The Wall Street Journal has given Fred Krupp, president of the uber-far left Environmental Defense Fund, a platform to show that he has no idea what capitalism is
Capitalism Will Solve the Climate Problem
Skeptics try to deny the evidence of global warming, but businesses already are betting on clean energy.Together, science and capitalism built the modern world. But across the political spectrum, both are under attack. If we are to solve our greatest challenges, including climate change, we have to deploy the power of these twin engines of civilization.
The best available research confirms the existence of human-driven climate change, including the rapid pace of global warming. Leading scientists’ predictions of temperature rise have been largely accurate. In the three decades since NASA climate scientist James Hansen first warned Congress that global warming had begun, the U.S. and other nations have poured billions of tons of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, and the planet has continued to warm.
There’s no scientific method proof that it is mostly/solely caused by Mankind, and that fact that most Warmists refuse to give up their own use of fossil fuels and make their lives carbon neutral show that they themselves don’t really believe their own talking points. Further, Skeptics do not deny warming: we are debating causation.
Anyhow, let’s skip the polemic, and get to the end where Krupp explains capitalism
This brings us back to capitalism. Climate change is a byproduct of the prosperity created by the market economy, but the market similarly can be an engine to generate cost-effective solutions. Clean-energy technologies such as wind and solar power already have developed immensely in the past two decades. Public policy that puts a price on carbon emissions would speed the adoption of clean energy by exposing the market to the costs this pollution puts on society. This will accelerate adoption of and private investment in clean-energy technologies.
Though climate change presents American industries a daunting challenge, market-based policies can unleash innovation from investors, inventors and entrepreneurs, who will work to build a more prosperous and safer future. Working with accurate scientific facts and the right incentives, the market will find winning solutions.
So let’s follow the data and get this done.
If the government is instituting a tax in order to force the private sector to make changes, that’s not capitalism. If they’re dictating behavior, that’s not capitalism. They aren’t market based policies if the government is passing them.
Then you don’t understand capitalism. Almost all modern economies are mixed economy capitalism where government controls exist. Modern nations have child labor laws, environmental and worker protections, allow unionization by workers, taxes on products etc.
You certainly don’t oppose child labor laws, overtime provisions, unions or environmental protections, do you? Of course it would be cheaper for a business if it could dump its offal into the stream, or into the atmosphere, but there is a societal cost to these “economic” actions.
These costs are called negative externalities, e.g., the costs of cancer in tobacco users, the costs of vehicle accidents caused by alcohol, or in this case the costs of global warming. In almost all cases these costs are difficult to estimate. In the US, we’ll have about 250,000 new cases of lung cancer, 150,000 lung cancer deaths with costs exceeding $20 billion. Clearly, these costs are associated with the market transaction of a buyer and seller exchanging money for cigarettes. A nation could ban cigarettes or tax them to recoup the societal costs of the negative externalities – such a tax is called pigovian, after the English economist, Arthur Pigou. Pigovian taxes are used to correct the market failures associated with negative externalities.
Taxes are by no means, anti-capitalistic. The concept of laissez-faire , unfettered capitalism is long outdated.
The Jeffery of so many new names that I can’t keep up with them wrote:
This is the time that I miss the rolling on the floor laughing icon the most!
A vague idea of what capitalism is in practice is just enough for this guy to find another way to beg for a cap and trade tax. He also thinks “capitalism” is the process by which government steals from workers and corporations to turn around give the money to preferred people and businesses for research and development of preferred industries. Government picking lots of winners and losers. Look, any time you get a leftist that starts to talk economics just let your eyes glaze over and do some daydreaming, because some of them can mouth the words, but they have no idea of the meaning of the actual concepts, so you become dumber for having listened to them.