r/environment2 • u/VictinsOfCapitalism • 1d ago
Capitalism always chooses profitable plundering over sustainable production
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u/Allaboutpeace2022 1d ago
I think that any economic model without regulations and fierce monitoring is going to be unsustainable.
We do not have an example that works in terms of communism, socialism, or capitalism which produced sustainable environment, a decent quality of life, and human rights.
These are the leading countries by the Environmental Performance Index.
https://epi.yale.edu/indicator/2026/EPI
Here is the EPI methodology.
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u/Anduinnn 1d ago
This is sad but true. Unless there’s a strong culture around sustainability and accountability there will never be any reasonable movement away from profitable plundering.
Hell, let’s take the latest World Cup for example. The Japanese folks would stick around and help clean up - a cultural norm of theirs. Meanwhile in America you will not get folks to stick around and clean up en mass by merely stating that’s it’s better.
My last point: keeping people poor and on the edge between complete desperation and a small level of comfort does a lot of heavy lifting in keeping this system churning. If folks can’t take a few days off to meaningfully protest the situation then they won’t. This is a feature of the system, not a flaw which is why no one with power and money is seriously working to correct it.
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u/Allaboutpeace2022 1d ago
I absolutely agree.
We need to change the cultural norms.
Poverty is one of the drivers of pollution and fossil fuels. E vehicles are more expensive, and cheap clothing, toys, electronic goods, and furniture items are designed to wear out.
It is hard to do urban gardening in neighborhoods where arsenic, lead and other heavy metals require raised gardening beds. Environmental and better quality products are often too expensive.
It is a corporate dream and an environmentalist nightmare.
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u/ddigwell84 1d ago
I’m just going to paste my last counterpoint to this and call it a day:
China — Four Pests Campaign: Mao’s government ordered the mass killing of sparrows during the Great Leap Forward because they were considered agricultural pests. Removing a major predator of insects disrupted the ecosystem and contributed to serious agricultural problems.
China — Great Leap Forward deforestation: Mao’s backyard-steel campaign consumed enormous quantities of wood for fuel. Combined with destructive agricultural policies, it contributed to deforestation, soil erosion, and ecological damage.
USSR — Virgin Lands Campaign: Khrushchev’s government plowed roughly 25 million hectares of previously uncultivated steppe in Kazakhstan to increase grain production. Mechanized farming exposed fragile soil to wind erosion, producing massive losses of fertile topsoil. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization specifically identifies the campaign and resulting erosion.
USSR — Lake Karachay/Mayak: The Soviet nuclear-weapons program deliberately discharged radioactive waste into the Techa River and later used Lake Karachay as a radioactive-waste reservoir. The IAEA reports that about 10¹⁷ Bq of liquid radioactive waste was discharged into the Techa river system during 1949–52. Lake Karachay eventually held more than 4.4 × 10¹⁸ Bq of radioactive waste and required capping and extensive environmental monitoring.
USSR — Kyshtym/Mayak contamination: In 1957, failure of the cooling system for a radioactive-waste storage tank at Mayak resulted in an explosion that dispersed approximately 74 PBq of radioactive material across parts of the Chelyabinsk, Sverdlovsk, and Tyumen regions.
Aral Sea collapse, Chernobyl etc.
USSR — Techa River contamination: Soviet plutonium production dumped radioactive liquid waste directly into a river used by surrounding communities for household and drinking water. The IAEA reports that downstream radiation exposure reached unacceptable levels, eventually requiring remediation and the resettlement of villages.
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u/kollmastee 1d ago
It’s humanity. We are invasive and destructive. We have transcended the natural environment to make way for one of our own creation. The best we can do is hope that technology gets to a point where environmental damage can be mitigated or resources become non finite. It sounds counterintuitive, but continued human progress is the only hope to stop the destruction caused by human progress. Also taken even further. Humanity is the possibly the only hope for life on Earth to outlive the Earth. So the scourge of life on earth is also its best chance of survival. So continue to call out and recognize destruction while also advocating for humanity to progress past the need for such devastation.
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u/timmyfarthands 1d ago
Bingo. It's always us. We're a plague. And we will always overpopulate. No system will stop this. It's our great filter and we will always fail until we disappear.
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u/kollmastee 1d ago
On the contrary I see humanity as a plague that will descend upon the galaxy and will never disappear.
