporation will outflank every puny law and regulation that seeks to constrain its profitability. It therefore stands in the way of the functioning democracy needed to tackle climate change. Only by breaking up corporate power and bringing it under social control will we be able to overcome the global environmental crisis.

On these pages we have been called on to admire capital's ability to take robust action while governments dither. All hail Wal-Mart for imposing a 20% reduction in its own carbon emissions. But the point is that supermarkets are over. We cannot have such long supply lines between us and our food. Not any more. The very model of the supermarket is unsustainable, what with the packaging, food miles and destruction of British farming. Small, independent suppliers, processors and retailers or community-owned shops selling locally produced food provide a social glue and reduce carbon emissions. The same is true of food co-ops such as Manchester's bulk-distribution scheme serving former "food deserts".

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2006/feb/02/energy.comment

According to a report released Monday by the Obama administration, doing nothing to rein in greenhouse gas emissions would cost the United States billions of dollars and thousands lives.

The findings come as part of an attempt by the Environmental Protection Agency to quantify the human and economic benefits of cutting emissions in an effort to reduce global warming. The report is the latest piece of President Obama's recent climate push and provides a tool that he hopes to use in negotiations at the UN climate talks in Paris later this year.

The report, which was peer reviewed, estimates that if nothing is done to curb global warming, by 2100, the United States will see an additional 12,000 annual deaths related to extreme temperatures in the 49 cities analyzed for the report. In addition, the report projects an increase of 57,000 premature deaths annually related to poor air quality. The economic costs would be enormous as well. By 2100, climate inaction will result in:

• $4.2-$7.4 billion in additional road maintenance costs each year.
• $3.1 billion annually in damages to coastal regions due to sea-level rise and storm surges.
• $6.6-$11 billion annually in agricultural damages.
• A loss of 230,000 to 360,000 acres of cold-water fish habitat.
• A loss of 34 percent of the US oyster supply and 29 percent of the clam supply.
• $110 billion annually in lost labor due to unsuitable working conditions.

Why socialism fails

...

In one of Otteson’s most interesting side trips, he explores the connection between the drive for equality and the puritanical impulse to control others. Most socialist-inclined persons sincerely seek equality, but in so doing they often conflate it with other values. When they speak or write of equality, they often mean control or nudging toward what is at that moment perceived as healthy for the mind and body.

Consider obesity, for example. Much contemporary socialist-inclined policy is motivated by a desire to combat obesity, which is growing in incidence and in the risks it posts to individuals’ health. Yet consider: it is possible for a person to be rationally obese? Imagine an intelligent person with a high level of education—a Ph.D. in philosophy, say—who makes this claim: “I am fully aware of the medical, social, and financial risks involved with obesity. Indeed, I have studied them carefully. Yet I am also fully aware of the delights and pleasures that I receive from eating what I like to eat, as well as the displeasure I receive from exercising.”

Otteson asks if this is not a legitimate and well-considered choice, at least according to the lights of the one who made it. Does the impulse that insists it is not really arise from a desire for equality—or is it a desire to choose for another what the socialist-inclined person wishes to be the norm? 

The End of Socialism is one of the best books written on political thought and the philosophy of classical liberalism since Friedrich Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty. What will Otteson do next? Here’s hoping that in a subsequent book he explores the horrors of democratic despotisms, nationalisms, fundamentalisms, and terrorisms, as well as the glories of human creativity.

Bradley J. Birzer is author of the forthcoming Russell Kirk: American Conservative and co-founder of The Imaginative Conservative website.

read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/how-socialism-fails/

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Why capitalism fails: 

This is where I have arranged an interview with Professor Thomas Piketty, a modest young Frenchman (he is in his early 40s), who has spent most of his career in archives and collecting data, but is just about to emerge as the most important thinker of his generation – as the Yale academic Jacob Hacker put it, a free thinker and a democrat who is no less than "an Alexis de Tocqueville for the 21st century".

This is on account of his latest work, which is called Capital in the Twenty-First Century. This is a huge book, more than 700 pages long, dense with footnotes, graphs and mathematical formulae. At first sight it is unashamedly an academic tome and seems both daunting and incomprehensible. In recent weeks and months the book has however set off fierce debates in the United States about the dynamics of capitalism, and especially the apparently unstoppable rise of the tiny elite that controls more and more of the world's wealth. In non-specialist blogs and websites across America, it has ignited arguments about power and money, questioning the myth at the very heart of American life – that capitalism improves the quality of life for everyone. This is just not so, says Piketty, and he makes his case in a clear and rigorous manner that debunks everything that capitalists believe about the ethical status of making money.

The groundbreaking status of the book was recognised by a recent long essay in the New Yorker in which Branko Milanovic, a former senior economist at the World Bank, was quoted as describing Piketty's volume as "one of the watershed books in economic thinking". In the same vein, a writer in the Economist reported that Piketty's work fundamentally rewrote 200 years of economic thinking on inequality. In short, the arguments have centred on two poles: the first is a tradition that begins with Karl Marx, who believed that capitalism would self-destruct in the endless pursuit of diminishing profit returns. At the opposite end of the spectrum is the work of Simon Kuznets, who won a Nobel prize in 1971 and who made the case that the inequality gap inevitably grows smaller as economies develop and become sophisticated.

