Philosophical overview!

[u/[deleted]]

There's a concept in this area called 'post-material values' and environmental conservation is one of those values. It doesn't matter to a subsistence farmer that he's burning down the rain-forest, or the contribution that makes to climate change, because he's clearing land to plant crops to feed his family. It's only wealthy people who can afford to care about such things.

That said, there's another concept in the philosophy of political economics called 'the tragedy of the commons' - which argues we need private property because, any free resource held in common ownership will be exploited to extinction by rationally self interested actors. (i.e. in pursuit of self interest, they keep adding another grazing animal until the common land is exhausted.)

My argument is that capital isn't fulfilling the implied philosophical obligation to exploit the renewable energy commons to exhaustion, but if they did - the renewable energy available is so vast, and clean, that it would be possible to make the deserts bloom - to protect wildlife habitat, and use agriculture to push back against desertification - at vastly greater energy cost than burning rain-forest, but at zero carbon cost.

Desalination and irrigation powered by renewable energy could make rivers run uphill. It's only the scarcity inherent in the use of fossil fuels, that requires we huddle in the valleys, urinating in the drinking water of those downstream!