getting coal.out of ground capitalism ii game

Commerce requires living systems for its welfare - it is emblematic of the times that this even needs to be said. The laws we’re ignoring determine how life sustains itself. As author Bill McKibben put it, “The laws of Congress and the laws of physics have grown increasingly divergent, and the laws of physics are not likely to yield.” Historians will show, perhaps, how politics, the media, economics, and commerce created an industrial regime that wasted our social and natural environment and called it growth. The consequence: massive waste - of both resources and people.ĭecades from now, we may look back at the end of the 20th century and ponder why business and society ignored these trends for so long - how one species thought it could flourish while nature ebbed. Today, more people are chasing fewer natural resources.īut industry still operates by the same rules, using more resources to make fewer people more productive. As a result of the successes of industry and capitalism, these conditions have now reversed.

Modern industrialism came into being in a world very different from the one we live in today: fewer people, less material well-being, plentiful natural resources. Even by its own standards, industrialism is extraordinarily inefficient. Toto, pull back the curtain: The efficient dynamo of industrialism isn’t there. In fact, a humbling design flaw deeply embedded in industrial logic links the two problems. Nationally and globally, we perceive social and environmental decay as distinct and unconnected. There is the waste we can see: traffic jams, irreparable VCRs, Styrofoam coffee cups, landfills the waste we can’t see: Superfund sites, greenhouse gases, radioactive waste, vagrant chemicals and the social waste we don’t want to think about: homelessness, crime, drug addiction, our forgotten infirm and elderly. Somewhere along the way to free-market capitalism, the United States became the most wasteful society on the planet. Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Getting coal.out of ground capitalism ii game