Piketty says that neither of these arguments stand up to the evidence he has accumulated. More to the point, he demonstrates that there is no reason to believe that capitalism can ever solve the problem of inequality, which he insists is getting worse rather than better. From the banking crisis of 2008 to the Occupy movement of 2011, this much has been intuited by ordinary people. The singular significance of his book is that it proves "scientifically" that this intuition is correct. This is why his book has crossed over into the mainstream – it says what many people have already been thinking.

"I did deliberately aim the book at the general reader," says Piketty as we begin our conversation, "and although it is obviously a book which can be read by specialists too, I wanted the information here to be made clear to everyone who wants to read it.' And indeed it has to said that Capital in the Twenty-First Century is surprisingly readable. It is packed with anecdotes and literary references that illuminate the narrative. It also helps that it is fluently translated by Arthur Goldhammer, a literary stylist who has tackled the work of the likes of Albert Camus. But even so, as I note that Piketty's bookshelves are lined with such headache-inducing titles as The Principles of Microeconomics and The Political Influence of Keynesianism, simple folk like me still need some help here. So I asked him the most obvious question I could: what is the big idea behind this book?

"I began with a straightforward research problematic," he says in elegant French-accented English. "I began to wonder a few years ago where was the hard data behind all the theories about inequality, from Marx to David Ricardo (the 19th-century English economist and advocate of free trade) and more contemporary thinkers. I started with Britain and America and I discovered that there wasn't much at all. And then I discovered that the data that did exist contradicted nearly all of the theories including Marx and Ricardo. And then I started to look at other countries and I saw a pattern beginning to emerge, which is that capital, and the money that it produces, accumulates faster than growth in capital societies. And this pattern, which we last saw in the 19th century, has become even more predominant since the 1980s when controls on capital were lifted in many rich countries."

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/13/occupy-right-capitalism-failed-world-french-economist-thomas-piketty

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Gus: The puritanical impulse to control others stems for religious beliefs. More religious beliefs are ingrained in Capitalism. In fact Capitalism is sneakily designed to control others and make sure that equality NEVER HAPPENS. Capitalism maintains the illusion that anyone can reach the top. On average one reaching the top has less chance than winning lotto. The way to maintain this deceitful illusion is through the media and the "stardom" system. FAME is a game of "you can do it but you will be pitted against people who are better at walking over you than you are over them... So if you want to reach the top you have to be ruthless, sell your arse or rob someone". Capitalism and socialism are fertile grounds for breeding sociopaths to the top, with different social motives, but with the same motivation of being the ones in control.

Capitalism plays the game of numbers, by attrition: Some people will not try, most people will fail, some people will dream. Most will stay near the bottom, with an illusion of choosable comfort.

In socialism, eventually, most are more likely to be educated, though we "westerners" will dismiss this. Comfort is less choosable, but envy becomes less of a motivator.

No matter what, the capitalist system is a gigantic pyramid scheme in which buying and selling money is more important than manufacturing anything or than the welfare of people. People who cannot cut it are labelled lazy.

Of course there are critical factors, below which the capitalist system cannot go, otherwise there could be a revolution. But this cannot readily  happen because the system makes sure that everyone is pitted against everyone else and that there is no unity (unions) to speak of in the lower classes, still eager to cut it on a higher level and crap on someone else to "get there". 

It is quite simple mechanism that is designed to drive greed. Should everyone be equal, there would not be the urge of one-up-man-ship and enrichment at the expense of others. There would not be cash flow to the extend banks play with.

The socialist system can 'vegetate" and still be innovative. In the capitalist system, there is a need for unlimited growth to survive. There is the need for keeping unemployment at a certain high level (6 per cent) to keep wages at the low end of the market and maximise profits. There is the need to have people more interested in chasing money than develop better relationships with others. 

With capitalism, as we now fear in Cuba, for example, money will destroy the environment. It has done everywhere in the rest of the world such as the Amazon Forest and the Forest of Borneo. The CONservative government is trying to plunder the Tasmanian forests under the umbrella of "economic necessity". Capitalism is thus enjoyable rubbish. Meanwhile, it will destroy the planet, unless we put the brakes on it. 

Otteson's example of fat people is ludicrous. Obesity is mostly a disease specific to capitalistic greed. Capitalism sells products designed to make people fat and to want more of the product. The result? The same people (or others of the same greedy mind as the manufacturer of the fat products — including "supersize") run fat farms or EXPENSIVE special meal delivery to combat what their mates have started: obesity. Convenient vicious circle...

The science is simple: Eat less. Shit more. Eat fibre. Liquid fibre is a stupid idea. 

Less greed is great...

AND YES, I HAVE MET GREEDY CAPITALIST WHO THOUGHT “I am fully aware of the medical, social, and financial risks involved with obesity. Indeed, I have studied them carefully. Yet I am also fully aware of the delights and pleasures that I receive from eating what I like to eat, as well as the displeasure I receive from exercising.”

This attitude has nothing to do with capitalism or socialism. Only a personal choice of over-consuming in an over-consuming world, which in the end is the most stupid attitude and will clog up the health system. Sure, it will make some doctors very rich. 

Some people cannot avoid obesity but the majority of people can. Up to the beginning of the 1950s, people were on average far less obese than now. 

Obesity seems to occur more in the ranks of the lower classes, because they cannot afford to feed properly. Working several jobs, people end up using the convenience of fast food outlets, becoming addict to it. As well, the "capitalistically" sponsored sugar in supersized portions compound the "addiction".