If you ever want to stop wallowing in misanthropic nihilism, I recommend reading books like "More From Less" - Mcafee which shows that capitalism does in fact reduce/moderate consumption. Next look at "Speed and Scale" - Doerr, or "How to Solve a Climate Disaster" - Gates for a giant list of human innovations that will in fact decrease/reverse climate change.
Aside from the needless labeling, thank you for the references. I will take a look. However, count me initially skeptical of some of the claims. I simply have not seen any data that would corroborate what seems to be the thesis of More From Less. Even if "more from less" is true, doing so at scale is still more. But I will read more. I do note the following quote from a review of More From Less:
> In a positive note, the author is very clear that market fundamentalism - letting capitalism run amok - is emphatically NOT an answer to the environmental crises, and that we need a strong state to regulate and control the private interests, repair market failures and price the externalities. ... That said, I've already noticed that many proponents of this book haven't noticed these caveats, and instead claim that McAfee suggests unbridled capitalism is "the" answer.
And to be clear, I am not opposed to environmentalism and acting on climate change. In fact it's quite the opposite. I do what I can with composting, recycling, native plant restoration and conservation on my property, and my donations. However, I am indeed quite cynical when VCs suddenly want to ride the green wave, and I don't see much of a coherent plan in the post here aside from a shotgun approach to simply making money through investments of a "hot" area.
Theoretically, if we can drive the carbon footprint per captia down far enough such that the carbon footprint of 10 billion people is lower than the rate of carbon removal (natural and artifical), then we're fine.
Definitely a hard problem, but so is restructuring society into a non-capitalist, non-consumption based system.
So I think the "coherent plan" is to accelerate this decrease in carbon per captia. It's trending the right way but too slowly. But perhaps with the power of the market's exponential growth, if we incentivize it the right way, it will accelerate this in a way to avoid total collapse.
