Global Warming

Years of global industrial production, vehicle exhaust, and other pollution-causing processes and activities has created a thick layer of pollution that is enveloping the world. This envelope is trapping heat in the atmosphere, and slowly raising its temperature. This is a huge problem that is seen as leading to a plethora of catastrophic environmental and social effects, including:

• The melting of the global ice caps, which will itself lead to the flooding of major American cities.

• The desertification of the breadbasket of America.

• Etc.

Question:  why was this pollution allowed to continue over so many years?

Answer:  because capitalism is an economic system that operates in a fast, aggressive, and predatory manner, to accumulate as much profit as possible with little thought given to much of anything else, whether the health of the environment, worker or consumer safety, or anything else.

In contrast, development, industrial production, and economic activity generally under a Cooperative system would never have permitted such an assault on our environment. Unlike capitalism, the initial development of our many processes of production under a Cooperative system would have included environmental impact as a core consideration. Under capitalism, by contrast, such concerns are of secondary or even tertiary importance, relegated in consideration or perhaps to be worried about or worked out "later"--taking a clear backseat to profit maximization.

We're not asserting that the corporate ruling class pays no attention at all to concerns such as the environment. In the modern age they have finally come to pay some attention. But it is simple economic reality that the reason they do so is because they are continually forced by the government, and by fear of litigation by consumer or environmental groups, or the government, itself; moreover, corporations generally do the minimum necessary to satisfy government regulation or avoid litigation. One of the reasons they take this approach is that addressing environmental concerns represents significant cost, and one of the fundamental rules of success under capitalism is to keep costs down, indeed to cut them to the bone, whether those be the costs of paying workers, or the cost of maintaining the natural environment.

Thus, as with every other problem we're suffering today, we need look no further for the root cause of our environmental degradation, generally, or global warming, specifically, than the normal operation of capitalism.

In a Cooperative system there would be no money or profit to worry about, and the only factors to be "maximized" would be those such as safety, the well-being of the environment, and the health and self-actualization of people.