for the people who don't spend their time thinking about politics or economics, the question doesn't even begin to occur to them because they don't have any conception of what "capitalism" is, at least in relation to their current conditions. they cannot see it any more than we can see air or a fish can see water. they are so surrounded by ideology that they aren't even aware that they have an ideology, like how a person with an accent doesn't know they have an accent unless they talk to somebody with a different accent (or are told about it). at best, they might hear that carbon taxes are a thing and are like, yeah, we should do that maybe.

for the people who do spend their time thinking about politics or economics and still like capitalism despite its climatic impact, their connection to these political views are purely vibes based and not informed by any intimate connection to their conditions or the conditions of others, because the average person is so far removed from any kind of political process or having a say in anything that everything is completely unchangeable. There Is No Alternative. they saw a facebook/twitter/discord meme and go along with that due to social pressures, or maybe somebody at their workplace is a conservative or a libertarian or a centrist or even a socialist and they discuss current events and the ideology rubs off on them and they "become" those things without even really knowing what those things are, or the political histories of those movements, or even the names of the titans of those movements. and thus, if you have decided that you are a libertarian because of all these small little things that are, again, completely independent of your material conditions much of the time, then you "join the team" so to speak and get to know the boilerplate arguments and, for lack of a better word, memes, and finding that community slightly alleviates the crippling social atomization you feel at every moment because your job sucks or is unfulfilling, you live in a sprawling suburb where the same house has been copy-pasted a thousand times or a giant apartment complex, and never talk to your neighbours.

at no point are a solid 90-95% of self-described capitalism supporters intimately engaged to the ideas and philosophies that they say they support. few of them are actually going and doing the reading. at most they might listen to a podcast or youtube channel called something like "The Epic Logician" or "The Woke Destroyer" or "Communism Kills, Capitalism Uplifts" or something. it's vibes based. it's a bubble of idealism that is being supported by the 7 or so billion people outside of the imperial core who actually have to live in material reality. it will come crashing down around these people probably within their lifetimes for the ones under 40 as the empire declines, and that'll be the really interesting part - of how 300 million people or so suddenly have to come to terms with material reality rather than imagined fights or "meme wars" online between different political factions.

the final class of people are the ones who prefer capitalism despite its environmental impact and have done a lot of reading, and the vast majority of these people are, simply put, sickos who should be [insert fedposting here]

Most people don't know what capitalism is and therefore cannot assign blame to it.

The best take I saw on this, it’s because too many in the West, and America specifically, assume they’ll be able to buy their way out of the consequences of climate change. They, or their governments, have the money to buy the resources needed to make it a non-issue for them.

So the real tipping point from a political economy perspective is going to be when that resource crunch hits because the places where those resources normally get extracted from become uninhabitable, plus the people fleeing those areas (already starting) cause a migrant crisis that will make the Syrian one look positively microscopic. That’s when the panic will set in and the faith in the status quo will implode.

Having just come from yelling at a bunch of climate bloomers, they think we're going to tech our way out with carbon capture and that the US and EU are going to switch to renewables in some way, and we're going to plant trees. They think the system can still save them.

I despise "Hope". Hope is waiting for someone to save you. Hope is not making plans because someone else will figure it out. Hope is sitting back and waiting for death. Hope isn't action, it's not praxis, it's not revolution. It's complacency, and unearned surety that something will magically appear and make everything alright. Hope is for people who have already given up. Hope is for people who see no future. Hope is death.

More and more I ask libs this question and usually their answer is "economic systems have nothing to do with climate change." Basically they think climate change is inevitable and it doesn't matter how humanity approaches economics, it was always gonna happen. They then usually say dumb shit like "capitalism invented solar panels!" As if communist nations don't have any reason to solve climate change because the only reason to solve a problem is profit incentive.

Yeah it sucks but what are you gonna do? I have a mortgage to pay and kids to feed. All I hear is that people are driving too much and eating too many burgers, and look, I could cancel that trip to Cancun and skip the one week I get away from the grind every year, but everyone else is still going so it's not like what I do is going to make a big difference either way. I ordered that impossible burger at a BK the other day, even. The kids are pretty bright - hey, look, Timmy got an A in freakin' calculus last semester - they'll figure something out, and I'll be dust by then anyways the way my heart's been going.

I think it is a combination of several factors. One is the triumph of the end of history myth in the imperial core. A lot of history has happened but the lack of an anticapitalist left wing and the onslaught of reactionary propanda for the last few decades has made capitalism feel like an unchangeable law of nature to many people. There is no alternative, and thinking capitalism is good or bad is as pointless as having opinions on gravity.

Another factor is that climate change is too big and horrible to comprehend. There's nothing you can do about it as an individual and the individual nation states that people comprehend politics inside of are also powerless to do anything but mitigating symptoms. All available data suggests that we're not only heading towards a slow-rolling cataclysm of biblical proportions, those in power will also actively prevent any meaningful action from being taken. You can stare into that abyss and go mad or you can protect your sanity and close your eyes.

That tendency to shy away from facts is helped along by climate denial. We both have the hard chuddy version where climate change is a hoax invented by China because they're envious of America being great. And then there is the soft neoliberal climate denial where you claim to "believe the science" but also claim that it can all be solved by giving tax credits for buying Teslas and believing that a wizard will save us in the form of technology. Both types of climate denial helps make the crisis look less alarming and makes it easy to trick yourself into believing everything will be alright.

Looking the other way is still possible in the imperial core as people there, especially the more privileged members of these societies are still mostly protected against the consequences. For people in the global south climate change means starvation and being driven from their homes while people in the imperial core experience climate change as their lawns turning brown for a few weeks in the summer.

When libs say "better dead than red," they mean it. They're a death cult so enamored with capitalism that they would rather die under it than live decent lives under its main competitor.

“Human-caused climate change” and “the anthropocene” do a lot of lifting, as if Elon Musk and a random homeless child are equally responsible for annihilating human civilization.

deleted by creator

They literally shrug their shoulders and say “whaddyagonnado ”

People just learn to repress things . Like sometimes if you have trauma or anxiety you can become hyper-aware of the dangers and horror in life to the point you basically can’t function anymore (at least this was my experience with ptsd). It’s not like those dangers don’t also exist for people who are well, they do but they just don’t register them, they repress them because they don’t believe that the threat exists for them personally, even if they are aware of it in general. And this is genuinely a healthy and normal way of engaging with life. So it’s natural and convenient to extend that kind of repression to something like climate change too, especially when that perspective is also tacitly supported by the belief systems of ideology, which is a foundational aspect of one’s psychology. For most people it’s a simple task to repress anything that would threaten their fundamental identity. We see what we want to see, unless something forces us to do otherwise. This is why the middle class is one of the more ingenious inventions of capitalism, because people who are materially comfortable will naturally avert and even defend themselves from recognising the realities of the system.

I honestly think we're the weird ones for realizing and freaking out so much

I feel like it's normal for people's brains to adapt, ignore, and put up walls so that they can remain happy and continue on with their lives regularly

Most Americans think capitalism is just another word for a barter system.

to most people "looking at what's happening with the global climate" means closing your eyes and vaguely remembering feeling like you probably read a bunch of articles about how green capitalism has all of that covered