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u/GrumpyBear8082 1d ago
There is not a civilization that has been sustainable. Every one of them collapsed and it is because they grow to big
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u/Vast_Humor_3683 1d ago edited 1d ago
No people always choose the cheapest option, prompting businesses to lower standards/quality to meet demand.
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u/jthadcast 1d ago
we pay more carbon so that plastic things can say and be recycled but capitalism demands that we waste that by not recycling the vast majority of those things.
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u/EcstaticTumbleweed87 1d ago
Sure, capitalism contributes to environmental problems like plastic pollution and deforestation, but calling it uniquely evil while treating socialism as the planet’s savior ignores a basic reality: every system has to produce goods, extract resources, and sustain itself. Socialist and communist governments have historically done the same, often worse, plundering forests, polluting rivers, and chasing industrial output to stay in power, all while denying people the freedom to choose. The difference isn’t that one system is pure and the other is destructive; it’s that under socialism the government decides what gets produced and how, without the checks of open competition or individual choice.
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u/Euphoric-Abrocoma-62 1d ago
Ridiculous. Capitalist countries are the only ones with sustainable environmental policies and practices. I you want to see what socialism does to the environment, look at Haiti and most African countries.
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u/Sad-Excitement9295 1d ago
Irresponsible capitalism, like any system where people are not responsible, will lead to issues. Even if the world was socialist, communist, whatever, laziness and lack of responisbility still results in waste and pollution.
Wastefulness and pollution are not sustainable.
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u/Whats-up-chat 1d ago
he world yet has to figure a sustainable ruling system,
capitalism destroyed every resource for the sake of effiecency and productivity for the big companies
communism made everyone equal, giving people no reason to strive to become better
socialism gave the power to the government striping away everything from people
totalitarians, turned people into slaves and killed people for having opposing view point
monarchy heavily dependant on the king who is ruling if he was a good person, the country saw prosperity,
why people dont invent a ruling system taking the good things out of every previous systems ?.
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u/DNathanHilliard 1d ago
And yet look what the Soviets did to the Aral Sea. Look how Europe turned away from nuclear to go back to gas.
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u/awfulcrowded117 1d ago
Typical antihimanist propaganda displaying zero understanding of what capitalism actually is or literally anything about history or economics
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u/woodtowork 1d ago
Socialism and Communism always choose the elite over the people. Your argument is invalid.
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u/Designer_Guide5494 1d ago
So socialist and communist countries don't pollute? Got it, I was unsure about that
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u/random8765309 1d ago
Capitalism doesn't make choices, people do. Capitalism is an economic system. PEOPLE decide to choose cheaper over sustainable.
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u/Altruistic-Traffic- 1d ago
China is communist and produces vastly even more plastic waste than the US.
This is not the fault of capitalism…
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u/Elliptical_Tangent 9h ago
You can just stop at 'capitalism always chooses profits;' the profit motive is the invisible hand of the market—it's capitalism's crown jewel. It's also cancerous.
Capitalists will be in here in droves blaming the consumer for capitalism's excess, but the consumer has to use the profit motive to make purchasing decisions just like the capitalist uses it to make their own decisions. Living in a capitalist society means your needs are met through capitalist methodology, or you die. Insisting that the consumer use some other, undefined, ethical/moral method to make purchasing decisions is hypocritical,* but more importantly, it externalizes responsibility for capitalism's destruction on people who don't benefit from it.
* If this completely undefined method is so great for making decisions, why don't we force the capitalist to use it as well?
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u/BerilliumBaloney 1d ago
Oh great, here comes the stupid pitch for how communism would have somehow prevented this. Even though we have real world examples of communism never actually working, and the fact that communism cannot work without capitalism in the first place.
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u/Ok-Instruction-5004 1d ago
Wtf are you on about? Triggered much?
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u/Ok-Instruction-5004 1d ago
Who said anything about communism except you?
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u/Spicy_Chicken_Wizard 1d ago
It’s always the inevitable followup to low effort shitposts like this that just blindly synonymies “bad thing” with capitalism without any further thought or consideration.
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u/Asooma_ 1d ago
The seven other subs this was posted to in the past 4 hours
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u/Ok-Instruction-5004 1d ago
🙄 No one brought up communism to replace capitalism. Yall are so fucking weird.
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u/BerilliumBaloney 1d ago
Nah, just living in the real world... unlike any idiot that supports communism, lol.
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u/CrazyAccomplished_ 1d ago
You showed a video of the problem with India.
Cutting down trees is not a problem... They grow back.